Digest 10/4/2021

Bees and parental leave, Ozy's music-ish festival and final-ish days, and more.

WHAT WILL BE THE NEW OFFICE PERK?

I’m not proud to admit that the first of many times I applied to Refinery29, it was because I had seen pictures of its New York office on the corporate website. The glass-panelled meeting rooms with turquoise and white fixtures, promises of cold brew, and kombucha on tap were everything my 22-year-old self dreamt of for my potential digital media career. Two years and countless applications later, I finally landed a role as an entertainment news writer and walked into the pictures I had browsed in a Starbucks all those years ago.

Refinery29’s New York office had it all: a ping pong table, cold brew, elaborate bagel Fridays, frequent happy hours. As the years passed, however, cost cutting measures took away almost everything until all that remained was a box of bagels and a few tubs of plain cream cheese. Then, the pandemic sent us all home. I left my role, and will never see that office again. 

It’s fitting, then, that this screed about Millennial officecore came from Refinery29 itself, with writer Mirel Zaman exploring how these office perks were often dangled in place of less Instagram-worthy benefits like proper parental leave and a fair vacation policy. Zaman blamed the sweeping “framing of generational desires” for prompting “companies to reach for low-hanging fruit and, say, buy a pool table for their break rooms or make that year’s holiday party toga-themed (please, no), and not understand why their Glassdoor reviews continue to plummet.”

Now, office perks aren’t just shallow, but rendered entirely useless by the fact that no major media company has returned to the office full-time. It seems more likely that the near future of media will look a lot more hybrid, meaning it will be hard to lure impressionable 22-year-olds with aesthetically-pleasing pictures of an office that they won’t be using consistently. 

Some companies haven’t given up on perks; investment company Nuveen installed two beehives on its terrace and hired a beekeeper to educate the tenants in hopes of giving the office more of a “nature” vibe. For those who don’t choose to fill their offices with bees, there’s an opening to finally address the less glamorous things the company has maybe been neglecting. For the cost of one in-house beekeeper, a whole host of more legitimate company needs could be addressed: Could that money instead be allocated to the freelance budget, to cover staffers when they go on vacation? Or towards employees’ work-from-home expenses? 

Sure, you won’t see these things on Instagram. But you finally won’t see them complained about on Glassdoor, either. 

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OZY, IN MEMORIAM

I’ll be honest: I wasn’t aware until this week that Ozy was actually a media company. My only experience with it prior was passing signs for Ozy Fest, which I did not attend. But for something that seemed to make zero impact on our day-to-day lives, the hold its downfall has had on my Twitter feed this week is significant. First, there was the New York Times story, which revealed, among other things, that Ozy co-founder and COO Samir Rao impersonated a YouTube exec on a conference call with Goldman Sachs as part of what appears to be a longstanding tradition in the company of (allegedly!) inflating their metrics. Also, pretty much every positive quote they’ve pulled about themselves in their promo material is either heavily cherry-picked or, in some cases, can’t actually be found in the source material. 

Days later, Forbes published its own investigation looking at the details of Ozy Fest, the company’s annual music-ish festival. Like the Times column, Forbes revealed that the numbers around Ozy Fest attendance were heavily inflated, and that the cracks in the company would have shown a lot earlier had a heatwave not bailed the company out of its ultimately cancelled 2019 festival. 

All this gossip has led to a wave of Ozy — specifically Ozy Fest — nostalgia, as the festival appears to have been a universally bizarre experience for those who ever attended. Let’s reminisce via tweets, shall we?

— Their first-ever OzyFest lineup in 2016 featured Malcolm Gladwell, Issa Rae, and Karl Rove. 

— Daily Beast media reporter Max Tani was prevented from entering a tent at the festival in 2017 because the inflatable chairs Ozy provided were taking up too much room. 

— There was a 2017 OzyFest panel that somehow featured both Jeb Bush and Mark Cuban.

— In 2018, two Chapo Trap House hosts attended while on LSD.

Ah, Ozy, we hardly knew ye. Really. 

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Dee Lockett is moving from Vulture to New York Magazine to be their new features editor. 

— Amy Wang is leaving Rolling Stone to join New York Times Magazine as assistant managing editor. 

— Errol Louis is joining New York Magazine as a columnist, covering the upcoming mayoral race in NYC and other areas like criminal justice. 

— Jezebel just announced a slew of new hires: Jenna Amatulli is the site’s new deputy editor, coming from The Huffington Post, and Zeba Blay and Danielle Tcholakian have joined as weekly columnists. 

— Jessica Lussenhop is joining ProPublica as a reporter. 

— NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro has been nabbed by the New York Times to host its new Opinion podcast.

— Paolo Uggetti is leaving The Ringer after almost five years.

— Morgan Sung is leaving Mashable and heading to NBC News to report on internet culture. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— Axios won a News Emmy for their viral August 2020 interview with former President Trump in which he hands interviewer Jonathan Swan increasingly baffling pieces of paper insisting the Covid crisis is improving (reader…it was not). 

— Speaking of the News Emmys, VICE News swept.

— Writer Jamie Lafferty’s Twitter thread about his experience getting paid (or rather, not getting paid) by Outside Magazine seems to contradict the outlet’s March 2021 promise to do better with paying freelancers within 30 days.

— Chicago Public Media’s board of directors voted to pursue an acquisition of the Chicago Sun-Times thereby creating “one of the largest local nonprofit news organizations in the nation,” per a joint statement. 

— Sixteen organizations are calling on CNN to clarify the terms of its financial and contractual relationship with the rulers of the United Arab Emirates in light of the upcoming “Expo 2020 Dubai,” of which CNN is the official broadcaster. “The UAE and Saudi governments use high publicity propaganda events, like this October’s UAE “Expo 2020 Dubai” and Saudi Future Investment Initiative, to attract investment and build political clout despite their brutal human rights records,” the open letter reads.