Digest 10/5/2020

The New Yorker union fights for a contract, a dispatch from the streaming wars, and more.

STATE OF THE NEW YORKER UNION

It hasn’t been a great year to be Condé Nast. Workers disclosed a culture of racism and general workplace toxicity at Bon Appétit, one of the company’s titles; seven of the magazine’s YouTube stars left the channel during the maelstrom, and editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport departed after a social media post of him in brownface resurfaced. Calls for accountability compelled Anna Wintour to send an email addressing racism within Vogue and pledging to do better in terms of diversity. Then there’s the ongoing battle between the New Yorker union (which represents staffers who are not management or senior-level and excludes writers) and Condé Nast management. Negotiations for their first contract have been ongoing for about two years now, but the union and management have yet to reach an agreement. 

For roughly a year and a half of that time, negotiations have been stalled over a just cause clause, which would establish an agreed-upon standard for firing employees; without such a provision, staff can be fired for no reason at all. In the past, management has argued that such a clause could erode the magazine’s standards and has proposed an “editorial exception” that would allow for the firing of employees for reasons deemed relevant to “editorial standards.” The union has argued that such an exception would defeat the purpose of the provision altogether.

That could all change today — but if it does, it will be because the union managed to pull some strings and hit the magazine where it hurts. A digital version of the annual New Yorker festival is planned for tonight, featuring senator Elizabeth Warren and congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as keynote speakers. When the union reached out to Warren and Ocasio-Cortez asking for their support, both speakers pulled out of the festival in solidarity with the union, which planned a digital informational picket for tonight at the time the festival is supposed to take place. 

In public, New Yorker management has expressed a desire to continue bargaining with the union to reach an agreement, and agreed to marathon bargaining sessions over this past weekend. In a Sept. 29 email obtained by the New York Times, however, they criticized the union’s actions as “undermin[ing] the hard work of [their] colleagues on the Festival.” The mood within the company is indeed “tense” at the moment, New Yorker copy editor Crispin Long told me on Friday, but picketing the festival was a last resort after nothing else has worked. 

“Management seems more stressed out than they have ever been,” said Long. “It’s not pleasant to upset people like this. It’s never been our goal to just form a union in order to upset people, but we’ve been bargaining for two years now, and there’s been a lot of stonewalling.”

“People have had individual conversations with management and there have been moments where they ask, ‘What is it that you really want?’” they continued. “It’s bizarre. We want just cause in the union contract. We’re not trying to destroy something for the sake of destroying things; we’re trying to have job security.”

As of the time of this newsletter’s publication, the union and management are trying to hammer out an agreement that could allow the festival to proceed as planned. Contract bargaining sessions ran late into the night last night, and another meeting was scheduled for 11 am this morning. A deal has not yet been reached, but the union is hopeful one might be reached today. Ultimately, unless management agrees to the just cause provision, the picket of the festival will continue as planned. Hopefully the company will get out of its own way and continue its move into the present. 

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A dispatch from the streaming wars: Netflix remains unrivaled, but viewership of season 2 of The Boys, Amazon’s spin on the superhero genre, is overtaking the streaming giant. In a ranking of streaming viewership across platforms, the top 10 consists mostly of Netflix content, but The Boys ranks third, bested only by Netflix’s Cobra Kai and Lucifer. Showrunners of the hit Amazon series decided to release new episodes in a weekly format rather than all at once, returning to the serial format of traditional TV. Though showrunner Eric Kripke told The Wrap that was a “creative choice,” it has incensed some fans of the show, who have flooded the Amazon page with one-star reviews exclusively because of the release format.

It’s not as though the format is a total aberration — HBO still releases one episode at a time, and viewers have eagerly tuned in for the latest installments of hit shows like Succession and Insecure. In fact, the installment releases seem to encourage a more communal viewing experience, which may be what The Boys team was hoping to capture. In a streaming climate where there is a glut of instantly bingeable content, the move signals a desire to introduce some old-school prestige. And angry Amazon reviews aside, the strategy seems to be working — viewership of this season is double that of season 1.

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LONGREAD OF THE WEEK At New York magazine, Benjamin Wallace writes a postmortem of Hearst’s ill-fated digital turn under president Troy Young, who resigned earlier this year amid reports of sexual harassment and creating a toxic work environment. The piece documents the gap between Silicon Valley and old-guard media: “Everything Troy was talking about was extremely basic,” a source tells Wallace. “You’re taking best practices from other industries…and applying them to a place that used to operate on martini lunches. It’s really kind of amazing that he parlayed this fairly mediocre career, as far as people in tech are concerned, to this thing that’s really big to people in the media world.” — Erin Schwartz

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— Writer David Dennis, Jr. published some criticism of Defector, the sports blog launched by former Deadspin staffers, arguing a lack of staffers of color undermines the publication’s revolutionary promise. 

— Leon Wieseltier, the former New Republic literary editor and walking caricature of a public intellectual accused of workplace misconduct in 2017 — at which time it became known he was investigated for sexual harassment in 2014 — has released a new publication called (what else?) Liberties. 

— When TikToker Nathan Apodaca filmed himself longboarding while drinking Ocean Spray and singing along to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” a beleaguered nation became entranced by the (now viral) vision of pure bliss. “Dreams,” first released in 1977, has seen a massive boost in sales and Mick Fleetwood himself has recreated Apodaca’s viral video.

— Google has launched a new $1 billion partnership to pay news organizations to curate editorial content for its new product, Google News Showcase. 200 publications are currently signed onto the partnership, and the product has launched in Germany and Brazil before rolling out in other countries. This comes at a time when tech giants like Google and Facebook are facing scrutiny over their impact on the news industry and on the information ecosystem more broadly; Facebook is currently battling Australian lawmakers and publishers over a provision that would require them to pay publishers for their content. 

— The Daily Beast has published a bombshell report about the unreliability of New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi, a foreign correspondent known for her coverage of ISIS for the paper. Following accusations that one of her biggest stories may have been based on a hoax, it turns out that there have been questions about the legitimacy of her reporting swirling within the Times for years – there had been a review of her work by a managing editor, though the conclusions of that review were unclear.

— I don’t know if you heard, but the president has coronavirus. Publishing information about his condition has proved a bit of a challenge to political reporters, as the White House has obfuscated and the doctor giving updates on Trump’s health has admitted to lying about his condition. The health and well-being of White House reporters themselves, of course, has been callously disregarded by the administration.