Digest 2/16/2021

Bon Appétit BINGO, (not) covering unions, Seth Abramson and more.

Vicky is filling in for Allegra Hobbs this week.

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BON APP BINGO!

The second chapter of Reply All’s deep dive into the life of the racialized workers at Bon Appétit dropped on Friday. The first episode focused on the earlier scrappier era of BA when it was a high profile magazine in the food world. At that point, the magazine’s revitalization was just beginning, led by then-EIC Adam Rapoport. The second episode picks up as the magazine grows in popularity and ambition, and begins creating stars. Whether you know about food media or not, the audio docuseries is a snapshot of how working in media in any way often looks and feels for media workers who aren’t white. The episode is emotive—a lot of young people’s hopes are dashed quickly. It’s depressing! And it’s negative one thousand and snowing both outside and inside my soul. Let’s have some fun instead.

Many, if not all, of the experiences described by the BA staff are fairly typical for non-white people working in mainstream media. You can almost guarantee that a random grab bag of racist-ish events will happen while working anywhere in media. It’s like a game—a terrible, terrible game. One that I’m calling POC Media Bingo and now you can play too! All quotes are from the Reply All episode. RESIGNATION LETTER is your free space. Play as you listen or just play it as you progress through your career. There are no winners. 

COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Up to 100 editorial staff at Bloomberg have been laid off, according to an internal memo from editor-in-chief John Micklethwaite. The layoffs were concentrated in the company’s European offices, reports Steven Perlberg.  

— Swati Sharma is moving from The Atlantic where she was managing editor to become editor-in-chief at Vox.

LONGREAD OF THE WEEK  Written by Lyz Lenz, the Columbia Journalism Review profiled noted Twitter news person Seth Abramson. Abramson is one of those Twitter personalities whose “power” and “influence” grew in the Trump years. The ability to quickly curate news while having a point of view can gain any person a following. Abramson’s skill is in turning that following into the status of punditry, but his tweets aren’t quite journalism. (That little observation, of course, threw him into a multi-tweet thread/tantrum, naturally.) In Abramson, Lenz uncovers a personality that benefited from Twitter’s shareability, the Trump-inspired conspiracy theorizing, and the kind of fame one can get from being Very Online.  — Vicky Mochama

EVERYTHING ELSE

— After being sold in Fall 2020 to North Equity LLC, Saveur is becoming a digital-only publication. North Equity’s specialty is digital publications so it seemed like only a matter of time for the end of Saveur’s print edition.

— Three Gannett-owned newspapers in New Jersey have somehow managed to avoid covering the unionization effort of the newspapers’ own reporters. 

— New York Times columnist Bret Stephens experienced editing and it did not go well; a recent column on the paper’s Donald McNeil scandal was pulled for not meeting editorial standards according to editor Kathleen Kingsbury. She confirmed to the Daily Beast, however, that in pulling the piece, the paper’s publisher AG Sulzberger was consulted on the decision.