Digest 2/22/2021

Texas blackouts, media grifters, and more.

COVERING THE TEXAS BLACKOUTS

In the early hours of last Monday morning, millions of Texans lost power as the state plunged into historic subfreezing temperatures. Among those millions were journalists attempting to cover the disaster. They found themselves in the unique position not only of having to work around a lack of electricity and WiFi, but of personally experiencing the very thing that was happening to their subjects.

Amal Ahmed, climate reporter for the Texas Observer, was working from her home in the Dallas suburb of Plano on Monday when her internet started dropping out, limiting her ability to get information to the public. She said she was lucky: her family had a fireplace to keep them warm and a gas stove to cook on. But they were often without power altogether over the course of several days. “Tuesday it was really hard to be able to do anything,” she said. “At some point it was like, ‘Oh, we have an hour of WiFi,’ so you send all your emails, then the power goes out again.” 

“I was still also trying to figure out what was going on,” she said. She had cell phone data for part of the time and was able to look at information on her phone, but it wasn’t conducive for the kind of research she needed to do on the surrounding climate disaster. “At some point I was like, the only thing I can do is tweet. I can’t do the kind of research I need to be doing on my phone.” In the brief moments she had power, she downloaded PDFs for later reading.

Local news in Texas has gotten some much-deserved recognition in the aftermath of the crisis. (“Thank god for The Texas Tribune,” declares a headline over at CNN.) Starting Thursday, both the Tribune and the Austin American Statesman supplied information to locals via text services. News publications were indispensable, reporters told me, because officials were doing such a shoddy job of communicating to the public. “The communication from the grid operator and individual utilities locally was horrendous at times,” said Zach Despart of the Houston Chronicle.

Despart described the staff’s approach to the crisis as a “weird musical chairs situation” to find a place with electricity in which to work. “People were operating on group texts like, ‘Ok I have power, if you want to come here,’ then they would lose power.” Despart lost electricity on Tuesday night when the temperatures dipped into the teens; when he did have power, he only kept the heat on in the bedroom in order to conserve energy. “We’re hanging out in our bedroom all day trying to get work done, because the rest of the house is 45 degrees,” he told me.

Despart mentioned that Houston reporters have become adept at covering disasters. “I’ve been through a hurricane and several pretty major floods and a chemical fire and pandemic. Our staff is pretty used to having to adjust to pretty crazy circumstances,” said Despart. And the staff was already used to working remotely due to the pandemic, so coordinating over distance wasn’t an entirely new challenge.

Dallas-based freelancer Steven Monacelli set up a tent in his living room for insulation; his home was so cold that some indoor plants suffered freeze damage. But experiencing the disaster he was attempting to cover was motivating. “It gave me the fire in my stomach to push through and absorb some very traumatic stories, because I consider myself very lucky and there are people facing some really tough situations,” he said. “We were really left out here by ourselves — that’s how it felt.” 

AND NOW, A DISPATCH FROM TWITTER

Ahhh. Ok. Alright, I’m going to try and make this as easily digestible as possible and tell you what I think you should know about a situation unfolding in media if you’re not totally immersed in Twitter. As has already been covered by nofilter, Beejoli Shah, a former editor at The Juggernaut, published a Twitter thread accusing food writer Alicia Kennedy of pretending to be a person of color (this is not true — Kennedy, who is one-quarter Puerto Rican, has always identified as a white woman and has consistently stated so publicly). Her tweets garnered a few likes and were boosted by media writer Foster Kamer, but for the most part Shah was thoroughly criticized, leading her employer to issue an apology, followed by her own apology, after which she deleted the thread. 

Shah happens to be a notorious media grifter with a reputation for causing mayhem and launching attacks on fellow journalists. It’s been whispered about for years, but remained in whispers because, frankly, people in the industry have learned to fear harassment. That changed this past week. Tracie Egan Morrissey called her out for a pattern of malicious behavior, immediately after which Shah deleted her account. The Juggernaut announced they had fired her. Anna Merlan decided to name her as a serial offender in the industry, and then Morrissey then started a thread encouraging others to share their stories, beginning with her own, in which she alleges Shah reported her to CPS, falsely claiming she was abusing her children.

COMINGS AND GOINGS

— The New York Review of Books is getting a few new top editors: Emily Greenhouse is becoming editor and Jana Prikryl takes the executive editor job. Daniel Drake is now production editor and Maya Chung takes on an associate editor role. 

— Sebastian Modak is the new editor-at-large at Lonely Planet. 

— Jamal Jordan is leaving an editor job at the New York Times for the wild world of freelancing. 

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Facebook vs. Australia continues! In response to proposed legislation that would require tech companies to pay publishers to use their content, Facebook did what it had previously threatened to do and barred Australians from sharing news on its service. 

— The rush for IP around the GameStop story has reached alarming heights: there are now nine (nine!!!) projects in the works about the remarkable short squeeze by day traders and Redditors.

— The Reply All podcast series on Bon Appétit has become a kind of Russian doll of workplace racism: former Gimlet staffer Eric Eddings last week published a Twitter thread accusing the Reply All co-hosts leading the Test Kitchen series, Sruthi Pinnamaneni and P.J. Vogt, of contributing to a “toxic dynamic at Gimlet” that was “near identical” to that at Bon Appétit. Both have issued apologies and stepped down from the series. Can someone help Bari Weiss understand this?? She’s trying!

— Former Smith College employee Jodi Shaw, who left her job over what she claims is anti-white racism, has been running what I think is a pretty successful grift with the help of Bari Weiss, who published Smith’s resignation letter on her Substack and hailed her a hero. Shaw has complained that her employers forbade her from performing a library orientation rap due to concerns around cultural appropriation (as others have stated, I do not want Shaw to be censored and believe she should release the rap immediately). Anyway, she’s managed to raise about $200,000 through her GoFundMe and has also been accepting money through PayPal. You should instead donate to one of these Texas mutual aid funds.

— A blessed error lead to the botching of this headline in University of Connecticut student newspaper The Daily Campus, the print version of which proclaims “I would 100% do it again: UConn students react to receiving COVID-19” (the word “vaccine” was cut off).