Digest 3/1/2021

New York Times diversity report, Facebook news, Patricia Lockwood, and more.

THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS THEY’RE WORKING ON IT

When was the last time we enjoyed a moment’s peace without having to sound the New York Times scandal alarm? (We have such an alarm installed here at the Study Hall headquarters.) The sense that there’s Times drama every week persists in part because, as the Times’ own media columnist Ben Smith pointed out, internal disputes at the paper of record are imbued with symbolism and gravitas that disputes at other workplaces are not. “I assure you, there are interesting personnel dramas playing out at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, but somehow they don’t explode as public morality plays, with emotional Twitter debates, social media cheering sections and dueling public letters,” wrote Smith.

The Times is the Times — sorry, London, there is only the one — and its place in American culture and within the media landscape is indisputable. I don’t see any of this changing. It is an institution that has been around for 170 years and has retained an aura of unassailability for most of it, whether merited or not. 

But perhaps that’s part of the problem. The Times published a report on diversity and inclusion at the company based on interviews with more than 400 employees over eight months. It’s not all bad — Times leadership takes care to highlight that the majority of respondents were proud to work at the paper — but it is pretty damning when it comes to its assessment of the overall culture, which is one both of exclusivity and opaqueness, the negative effects of which are felt most strongly by employees of color. The report follows two widely publicized and hotly debated scandals. Most recently, former Times reporter Donald McNeil resigned after saying the n-word on a Times-guided school trip to Peru, among other offences. (He had been a difficult employee well before then, and had been disciplined at the time of the most recent offense, which took place in 2019.) In the summer of 2020, Senator Tom Cotton used the op-ed pages of the paper to call for the deployment of troops to subdue protesters, which led many Times employees to break from the paper’s notoriously strict social media policy and criticize the Times for putting Black staffers in danger. 

An excerpt from the report that stood out to me, in a section highlighting “cultural inhibitors”: “A narrow view of excellence limits our ability to benefit from difference. ‘That’s not Timesean’ can be used to exclude.” Another: “Success and belonging at The Times are guided by a set of complex, unwritten rules.” And another: “Some people make the flawed assumption that there is a tradeoff between diversity and excellence.” Add this all together and you have a pretty inhospitable workplace for workers of color. These problems are made more intractable by the Times’ own sense of its exclusivity, a sensibility that some at the paper see as an expression of its values. That is why the cultural change that needs to happen is so “sweeping,” per the report.

One employee quoted in the report said that “you need two kinds of mentors at The Times, one for career growth, then another to navigate [the company]. I don’t know of another company that needs the second one quite so much.” Employees of color wonder if they are receiving the same guidance and mentorship as their white colleagues. Black employees leave the company at higher rates than their white colleagues. Black employees, and particularly Black women, gave the company the lower ratings in the report. Many Asian-American women reported “feeling invisible and unseen — to the point of being regularly called by the name of a different colleague of the same race, something other people of color described as well.”

Many of these internal difficulties also play out in other workplaces. But notes about the difficulties of navigating the company, of complex and unwritten rules, of the exclusion written into a comment like “That’s not Timesean,” make me wonder if the Times’ uniquely prestigious cultural position has prevented it from addressing these issues before now. The fact that some within the company, according to the Times’ own report, see diversity as at odds with excellence reveals that such an insistence on preserving tradition has kept the company from advancing in the present. 

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COMINGS AND GOINGS 

— Cameron Barr will steer the Washington Post through this Marty Barron-less period as the paper continues to search for a new Marty Baron (but one that is not Marty Baron).

— A new literary magazine called Astra Quarterly from Astra Publishing House will be led by Nadja Spiegelman, formerly of the Paris Review.

— Estelle Tang joins BuzzFeed’s Reader section as a senior editor. 

LONGREAD OF THE WEEK Hello, pull up a chair, and welcome to my Patricia Lockwood simp corner. Lockwood wrote a wonderful piece on the oeuvre of Elena Ferrante for the London Review of Books, memorable both for its insights into the Neapolitan novels (“to call the Neapolitan Quartet ‘a rich portrait of a friendship’ seems insane…the epigraph is from Faust, which I guess according to this formula is a story about two dudes hanging out: only one of them is completely red, because he is the Devil”) and good fiction in general. Citing Ferrante on moments where “the writing arches, becomes excited, spins around breathlessly absorbing everything,” Lockwood writes: “You can lay all the bones and muscles out in order…but that spin is beyond all hard work, education, conscientiousness. And when Ferrante hits it…you find yourself dizzy in the book as in a real human body, the world smearing ecstatically past your eyes.”— Erin Schwartz

EVERYTHING ELSE

— After Facebook blocked Australian news content in response to legislation that would make the company pay publishers (the social media company reached a deal with Australia last week), Canada has vowed to enact similar legislation in the coming months, and has said it won’t back down in the face of Facebook’s threats. 

— Kelsey McKinney at Defector published a detailed report of the internal unrest at Slate all stemming from (what else?) one white podcast host’s insistence on saying the n-word. Mike Pesca, host of The Gist, took to the company’s slack to vigorously defend his right to say the word in certain contexts. But that’s not all! He has said the word at work multiple times over the last few years — really, more times than you would think (any more than zero is too many, but it’s quite a bit more than that). Pesca has now been suspended. Here’s a key quote from one anonymous staffer: “Mike Pesca is really the only one causing these kinds of conflicts. We have other staffers who hold opinions that are unpopular at Slate, but they are not provoking their colleagues in a harassment-worthy way.”

— Al Jazeera is launching a right-wing media platform called Rightly, led by former Fox News employee Scott Norvell. An anonymous employee who worked under Norvell at Heat Street, a Newscorp site that shut down in 2017, said he played a role in making the site a “pro-Trump alt-right Breitbart clone.” What could possibly go wrong?

— A team of journalists who worked together at the Wall Street Journal to expose a $6 billion fraud that turned into a book, Billion Dollar Whale, are joining forces once again to launch a journalism studio seemingly for the purpose of uncovering more remarkable true stories that could become features or podcasts — in other words, for the purpose of creating IP.

— Twitter has announced the launch of a feature called Super Follows, which will allow users to charge people for access to bonus content, like extra tweets, newsletters, or access to community groups. I previously called Twitter’s newsletter service the final boss of the persona-based internet economy, but this might actually be it.