Digest 3/15/2021

Online harassment, the platform vs. publisher debate, and more.

Programming note: This week’s Opportunities newsletter will run on Thursday, 3/18 instead of Wednesday, 3/17. Thanks for your patience.

IT’S TIME TO TAKE HARASSMENT SERIOUSLY

Last week, New York Times tech reporter Taylor Lorenz marked International Women’s Day by calling attention to the vicious harassment routinely faced by women journalists and asking that they receive support. She was speaking from extensive personal experience — Lorenz has faced a barrage of online abuse and harassment, much of it from VCs and men in tech. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I’ve had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life,” she tweeted. “No one should have to go through this.”

Ironically, but unsurprisingly, this drew a fresh wave of harassment. Glenn Greenwald belittled her pain: “Her claim to this level of victimhood is revolting,” he tweeted, adding a bizarre implication that journalists shouldn’t complain about anything short of political persecution. FOX News’ Tucker Carlson continued his yearslong pattern of smearing female journalists by attacking Lorenz on his widely-viewed program, framing her as a powerful elite daring to perform victimhood, showcasing her face (the show added Lorenz’s image to mockups of tweet screenshots; her Twitter avatar intentionally does not show her face) and repeating her name, which resulted in harassment from his followers. The Times released a statement expressing support for Lorenz.

Online harassment takes an especially heavy toll on journalists of color as well. In an International Center for Journalists report analyzing attacks lobbed against Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa, researchers found many of the attacks were racist, sexist and misogynistic in nature; 40% of the attacks were personal in nature. The report also found that online violence can become real-life violence: “There is direct evidence that the online violence targeting Ressa has offline consequences. It has created the enabling environment for her persecution, prosecution and conviction. It also subjects her to very real physical danger.”

I messaged Hilary Sargent, a journalist and researcher who has spoken publicly about the harassment she’s suffered — she even posted a darkly humorous collage last week of some of the tamer threats she’s received — for her thoughts on how to address harassment. “The threats don’t stop,” she tweeted. “Sometimes they slow down. But they never stop.” 

Sargent is part of a small group that has formed to strategize ways to combat harassment. She drafted a document detailing some tactics, which has been circulated privately: preempting abuse by removing some public information, monitoring for threats (including keeping an eye on Google alerts that mention the target), documenting threats in a digestible manner, mass reporting threats to get them removed from social media, and identifying culprits who would rather remain anonymous.

The onus should not be on the women suffering the harassment to do all of these things — ideally, these tasks could be outsourced to allies. Sargent suggested that news organizations could do more to support the women who become targets of harassment. “News organizations aren’t inclined to do anything that resembles doxxing,” she wrote to me via DM. “But what better deterrent is there against posting how a woman you don’t know deserves to be raped than seeing others who’ve posted similarly lose their anonymity[?]”

“News organizations need to take preemptive steps to protect their staffers, and provide freelancers covering certain topics the same resources and protection,” she continued. “Women shouldn’t be discouraged from covering tech or disinformation or extremists or politics — they should be actively recruited to staff those beats and freelance those pieces — and they should be protected by the industry.”

In the meantime, I find it promising that publications like the Times will vocally and publicly defend their employees. In 2018, when journalist Talia Lavin was targeted in a bad-faith smear campaign, the New Yorker distanced itself from her and condemned the tweet that had become a subject of controversy; Lavin resigned from her role as fact-checker at the magazine. It would be more promising if publications made a habit of sticking up for freelancers, especially as freelancers comprise a larger share of the media workforce — I couldn’t help but recall that NPR severed its years-long relationship with Kim Kelly after she was targeted by Carlson. Maybe the time has come for publications to take preemptive measures to protect journalists, now that harassment seems to have become part of the job.

SUBSTACK SCANDAL OF THE WEEK

As was foretold in the prophecies, Substack is currently facing a reckoning over its decidedly non-editorial-purely-business decision to become the platform of choice for a phalanx of incendiary anti-woke, anti-cancel culture crusaders who have defected from their enviable media jobs to launch independent newsletters. Substack has been actively seeking out these writers, offering substantial advances (Matt Yglesias got $250,000!!!!), benefits, legal assistance, editors on retainer — you know, the kinds of things a regular media company might offer its employees. This has, understandably, caused some critics to question Substack’s insistence that they are a platform and not a publisher. (A very good, measured CJR piece by Clio Chang grappled with this apparent contradiction.) Meanwhile, Substack’s preference for a certain genre of writer has caused some critics to question Substack’s insistence that the decisions they’re making are decidedly not editorial.

On Friday, Jude Doyle announced they would be removing their newsletter from the platform due to Substack’s support of writers whose work they believe harms trans people and women (Greenwald alone has used his Substack both to fearmonger about trans issues and target Taylor Lorenz). Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie responded indirectly via a blog post explaining Substack Pro, the relatively new program through which the company has elected to pay certain writers generous advances in exchange for 85% of their subscription revenue during the first year. In the blog, he stresses these are business decisions — the company is making offers to writers that seem like “sure bets.” He also reiterated that information about who receives these offers is private, and that it is up to individual writers whether they reveal the particulars of their deal with Substack. We at least know a “generous financial offer” was made to Freddie DeBoer, who devoted one of his first blogs to a misogynistic screed against female journalists who had criticized him. 

On Friday, before McKenzie’s defense was published, Jude Doyle announced they would be removing their newsletter from the platform. Shortly after Doyle’s post, Safy-Hallan Farah and Defector’s Kelsey McKinney announced they would be discontinuing their newsletters as well. Others seem to be considering alternatives. But it seems unlikely any of this will sway Substack, because the platform is going all-in on “sure bets,” and you can always bet the house on controversial, white male journalists who have made dangerous contrarianism their whole thing. 

Substack CEO Chris Best has previously, explicitly stated that these self-proclaimed media rebels are good for Substack’s business model. (A few days ago, he reappropriated a call intended to end police brutality against people of color in order to defend these rebels.) But this undermines the fallacy, pushed by this set, that they are downtrodden or marginalized in some way. A tech company is staking its business model on the belief that these professional whiners’ brand of whining is lucrative! As the prophecy also foretold, a cash-rich tech start-up that is supposedly not a publisher has exactly the editorial stance you’d think.

LONGREAD OF THE WEEK In the Oxford American, Crystal Wilkinson writes a beautifully paced essay about a year of COVID cooking: she revisits family memories of gardening, harvesting, pickling, and baking. “My youngest daughter tells me she has leveled a place in the backyard of the duplex she lives in for a garden. She tells me she is doing this because of a breakup. She tells me she is lonely,” Wilkinson writes. “She tells me she wants to be able to grow her own food while she works from home…She has small pots of seeds growing all over her house and she sends me so many photographs and texts that it is sometimes annoying, but mostly I am jealous.”

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Teen Vogue’s choice of incoming editor-in-chief is embroiled in controversy over past racist tweets. Alexi McCammond, formerly a political reporter at Axios, wrote some anti-Asian tweets in 2011, and the internet is forever. Teen Vogue staffers released a statement expressing concern over the hire, McCammond condemned her past remarks (she had addressed them in the past) and apologized, but the controversy isn’t over. Ulta Beauty recently pulled an ad from the magazine in protest.

— BuzzFeed, which acquired HuffPost in February, last week fired 47 employees of the newsroom in order to “fast-track the path to profitability” for HuffPost. Many of those laid off were reporters, and HuffPost Canada/Quebec was closed altogether. As if that weren’t bad enough, Jonah Peretti did so by announcing a meeting then telling staffers if they didn’t receive an email by 1 PM that afternoon their jobs were safe. 

— The Irish Times review of the Harry-Meghan interview is very spirited!!! As much as Americans make fun of the British monarchy, the Irish…..really hate the British monarchy (for good reason).

— Architecture and design magazine Deezen has been acquired by Danish media company JP/Politiken Media Group, indicating the start of a major expansion — it is the company’s first purchase outside of Scandinavia. 

— Gothamist accidentally published its “Cuomo resigns” pre-write, and considerately left a spot to [describe his emotional state].