Digest 4/18/2022

Poisoned pastrami problems, bye to Bitch (Media), and more.

BON APPÉTIT GUY ALLEGEDLY GIVES ADORING FANS DIARRHEA 

A San Francisco Chronicle report, Gawker revelation, and countless, breathless tweets all point to one thing: this pastrami will make your tummy hurt. Bon Appétit YouTube personality Brad Leone, who is perhaps just as famous for wearing a little rolled beanie as he is for cooking, has ushered the food publication into another scandal with his potentially botulism-inducing recipe for pastrami. Thankfully, this scandal has significantly less brownface, but around two or three times as much disease-producing bacteria. You take what you can get, I guess.

Making things like kombucha and kimchi, Leone has been heading Bon Appétit’s “It’s Alive” fermentation segment since October, 2016. Food preservation techniques like fermentation and canning are fascinating and chic; they also rely on very exact science that can easily have serious health consequences if not executed perfectly. In February, 2021, BA removed Leone’s video for canning seafood because the method he uses could make you shit yourself and die.

According to The Washington Post’s reporting, in response to the video removal, Leone wrote on his Instagram story that he apologizes for making murder seafood and “will do better as a teacher and student of food.” Alas, the teacher and student of food failed to do better with a video posted on April 4 where “Brad Makes Pastrami.”

Though BA included a disclaimer that viewers should “be sure to follow a tried and tested recipe so your preparations line up with food safety standards” (this disclaimer is not found on other “It’s Alive” videos), the food world watched, mouths open, as Leone used an insufficient preservation method (celery juice) and prepped his beef for bacteria, not a delicious sandwich.

The video is still available to watch on YouTube, and Leone hasn’t publicly discussed it since telling an Instagram follower that her “absolutely atrocious” pastrami diarrhea could be a “crazy stomach virus,” and that he has “never gotten sick from any of [his] ferments.”

When I reached out to BA for comment, public relations director Erin Kaplan gave me the same statement as she did to Gawker: “Our safety practices are of utmost importance at Bon Appétit and we have many processes in place to ensure all content is accurate, fact-checked and safe for viewers. Our culinary production team extensively reviews all of our video content to confirm they adhere to safety protocols. In addition, we have a fermentation expert who oversees our recipes for this series, including this video.” In my initial email, I specifically asked BA to elaborate on this previously given statement by naming its fermentation expert, which, uh, they didn’t.

“Food antagonist” Joe Rosenthal, who has dissected the minutiae of Leone’s two botulism incidents on his Instagram story, was much more helpful, telling me that he thinks “Leone is the last remaining of the big BA video stars, and [he’d] imagine [Condé Nast Entertainment] would be very interested in retaining him to try to leverage those pre-implosion fans.”

“Clearly, they’re unconcerned with the reputational harms that the association with him could bring to their brand,” said Rosenthal. He continued to say that although we could consider BA’s sloppy PR “for a lifetime,” what he keeps coming back to is “do the experts that BA claimed approved this video believe that pastrami ought to be brown inside when cooked?”

This whole thing is the result of what I have identified as “the Jack Harlow effect:” a white guy with wiry facial hair makes women on the internet thirsty because he seems attainable and his facial hair is like an otter’s oily fur. Not to be all like “White Man, Am I Right?!” but the fact that Leone is still a BA Test Kitchen star or, at the very least, still producing a dangerous fermentation series is very White Man Alert.

BA’s Test Kitchen stars often toe the precarious line between journalist and influencer, and with the platform’s emphasis on personality and face over content, its sparkling YouTubers have historically pushed it into the latter category. In short, I suspect that Leone will get to create botulism scandals until he dies from it himself because he’s kind of cute and wears a hat.

WHERE DO THE GOOD PUBLICATIONS GO? 

The Chicago Reader is in trouble because media’s upper management doesn’t know where to put its money. The Counter will somewhat suddenly cease operations on May 20, leaving some employees scrambling to find new employment. On April 12, Bitch Media announced on its website that it will cease operations in June 2022 after 25 years. Many people, including myself, were devastated by the news and the narrowing of publications that provide non-white writers with smart, considerate work.

To make things worse for Bitch, social media editor Marina Watanabe told me there was no death knell.

Bitch’s demise “was a complete shock to me and most of the rest of the team,” Watanabe said. “I’m aware of a few other times when Bitch almost had to cease operations due to financial precarity. However, although leadership had communicated the possibility of cutting the print magazine and going exclusively digital, ceasing operations entirely was never mentioned as being on the table.”

“I’ve spoken to a lot of Bitch readers and former staff recently, and many of us expressed a (misguided) sense that Bitch was scrappy enough to stick around for years to come,” Watanabe continued. Later, in a candid Twitter thread, Watanabe describes Bitch’s exhausting work culture and out-of-touch upper management. In our conversation, she told me that the publication’s recently-hired CEO, Marisol Flores-Aguirre, who did not respond to my request for comment, was “well-meaning but didn’t have a background in journalism or a clear vision for the org.”

“To be frank, she did not understand Bitch’s mission or how to lead the organization,” Watanabe wrote in her Twitter thread.

Meanwhile, as Bitch shutters due to weak management, the Chicago Reader buckles down to prevent the very same from happening. Following a fact-check of Reader co-owner Len Goodman’s anti-Covid-19 vaccination column, staff at the publication say Goodman is now intentionally stalling the publication’s sale to a nonprofit. “For four months, they’ve continued to delay, repeatedly moving the goal posts with new demands,” staff wrote in a Chicago Tribune opinion article.

The situation is as dire as it sounds. Writer Leor Galil told me that what the next few weeks look like for the Reader “are pretty unclear to me, but we know that our funds are nearly tapped out.”

“The paper could be dead in a matter of weeks. None of us can be expected to work for free, and as much as Chicagoans value this newspaper, we can’t pay our printer with good vibes,” he said.

The Chicago Reader Union currently plans to hold a protest outside of Goodman’s Chicago house on April 21. He hopes that the protest will press Goodman into selling, but he also emphasizes what readers and Chicago would be losing if it doesn’t.

“If my job ends in the next few weeks, I can still be proud of the work I’ve done here,” Galil said. “But I can’t pursue this kind of community-focused music journalism elsewhere. […] The Reader is a valuable resource for Chicagoans, and a great place for journalists from all walks of life to try something they couldn’t do at any other publication. And that would be a major loss — for all of journalism.”

“What other publication would give me, say, 5,000 (or so) words to write about an old Dunkin’ Donuts that became a hub for Chicago punks?” he asked.

Every publication can’t be aggregate news and clickbait Gen Z headlines — we need the community-centered, moving, and beautiful writing that publications like Bitch and the Reader make space for. The world needed Bitch and The Counter, and now we must hold onto the Reader.

Says Watanabe, “Let Bitch Media serve as a cautionary tale — if you want progressive independent publications to continue to exist, you have to support them while they’re still around.”

COMINGS AND GOINGS

— I (me) will be leaving Inverse to join Kotaku as a staff writer (email me the script for the Atonement film adaptation as congratulations)

— Rachel Saltz will now oversee classical music and dance as an editor at The New York Times

— In May, Wendy Lu will become a senior staff editor on the The New York Times’ Flexible Editing desk

— Margherita Beale will leave her assistant editor position at Forbes and join Law360 as a content editor

— Jessie Thompson will become arts editor at The Independent after six years at the Evening Standard

— Nuala Bishari joins San Francisco Chronicle as a reporter 

— Liz Finny begins her position as associate editor at ESPN this week, as does Jackson Thompson

— Joshua Topolsky will leave his position as Chief Content Officer at Bustle Digital Group this week, according to internal messages received by Study Hall

EVERYTHING ELSE

— The Washington Post Guild released its Pay, Diversity and Retention Study and Black Caucus testimonial report on April 13, fleshing out its 2019 analysis of pay at the Post. Much of what the report conveys about working at the Post is disheartening and upsetting; the newsroom remains mostly white despite diversity efforts, women and people of color are paid less than male and white colleagues, and Black employees call the commercial side of the Post the “Plantation” because of how often white bosses overlook them. But the unpleasant truth of the Guild’s report isn’t exactly surprising, especially if you’re a non-white journalist who has ever scrolled through their newsroom’s Slack profile pictures. The Guild did not provide a comment in time for this newsletter’s publication.

— The BuzzFeed News Union sent a letter expressing its “concerns about the current state of our newsroom and our ongoing bargaining process” to board members and shareholders on April 12.

— NPR hires people of color, but lack of upward mobility makes them leave.

— Snapchat empowers over 40 newsrooms to Snapchat their brains out.

— CNN+, CNN’s streaming service launched on March 29, has less than 10,000 regular users and is generally suffering from being a major flopzilla. 

— CNN should instead host a lucrative podcast called CNN+: The “C” Stands for “Cum Town” and the “+” Means “More” and We Love Wolf Blitzer.

— Disregard last week’s level-headed reporting, Elon Musk wants to eat Twitter and burp up its bones.