Digest 5/3/2021

A freelancer takes on Big Celebrity, the Basecamp exodus, and more.

ST. VINCENT AND THE END OF CELEBRITY JOURNALISM

On April 26, music journalist Emma Madden self-published an interview with musician St. Vincent to her personal website, saying the publication she was writing for had capitulated to the artist’s team’s demands and pulled the piece. Madden has since taken it down, but copies of the interview still exist online. (There’s nothing damning in the interview; Madden asks fair questions and comes across as respectful of the subject’s boundaries. It’s frankly baffling that St. Vincent’s team was “terrified,” as she wrote, of its publication.)

The St. Vincent incident is the latest entry in the storied genre of celebrity tantrums over media coverage. In 2019 alone: E! News host Morgan Stewart made some critical remarks about Justin Bieber’s lip-syncing performance at Coachella, so Bieber dragged her for being negative. Ariana Grande called bloggers “unfulfilled” and “purposeless.” Olivia Munn published a bizarre rant calling some fairly mild critiques of her fashion choices by bloggers the Fug Girls sexist. Lizzo lashed out at a 6.5-star Pitchfork review, tweeting that anyone who reviews music without creating music should be unemployed. Lana Del Rey dragged NPR critic Ann Powers over a fine review. And who could forget Halsey (sort of) calling for another 9/11 over a Pitchfork review?

Celebrities are emboldened to vocally oppose their critics and defend their art, aided by social media — providing artists with a direct line to their fans and greater ownership over their public image, reducing their dependence on traditional publicity — and by the rise of stan culture (woe to anyone who dares offer a mild critique of Taylor Swift). I think it can also be understood as a backlash against the days of Perez Hilton and other celebrity gossip bloggers of the ’00s whose genuinely mean-spirited and invasive celebrity coverage was the norm. 

Artists are often sensitive and capricious people, and do not take kindly to anything they perceive to be an uncharitable reception of their art. It’s unsurprising when an artist lashes out at criticism. What is deeply concerning, however, is when a media outlet capitulates to an artist’s demands and changes their coverage. This happened in January when Carey Mulligan blasted a Variety review of her film Promising Young Woman as sexist, I believe incorrectly. Nevertheless, Variety decided not to defend their writer and issued an apology (which film critics decried).

And now, the St. Vincent incident. I reached out to Madden, who is declining to name the publication at this point, but described it as “an online-only, independently-run publication based in the UK.” She wasn’t threatened into removing the interview from her website, she explained, but began to feel guilty about the decision to go over her editors’ heads. “We had not agreed on a fee for the piece, but the editor offered to pay me double if I took the piece down (I then refused any money from the publication),” Madden explained to me in an email. “I felt I was guilt-tripped into taking it down.” 

St. Vincent’s management company, MBC, had alluded to the possibility of legal action and the publication got scared, according to Madden — but it also seems they wanted to maintain a working relationship with the company. “The piece was killed because the publication wanted to preserve their relationship [with MBC] and the possibility of legal action was thrown around (they asked the publication whether they had lawyers),” alleged Madden, continuing, “MBC didn’t reach out to me personally …They blamed the editor for commissioning the piece since it was through them that I was given access.” 

“I felt the publication’s relationship with [MBC] was privileged over my relationship with the publication, simply because they had more to lose and gain from the former,” Madden continued. “I believe they felt genuinely very threatened by St. Vincent’s team.”

Artists and their teams behave this way because they know, now, that they can get away with it. Outlets are increasingly deferential to their demands. It’s only a matter of time before celebrities eschew traditional modes of publicity altogether and only agree to chats in places like Interview Magazine with their celebrity friends. Now that those are more viable options, celebrities will have less use for journalists, and so the quest for access will become more fraught — journalists may have to decide whether to give into an almost colleague-like relationship with their subject, or to decline coverage altogether.

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Allie Jones joins Leah Finnegan’s Gawker which Allie calls “Gawker by Leah Finnegan,” making it sound like a fashion house.

— gal-dem magazine’s Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff is stepping away from the editor-in-chief job.

— Queens Eagle managing editor David Brand, the sole staff editor at the newspaper, is leaving the publication to join a “city-wide news organization.”

— Kinfolk Magazine is launching Kindling, a magazine for people with children, on June 15. Kindling was once a magazine for dads, but all is well because that magazine’s co-founder is on the Kindling advisory board, per this Twitter interaction.

— Radio station WNYC laid off Gothamist EIC John Del Signore and reporter Christopher Robbins as well as senior radio producer Richard Yeh. 

— Joshua Wolf Shenk resigned from Believer magazine, reports the LA Times, after a naked bathtub moment during a meeting. 

— Project management software company Basecamp lost a third of its workforce with many people taking buyouts after the company’s founders more or less banned political discussion at work. Sounds like hiring is a project that needs some managing. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— The New York Times is rebranding op-eds as “guest essays,” calling the op-ed designation “a relic of an older age and an older print newspaper design.”

— The NewsGuild is taking Gannett to task for dramatically underpaying its female and non-white staffers after a study found that women at the company earn $9,845 less than the median salary of men, and that non-white women earn $15,727 less than the median salary for white men.

— Maryland hotel executive Stewart Bainum Jr., who has committed $300 million to the cause of saving Tribune Publishing from hedge fund Alden Capital, is searching for investors to join him in his bid to save all the publications, but so far no one has stepped up for the Chicago Tribune.

— The Washington Post, New York Times, and NBC News all issued retractions on a story claiming Rudy Giuliani had been told by the FBI he was a target of a Russian disinformation campaign. The reports cited anonymous sources, who apparently had said Giuliani received such a report but then walked back that claim, saying a brief was prepared but not delivered to Giuliani.

— The New York Post briefly removed two articles falsely claiming Kamala Harris’ book was distributed to children at migrant facilities, then put the articles back up with a retraction and editors’ notes attached. The writer whose byline was on the original article, which had been a cover story, quit her job over the incident, claiming she had been ordered to write it and that it was the last straw.

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