Digest 6/21/2021

Finding mentors in freelancing, a coffee date in Manhattan, Chicago Tribune layoffs, and more.

This week’s Study Hall Digest feature has been handed over to Chika Ekemezie, a freelance writer and content creator and Operations Manager at Study Hall. She runs a weekly newsletter called twenty-something and semi-frequently writes on the internet about writes about sex, dating, and the politics of life.

THE ZENITH OF MENTORSHIP

Deciding to work in media as a freelancer in your twenties, eschewing more conventional paths like a staff job or journalism school, is like moving to a new high school during your senior year. Except instead of not knowing where your AP Calc class is or having no one to sit with during lunch, you’re left on the outside of exclusive pitching workshops, networking opportunities, and the knowledge that the editor from *INSERT PUBLICATION HERE* literally never responds to cold-pitches. Working in media can feel like the tagline to the critically acclaimed Clique novels: “The only thing harder than getting, is staying in”. 

That’s why efforts like the Zenith Cooperative, led by Mary Retta, an education columnist at Teen Vogue and a freelance writer, and others, feel like the equivalent of having a buddy to show you the ropes during your first day at school. The Zenith Cooperative is made up of 21 mentors in their twenties and thirties. (Applications to the Zenith Cooperative are open until July 2, 2021.) Strikingly, the application process doesn’t require you to list your accolades and beg for an opportunity to have basic support. Rather, it lets you showcase who you are and join a community of peers who are more than happy to sit with you at lunch. 

I spoke to Mary Retta and Lexi McMenamin, a freelance writer and Zenith mentor, about the importance of mentorship. Mary and Lexi didn’t go to J-school, nor have they had paid staff roles in media. Their successes have come from talent but also from building relationships with other writers, especially online. “It can feel really cliquey to look in on people who are doing well in online media,” Lexi told me. Unlike J-school, which costs thousands, and internships/fellowships that “pay”, efforts like Zenith Cooperative are free. By sharing in the institutional knowledge that they have picked up during their career, members of the Zenith Cooperative are able to share in the wealth of their mentor’s experience. 

I’ve always been a little apprehensive when it comes to mentorship. While working in philanthropy, an older white woman appointed herself my mentor; the term became sullied. Her being my mentor wasn’t about me at all. To her, mentorship meant patronizing your mentee and talking about nothing but yourself for hours on end while your mentee passes the time by checking herself out on Zoom. She thought she could relate to me as a Black woman by telling me the same stories over and over again about how she and Angela Davis are distantly connected. She didn’t advocate for me or empower me to advocate for myself. Instead, she actively made decisions that stunted my growth and damaged my confidence. It was about the appearance of taking an interest in young people in your industry while nonetheless enacting rules, hierarchies, and norms that harm those young people. 

“While mentorship can be a beautiful thing, unfortunately finding a great mentor can be very difficult,” Mary says. And not all experienced writers are cut out to be mentors. In an attempt to be “real” about media as an industry, oftentimes media veterans’ advice to new freelancers can boil down to “just don’t do it.” 

Mary told me, “I remember feeling super discouraged about the stuff that established writers would say to me. It’s not that people were saying lies…but that’s a complacent approach to take when you’re talking to younger writers.” Members of the Zenith Cooperative are aiming to both share how they navigate the current industry, but play a role in addressing some of the systemic barriers that make working in media so freaking hard. “By fostering non-transactional, collaborative relationships and community, we’ll be able to help newer writers — specifically those from marginalized backgrounds — get a foothold in modern media without having to face any financial barriers,” Lexi says. And by being in community with writers and media workers that are upfront about barriers to longevity in media, members of the Zenith Cooperative will be empowered to push back on barriers like predatory contract terms or laughably low rates (which helps us all!). 

It’s so important for new freelancers to have a community of people who will acknowledge that yes, journalism and media is hard, and yes, freelancing really sucks sometimes, but it’s kind of worth it? There’s obviously some reason why we do what we do. The Zenith Cooperative is an innovative new project, but it’s just one example of the ways that we can build some sort of community. You probably know of another (cough, cough, Study Hall). We tend to think of freelancing as a highly individual job. You find opportunities and contracts on your own, you work on projects on your own, you even do your own human resources. But without tapping into some sort of community, you leave yourself vulnerable. When we know how freelancers are treated, we can work together to raise the bar. So, even though we’re all staring at our little computers every day, we might as well help each other out.  — Chika Ekemezie

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KAMALA HARRIS V. NINA SIMONE’S GRANDDAUGHTER V. TWITTER

You know it’s bad when court documents appear on Twitter. RéAnna Simone Kelly, granddaughter of Nina Simone, accused Vice President Kamala Harris of wrongfully separating her family from their inheritance when Harris, then  California’s attorney general, oversaw a tort suit brought against Lisa Simone Kelly, ReAnna’s mother and Nina’s daughter. The suit ended in a settlement in which Lisa Simone Kelly, having allegedly breached her contractual obligations to maintain her mother’s estate, agreed to pay millions in damages and relinquish her rights to her mother’s work (and therefore her entire family’s rights to that work) as well as her title as administrator of her mother’s estate. 

What started off as routine online Kamala-bashing took a turn once internet sleuths discerned that maybe the narrative was more complicated than RéAnna made it to be. Posters reviewing the court documents noted that it seemed Lisa Kelly Simone had taken millions from her mother’s charitable trust. Whether or not Kelly Simone merely mismanaged the estate or was actually embezzling remains unknown; the settlement kept the case out of court. The settlement Harris devised placed a court-appointed firm, San Pasqual Fiduciary Trust Company, in charge of the singer’s estate and charitable trust as opposed to, say, finding another family member who could fulfill her obligations.

It’s unclear who has control of Nina Simone’s estate and the trust. Not long ago, Sony Music filed a suit in federal court that sought to void an agreement between Nina Simone’s estate and her former lawyer, Steven Ames Brown, who’d helped the singer recover rights to her work in the 1980s and 1999s in exchange for partial rights to the work. But not much has been heard since. That’s the problem with contract law in the United States: what happens behind closed doors is still considered justice, and some forms of wealth hoarding are entirely acceptable. — Evan Kleekamp 

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IT’S A MEET-KATE!

Hi! My name’s Kate Lindsay and I’ve spent most of the past five years in women’s media, leaving in 2020 to help found Embedded. a publication-turned-newsletter all about the internet and the creators who use it. 

I’ll be taking over the weekly digest this summer starting next week. You’ll also be seeing me elsewhere on Study Hall, getting to the bottom of things like Puck, the new mysterious subscription-based publication from Vanity Fair’s Jon Kelly. But first, Air Mail’s new fair-trade single origin roast coffee. 

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Three short blocks from Balthazar, the New York City restaurant where Graydon Carter was recently banned, sits the first official stop on Air Mail’s coffee cart tour. Air Mail Express will serve up coffee and pastries for three more days later this week outside Soho’s Pasquale Jones before moving north to Bedford, the Hamptons, and Washington, Connecticut. 

The pop-up, in honor of the newsletter co-founded by former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Carter and former New York Times writer Alessandra Stanley, has already soft-launched at the Mark Hotel and Charlie Bird (the latter is a place, not a person). It was there that glamorous NYC patrons like Bond Official editor-in-chief Igee Okafor and fashion socialite Edward Barsamian were photographed sipping coffee and sporting Air Mail swag that’s for sale alongside bags of Air Mail’s new fair-trade single origin roast Jet Fuel. They are people famous enough to have their own Getty Images tags but not enough that I didn’t have to Google them. 

I ordered an iced coffee — I drink my coffee with mostly milk and sugar so honestly don’t ask me if it was good — and was handed copy 538 out of 2000 of Air Mail’s Printed Matter. The broadsheet features a profile of restaurant veteran Anne Rosenzweig by Ruth Peltason, an excerpt from Cleo Le-Tan’s 2019 book A Booklover’s Guide to New York, and items from Air Mail’s online shop such as a tote bag that’s more expensive than the $899 bike. 

Air Mail is not actually the first digital publication to pull a print stunt. In March 2019, then editor-in-chief Ben Smith briefly handed out copies of BuzzFeed’s one-time-only printed edition in Union Square featuring a cover story on Momo by Katie Notopolous and a printed GIF. 

New Yorkers can catch Air Mail Express’s final Manhattan stop outside Pasquale Jones June 22 through 24 if they want to cosplay as an overpaid media exec who’s squeezing in a coffee meeting between brunch and a squash match. 

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COMINGS & GOINGS

— The Chicago Tribune’s Alden-propelled departures include longtime staffer and entertainment editor Scott Powers, and columnists John Kass and Heidi Stevens. 

— Michael Wilner is joining McClatchy as a Senior National Security and White House Correspondent.

— Senior contributor Jay Willis is leaving the Appeal. 

— NBA staff editor Mike Piellucci has left The Athletic.

— Travel writer Nikki Vargas is joining Fodor’s Travel as an editor.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— The Wall Street Journal is scrapping its metro section, Greater New York, on July 9 and their lordships are allowing staffers to apply for other staff positions, 

— After over two years of contract negotiations and revealing that Anna Wintour has a home like a mortal, the Pitchfork, Ars Technica and New Yorker unions averted a strike and achieved an agreement towards a contract: a base salary starting at $55K and reaching $60K by 2023, more robust benefits and workplace protections, guaranteed wage increases, diversity commitments, and a whole swag bag of successes. We love to see it.

— Did you know that May 26 was actually a good day in climate news? Well, not according to these headlines. 

— Nearly a quarter of the Chicago Tribune newsroom is taking buyouts, per the Trib’s Josh Noel.

— In an effort to undo the harms of the crime beat on people suspected of crime, the Associated Press has decided not to name any suspects in their crime briefs in cases where the story won’t be covered past the initial story or to publish stories based on “interesting” mugshots.

— New York Times staff are in a war of open letters about the union’s plan to increase dues (proposed as permanent but now temporary), reports The Daily Beast, with staffers like Maggie Haberman, Michael Rosenberg, Eric Lipton and 97 others in the No Thanks camp, and a hundred other staffers saying Yes Please.