Digest 8/16/2021

Frenzied fandoms, a digital media union showdown, and more.

JOURNALIST VS. FANDOM

Last Monday, BuzzFeed published a profile of internet celebrity Trisha Paytas by Scaachi Koul. For those following the saga, the profile was actually the conclusion to a months-long harassment campaign against Koul in which internet drama culture and standard journalistic procedure spectacularly and publicly collided. 

In May, Koul interviewed both Paytas and frequent online nemesis Gabbie Hanna for separate profiles. Paytas, however, demanded that any reference to them be removed after learning during the fact-checking process for the Hanna profile that they would be mentioned.

“In reality, journalists don’t have to abide by a public figure’s preferences about what gets brought up in coverage of them,” Kat Tenbarge, who covers online creators for Insider, tells me over email about the situation. 

The Gabbie Hanna piece went live, with the reference to Paytas included. So Paytas did what they had been taught to do through years of living online: turn any shred of adversity into content. Their fans, in turn, engaged with it. In her subsequent Paytas profile, Koul details some of the harassment she received as part of Paytas’s public lambasting following the Gabbie Hanna piece, including fans “sending [her] doxing threats, suggestions [she] kill [herself], demands that [she] be fired” and “racist jabs about [her] name and appearance.”

Over email, Koul tells me that influencers can get away with this kind of treatment because they don’t rely on journalists for their success. 

“They already have a firm hold over their own narrative, their audience, and how that audience…”

Read the rest here.

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WHAT’S GOING ON AT THE WGAE?

On July 29, a bizarre email appeared in my inbox. While I no longer work at a union shop, I still receive emails from the Writers Guild of America East due to my previous involvement (this may be a mistake on their part that they’re learning about…right now). The email confirms rumors that the WGAE had declined to organize an anonymous digital shop that approached them in the spring. This is, according to the statement, part of a larger pause the Guild has placed upon organizing new digital targets “pending the results of an assessment of the membership.” 

For many card-holding WGAE members, this was the first they heard of the pause, which other Guild council members were quick to clarify they did not support. A statement cosigned by Kelly Stout, Kim Kelly, Ashley Feinberg, Amy Sohn, Dru Johnston, Kaitlin Fontanta, Hamilton Nolan, and Josh Gondelman says the pause is “a result of political and philosophical disagreements among elected Council members about the value of organizing.” In short, there is a rift between those who want to prioritize the Guild’s original purpose as a union for TV and film writers and those who believe journalists should be given equal priority. 

David Simon, writer of The Wire and member of WGAE, shared on Twitter that he believes equal inclusion of both parties will lead to competing resources. 

“When any union extant for and devoted to collective bargaining in one sector becomes amalgamated, competing priorities and finite resources will de facto apply,” wrote Simon.

But Sara David, editor and union member at Vice who is running for a Council seat in the upcoming WGAE election, says this is really just a betrayal of the organizing movement the Guild itself helped pioneer. In 2015, Gawker was the first digital outlet to unionize, and WGAE’s representation kicked off a wave of digital organizing that now makes up 50% of its membership. The decision to pause digital organizing left David “shocked and heartbroken.”

“This conversation should have happened in 2015 when the guild decided to spearhead digital media organizing, it shouldn’t be happening right now when we’re already half of the membership, it shouldn’t be happening right now during COVID,” David says in a phone call.

The shop that had attempted to organize with WGAE and was turned away reportedly instead went to NewsGuild, where David said they were also turned away due to lack of resources.

“The Guild cannot comment on potential organizing conversations or confidential discussions it has with workers,” the NewsGuild told me in a statement. “We believe that all media workers should form a union in their workplace.”

However, without a home at WGAE and NewsGuild, the shop is hung out to dry ahead of the notoriously layoff-heavy fourth quarter. 

“It’s just so baffling to me and hurtful to me personally, because I’m like, I’m helping win contracts that palpably change all of your lives,” David says. “I’m showing up for you. I was on your picket line against agencies. Why won’t you show up for me right now?”

David is running alongside Kelly, Nolan, Gondelman, Liz Hynes, Benjamin Rosenblum, and Sasha Stewart as part of the “Solidarity Slate.” By voting for all the members who identify with the Solidarity Slate in the election (which runs from August 26 to September 14), voters have the chance to “turn all of the remaining council seats to people who are at least sympathetic to digital media workers so that they can overturn the vote” to pause digital organizing, and allow the shop that had approached them in the spring to join. 

As for Simon, and other members of the WGAE who are not sympathetic to digital media’s organizing, David encourages them to reframe their questions.

“He’s just like, ‘Should we be letting digital media workers in our union?’ Instead of asking, ‘How can we use this growing power to help screenwriters and everyone in our union?’ He’s so indoctrinated in this weird imaginary hierarchy that he’s union busting our own cohort.”

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Lila Harron Battis is leaving Travel + Leisure to dive into freelancing. 

— Safy Hallan Farah is joining TechCrunch to cover tech and culture. 

— Thomas Oide is leaving the Minnesota Star Tribune to join Axios.

— Hannah Smothers is leaving Vice to pursue an MFA in fiction at Texas State University this fall.

— Andrea González-Ramírez joined The Cut as a senior writer. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— *SNL Stefon voice* New York’s hottest media club is…Montclair, New Jersey.

— The New York Magazine union conducted a pay study in the spring, revealing a number of damning discrepancies among women and people of color compared to their white male counterparts. The median salary for white women is $27,000 less than the median for men, with the median salary for women of color an additional $9,000 less than white women. The study also highlighted the poor pay received by essential employees like fact checkers. Additionally, only 24.4 percent of employees self-identify with a racial or ethnic background other than white. 

— A new Pitchbook report via Axios reveals that venture capital media investments have significantly slowed in the past year, peaking in 2015 at 50 deals making up over $1 billion  and dropping to just $115 million for 18 deals in 2021. Hmmm, I wonder what spooked them?

— That klaxon you hear is the sound of Medium changing again. 

— The New York Times did the union-busting version of accidentally sending a shit-talking text to the person you’re shit talking. The Daily Beast reports that lawyers for the outlet accidentally sent their potential strategies for responding to the union efforts by technology and product staffers to Rachel Sanders, an organizer for the New York chapter of the NewsGuild, which represents the Times tech workers. 

— The Vox Media Podcast Network has acquired Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast, hosted by Marques Brownlee and Andrew Manganelli. The popular tech podcast also boasts a YouTube channel with over 100,000 subscribers.

— The New York Times has paywalled eleven of its 50 newsletters to subscribers only, and also launched an additional seven newsletters from writers like Kara Swisher and Tressie McMillan Cottom. The paywall will start rolling out on select newsletters in early September.