Digest 11/1/2021

Internet culture reporting beyond what the D'Amelios are doing, the loss of Mr. Autumn Man, and more.

THE INTERNET CULTURE BEAT’S DIVERSITY PROBLEM

Last week, Slate’s Rachelle Hampton called out New York City venue Caveat for snubbing her in an invitation to host a live event. Hampton, who is Black, co-hosts the internet culture podcast ICYMI with Madison Malone Kircher. However, it was Kircher who received the invite to host a live ICYMI show at the venue, with no mention of Hampton.

Hampton had previously subtweeted the venue, and its collaborators, for frequently hosting internet culture panels without the involvement of Black reporters.

“i wasnt going to call out the venue that kept doing this but now that they’re apparently fine doing a live @ICYMI_pod event without me, @caveatnyc what’s good?” she wrote.

While internet culture didn’t exist as a recognizable beat when Hampton got her start as an editorial assistant four years ago, it’s always been a focus for her. She wrote about the 2014 movement #YourSlipIsShowing, and hosted a season of Slate’s Working podcast on the influencer industry. Over the past year or so, the digital culture beat went mainstream, and Hampton said it’s been complicated watching the genre gain legitimacy through majority-white reporters.

“I think it was always extremely clear to people from marginalized identities that what happened online could and did have real world effects,” Hampton tells Study Hall over email. “Everyone else is just catching up. Which only makes it more frustrating that the people who most often get to stake internet culture as their dedicated beat are very rarely the ones who are most harmed by the dynamics we see playing out online.”

When asked about the barriers Black writers face in this beat, Hampton says it starts on “the very basic level of who is allowed to claim the beat of internet culture in the first place.”

“When they write about the Black creators who are the driving force behind most of the stories on this beat they aren’t seen as ~internet culture reporters~,” she says. “They’re just Black reporters writing about ‘Black stuff.’”

Only recently, Hampton says, have people started referring to her as an internet culture reporter.

“I had been writing about the internet for years at that point,” she says. “I just wasn’t writing about the internet that white people were seeing. It’s like only when you start reporting on what the D’Amelios are doing or NFTs or Bama Rush TikTok that you’re considered an internet culture reporter.”

Having the internet reported on by majority-white writers presents only a small sliver of what the online community actually looks like, and allows mainstream coverage to be dictated entirely by the algorithms that cater to white audiences, Hampton points out.

“The easiest way to describe this is probably using the example of Jalaiah Harmon and the Renegade dance challenge,” she says. “That story was originally — and continues to be — framed as one of Charli D’Amelio Columbusing that dance. Which definitely happened. But if your first interaction with the Renegade dance challenge was seeing D’Amelio do it, that’s a product of the internet experience you’ve created for yourself or that’s been created for you by an algorithm. The internet culture cycle we constantly see, of trends created by Black people being co-opted by their white counterparts, wouldn’t exist if there were writers who were empowered to actually cover the original trends.”

To read more Black voices covering internet culture, Hampton recommends following the work of Gita Jackson at Vice, Ashley Reese at Jezebel, Jason Parham at Wired, and freelancers Rob Dozier and Shamira Ibrahim.

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THE GREAT PHOTO APOCALYPSE

I didn’t even realize there was a bell left to toll for the 2010 era of blogging, but BuzzFeed and G/O Media just found it. According to Gawker, BuzzFeed, the pioneer of the listicle and online personality quiz, began quietly removing photos from “much of what the website published before 2015.” This was reportedly done to avoid copyright infringement after an “increase in legal copyright claims in the past year,” according to an internal memo obtained by Gawker.

Over at G/O Media, the deletions appear to be far more sweeping, with photos having been removed from all articles before 2019—before the sites were acquired by Great Hill Partners, their oft-maligned current owners. Former and current staffers at places like Jezebel, Gizmodo, The Onion, and the rest of G/O Media’s portfolio began photo deletions across the sites—including, heartbreakingly, the photo of Mr. Autumn Man of The Onion’s “Mr. Autumn Man Walking Down Street With Cup Of Coffee, Wearing Sweater Over Plaid Collared Shirt.” (Luckily, a version was republished on Clickhole earlier this month, where the photo remains).

Neither BuzzFeed nor G/O Media returned a request for comment, but at the former, at least, the complaints of the editorial team appear to have been registered. On September 8, BuzzFeed reportedly collected high-risk posts in a spreadsheet and allowed their respective writers to review and determine acceptability of current images by October 15. However, the deadline was later extended, and now “writers are now able to restore posts on a case by case basis, provided the images were properly credited or that BuzzFeed was able to later license them.”

For these publications, images often aren’t just supplementary to the writing, but reliant upon it—and vice versa. The text without images isn’t just bizarre, but in many cases no longer makes sense, rendering the entire article useless.

We’re so often warned that the internet is forever, but really, the internet seems to be about ten years. Then the ground is razed, leaving behind no more than a broken image and a headline that no longer makes sense because of it. Is this how this decade of innovation and groundbreaking creativity really ends? And is this really what’s next?

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Ariana Yaptangco has joined Glamour Magazine as senior beauty editor.

— Zachary Petrizzo is leaving Salon to join The Daily Beast as a reporter.

— Peter Allen Clark has joined Axios as a tech editor.

— Tyler Coates and Beatrice Verhoeven have been appointed to positions of awards editor and deputy awards editor, respectively, at The Hollywood Reporter.

— Emma Sarappo is now an associate editor for The Atlantic’s books and culture team.

— Andrea Long Chu is joining New York Magazine as book critic.

— There was a whole slew of promotions over at Vox for Shirin Ghaffary, Meredith Haggerty, Caroline Houck, Rebecca Jennings, Sara Morrison, Terry Nguyen, and Alanna Okun.

— Lots of new faces at the New Yorker: Merve Emre as contributing writer, Emma Green as staff writer, Julian Lucas as staff writer, and Susan Orlean as a regular obituary writer. Stephania Taladrid has moved from contributing writer to full-time writer.

— Evan Nicole Brown has joined The Hollywood Reporter as culture writer.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— The New York Times cancelled a bargaining session with the Times union after members of the union beyond the bargaining committee wanted to observe. Open bargaining is a common union practice that allows members to witness how decisions are being made between the union and their employer. The Times, however, accused it of being a “spectacle” from the NYTimes Communications Twitter account, in a tweet that was subsequently ratioed to high heaven.

— Some clarification on this Roxane Gay tweet: While Hearst didn’t respond to my request for comment, the consensus among freelancers who’ve worked with Hearst is that the Net 75 pay rule is applicable only to corporations. For individuals who don’t work through an LLC or S-Corp, the rule is still Net 30. It’s unclear if individuals are also given the option to receive a faster payout for a fee, another aspect Gay cites, but it wouldn’t be unprecedented. Condé Nast reportedly does the same thing!

— Substack has launched a two-month fellowship for emerging writers, according to The Information. The fellowship includes a $7000 stipend, as well as a healthcare stipend, Getty Images access, and proofreading services.