Study Hall Digest 11/18/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

A Spreadsheet Solidifies a Growing Trend

Wage transparency is good and (mostly) not scary.

Sarah Kobos, senior photo editor at Wirecutter, was looking at salaries at her place of work on Glassdoor when she noticed something — they varied wildly despite corresponding with similar job titles. “Having thought my salary was pretty on-par for ‘industry standard,’ I started to wonder if that term had any merit at all in reality,” she wrote to Study Hall in an email. “At work, colleagues and I had been sharing our salaries internally for months and it proved super beneficial. So I thought if that kind of transparency could exist in the industry as a whole, how useful that would be. If it’s such a hush-hush thing, how do you know you’re being paid fairly?”

You don’t, and the lack of pay transparency is a source of deep frustration among media workers and a main issue for media unions. You often hear stories about someone discovering they’re being criminally underpaid when a colleague (often white and male) shares their salary in private conversation. Many workers are reluctant to disclose what they make — talking about compensation can be taboo, and workers reasonably fear repercussions from an employer. (For example, Erica Baker, a former Google employee who created a salary spreadsheet in 2015, subsequently had bonuses rejected by management.)

So Kobos created a Google spreadsheet where workers could disclose their salaries anonymously, along with any other information they choose to share for context, such as gender, race and years of experience. As of this morning, there are over 1,300 entries. A statistician broke down the available data earlier last week and found that years of experience accounted for just 43% of salary variance — according to their calculations, someone with 10 years of experience could make between $20,000 and $30,000 or upwards of $90,000.

It’s also worth noting the anonymity offered by the spreadsheet is a luxury largely afforded to white cis employees — author and Them contributing editor Meredith Talusan tweeted that many trans folks, including herself, feel unable to share their salaries because they are the only trans person at their company or the first to hold their particular position. Given how white media is on the whole — recent data shows more than three quarters of newsroom employees are white — the same could be said for people of color. (For what it’s worth, 883 of the entries on the spreadsheet are coded “white,” which is about three quarters of the spreadsheet.)

Still, the existence of the document signifies a shift in the way media workers organize, bargain, and think about their jobs. “I think it’s something I came into my career with, guarding [salary information] like a secret. Trusting in others to tell me what was fair and just being happy to be there,” said Kobos. I’ve also since seen more industries starting their own sheet, and heard about them having already existed in others.”

Media workers recognize that a lack of wage transparency benefits companies and hurts employees who lack the resources or information to negotiate. Plus, it helps nascent media unions make their case. On Twitter, quoth Kim Kelly: “A strong union contract like the one we won for @viceunion can set salary minimums and address the systemic exploitation of marginalized workers.”

Leave College Journalists Alone, You Ghouls

The embarrassing, manufactured controversy over an editorial published by the Daily Northwestern, Northwestern University’s student newspaper — in response to a backlash over its coverage of students protesting Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaking on campus — is indicative of a few things. Most obviously, that grown-up professional journalists at national newspapers seem to get some kind of rush from posting tweets about how journalism ought to be done, even when their targets are college students and they lack important context about the situation. This is a bad look — I encourage everyone out of college and in a well-compensated staff position to get a life.

The controversy also revealed a generational schism over professional priorities. The immediate reaction from older, professional journalists was to dismiss the ethical concerns raised by the editorial board: students were uncomfortable being photographed at a protest, fearing repercussions from the school, and they felt the way student journalists were contacting them violated their privacy. It soon became clear that (surprise) these critics had missed some vital context. Students of color had already been contacted by journalists at the Daily Northwestern in a tokenizing way, for example, and the university does not grant amnesty to student protesters (the president of the university has explicitly stated students could “face the consequences” for interrupting speech).

Journalists do have ethical obligations, particularly when interacting with vulnerable people who could be harmed by their reporting, and for some reason, in the Discourse this concern was secondary to the reporters’ right to document, consequences be damned. The young journalists at Northwestern treated those ethical obligations not as a secondary concern but as a necessary part of doing the job well — which it is.

Big Media, Big Tech, Big Deal

Last week, The New York Times Magazine put out a technology issue squaring the history of the internet with our contemporary hellscape, and New York Magazine put out a “future issue,” which is essentially a technology issue. Meanwhile, Input, the tech publication from The Outline founder Joshua Topolsky, is gearing up to launch at the same time as anew tech venture called Protocol, from a Politico co-founder. Rigorously covering tech (and making predictions about its future) is a pretty clear priority these days. It seems like the market for tech reportage is growing, even as other coverage areas suffer. Last year we saw the death of the Village Voice and LA Weekly, as well as layoffs at The Fader, Complex and GQ. Former The Fader writer Kelsey McKinney (who had previously worked at Fusion, where the entire culture section was eliminated) pointed out there seemed to be a growing dearth of culture writing jobs. We talk so much about the “intersection of technology and culture,” but which gets the priority?

One Good Thing

The Financial Times was forced to issue a delightful correction that allowed me to imagine the existence of a jazz beat at a regional newspaper for one brief, peaceful moment.

Longread of the Week: Jamie Lauren Keiles, for the New York Times Magazine’s technology issue, wrote a great piece about podcast fans and the origins and nature of fandom itself. The concept of fandom is not entirely new — it dates back to the first “Star Trek” convention, Keiles explains — but podcasts have created a strange dynamic wherein relative unknowns are not only mico-celebrities but the objects of surprisingly intimate one-sided relationships with listeners, who come to feel very close to the people whispering in their ear.

Everything Else

— WHAT a week for established writers punching down on the youth! First there was that bizarre, drawn-out controversy in which a formidable group of best-selling authors piled on a grad student who didn’t want a YA book chosen as required reading for incoming freshmen (the chosen book was about racism in the criminal justice system). Then Roxane Gay (who had apologized for participating in said pile-on) tweeted that she was “surprised” a freelancer had followed up requesting a fairly prompt response on a submission — she was “fascinated” by this behavior, which she found “jarring.” Freelance writers reacted very strongly! What she failed to note was this happened after three weeks of silence on her part. It is perfectly acceptable and even recommended to give timetables for pitches and submissions so you can attempt to place it elsewhere and, you know, hopefully get paid for your work?? Anyway, apropos of nothing, Gay’s parents paid her rent until she was 30 years old.

— Speaking of things that annoyed Roxane Gay, a story in The Cut on the launch party for Rachel Rabbit White’s Porn Carnival has people angry because they are mistaking a party report for a summary of the author’s politics, an error that seems like it might be somehow mysteriously related to gender. For a summary of Rachel’s politics, read this Q&A in Garage, and in general, 1) stop getting mad at people for having fun and 2) always tip at a cake-sitting. — Erin Schwartz

— Netflix doesn’t want to step on any governmental toes: after receiving complaints from the Polish government, the streaming service will amend its documentary The Devil Next Door to make clear the Nazi concentration camps it depicts do not fall within modern-day Poland.

— In the ongoing battle to save local news, the non-profit model is gaining traction. The Salt Lake Tribune has just become the first regional newspaper to itself become a non-profit, having recently been approved by the IRS.

— The Chicago Tribune is shutting down its Spanish-language news service, becoming the latest of several national outlets to do so. Just two months ago, the New York Times shuttered its Spanish-language coverage, following close behind the closings of BuzzFeed Mexico and HuffPo Mexico.

— Can anyone shed some light on how People selects its Sexiest Man Alive??? What are the criteria? Is there a vote??