Study Hall Digest 3/9/2020

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

How Hachette Staffers Pushed Their Employer to Drop Woody Allen’s Memoir

On Monday, Hachette Book Group announced it would publish alleged sexual abuser Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing. The next day, Allen’s son Ronan Farrow expressed his disappointment on Twitter; Farrow’s #MeToo book Catch and Kill was published by Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette, and said that he would no longer work with the publisher if they publish the memoir. On Thursday, dozens of Hachette employees staged a walkout in protest of Allen’s book deal, and on Friday, Hachette announced it was dropping the memoir after “extensive conversations with our staff and others,” noting its commitment to “offering a stimulating, supportive and open work environment.”

How did Hachette executives make a 180 in the span of one work week? A Hachette employee, who asked to remain anonymous, tells Study Hall that unease had been building among staff since the Monday announcement but reached a breaking point after an unproductive town hall with Michael Pietsch, Hachette’s CEO, on Thursday afternoon. By the time of that town hall — held only for the staff of Grand Central Publishing, the imprint putting out Allen’s memoir — plans for a staff walkout had already been forming. “The plan was more or less, if this goes the way we think it’s going to go, and the same excuses are made, then we’re walking out,” said the employee. But some staffers didn’t get word of the walkout until that afternoon, when it was already underway.

More than 100 employees gathered outside the offices, according to the New York Times. The walkout was documented in real time on Twitter. “Given how quickly and quietly word was spreading, it wasn’t exactly obvious who would participate or not, but in some cases fairly senior employees were supportive of the walkout within their imprints or walking out themselves,” said the employee. “People were leaving in waves, and as more and more of us joined up outside the feeling was unified and electric. We’d be standing outside and every few minutes cheers or clapping would go up as more and more of us came out. I heard later that it felt like a ghost town within the offices that afternoon.”

The staff made demands of Pietsch — that Hachette drop the book, apologize, and confirm employees had the right to protest in this way. No one knew what response would come. “When they announced [the cancellation] to all the staff on Friday, there was definitely a pin-drop sort of feeling that it could go either way,” said the employee who spoke to Study Hall, adding they were “very pleasantly surprised” by the decision.

We’ll all have to suffer through some insufferable hot takes on Hachette’s decision and what it means in the coming days — Stephen King already got a head start — but as another anonymous staffer told Refinery29, this isn’t about who gets to tell their story but about who is given “a platform with which to tell it that includes distribution, marketing, publicity.” Being refused by a major publisher isn’t the same as being “muzzled” or “censored.”

Mailchimp Is an Email Marketing Service — Or Is It a Media Company?

Mailchimp, a platform that helps clients grow their business through email marketing, has acquired London-based media company Courier, the publisher of a print magazine of the same title, indicating that it has larger plans to expand into print. The match makes sense: Courier is marketed towards entrepreneurs growing small businesses and has already collaborated with Mailchimp. I’d never heard of Courier before reading the news, and I imagine that was also the impetus behind the sale. Mailchimp seems content to let Courier operate fairly independently, and Courier will benefit from Mailchimp’s reach and funding to grow.

Mailchimp gets to establish itself as a burgeoning media company rather than simply an email service, which indicates something about the future of media (see: the growth of Substack). I think we’ll see email subscription services become increasingly integral to media companies’ business models over the next year, not just as distribution but as original content and original brands.

NYT Ben’s Bernie Media Bias Op-Ed Is Missing a Critique of His Employer

Fresh off his debut New York Times column critiquing his new workplace for being amazing and all-powerful, The Writer Formerly Known as BuzzFeed Ben [Smith] has taken on his next target: media bias against Bernie Sanders. In the column, titled “What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About the Media,” NYTBen namedrops his time as head of Buzzfeed News to help drive home his point that the major news networks really don’t give Sanders a fair shake, possibly because Sanders has been against corporate media for decades.

After a week’s worth of gleeful coverage of moderate Democrats going full Avengers in their rally behind Joe Biden, it is nice to see someone talk about the bias, which gave Uncle Joe the equivalent of $72 million in free media coverage in the critical 48 hours before Super Tuesday. Voters who picked a candidate in the final few days before polls opened overwhelmingly favored Biden.

But Smith’s column also has one large blind spot. Less than a week ago, the NYT tried to create a scandalous “Bernie-Russia” connection that amounted to Sanders, as Burlington, Vermont’s mayor, trying to form a bond with a Soviet sister city in the ’80s alongside “several dozen other American cities” with a goal of ending “the threat of nuclear annihilation.” It’s not a good sign when your attempt to twist history to smear Sanders gets blasted apart two days later by three separate historians, including New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen. And it was her critique, in particular, that highlighted how dangerous this media revisionism is: “the Times, by misrepresenting the context and the impact of his long-ago actions, risks more harm to American politics than Sanders’s credulousness ever could.”

Here’s an idea for NYTBen’s next column: How effective is it to take the media to task for manufacturing biased narratives when you leave out your own employer’s complicity? — Chris Erik Thomas

Comings and Goings

— HuffPost Editor in Chief Lydia Polgreen will become head of content at Gimlet Media, per The Daily Beast. Podcasting is where it’s at!

Longread of the Week: Over at Mel Magazine, Alana Levinson and Miles Klee wrote about their shared fixation with Ben Affleck as an eternal comeback hero. “There is something almost ‘comforting’ about a nice-looking, all-American guy who blows his victory lap, because we know he’ll always be saved. His pain will be neatly mapped onto art, where tales like his abound. Affleck’s story — that he married the perfect gal who became the perfect mother and cheated on her with the nanny; that he got the job of a lifetime and took to the bottle to cope — is striking not just because men like him are familiar, but because the world desperately wants to forgive them. His redemption is redundant, a welcome home for the guy who’s been here this whole time.”

Everything Else

— The worst part about books? You can’t stream them! ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish says Simon & Schuster is up for sale because it is “not a core asset of the company.” Keep in mind ViacomCBS is currently expanding its CBS All Access service and is gearing up to acquire a 49% stake in Miramax, so yeah, it’s not super interested in the written word right now!

— Medium has declined to renew its contract with Roxane Gay’s Gay Magazine after just one year, though Gay said on Twitter the magazine is only ending “in this form” and that she will continue to work with Medium on the next iteration. She also clarified that “all contracts are being honored,” so writers who had work lined up with the publication won’t be left in the cold. Either this is the end of another roller-coaster loop for Medium’s editorial spending or Gay’s latest literary controversy gave the company cold feet.

— Everything eventually becomes a podcast, even pandemics. New Yorker writer Adam Davidson has launched a breaking-news podcast called Viral to “calmly” and “clearly” deliver information about COVID-19 amid a time of widespread panic.

— Quibi, the streaming service for our phones specializing in ten-minute episodes — made to help us fill all the time before we die — has raised an additional $750 million ahead of its April launch. It had raised $1 billion in 2018 from Hollywood studios. If all goes according to plan, you’ll never have to make eye contact with another person ever again.

— Twitter knows you’re either ashamed of your past tweets or anxious about their permanence. The company is testing out ephemeral tweets, called (obviously) fleets, which are essentially Instagram stories for Twitter that will disappear automatically after 24 hours. Ephemerality is the future of social media, and Twitter would be silly not to heed the trend. Mark Zuckerberg has cited “reducing permanence” as a principle for Facebook’s path forward, though of course it’s pretty difficult to scrub something from the internet entirely.

— Back in 2018, before WeWork imploded, The Wing was valued at around $300 million. At the time WeWork’s parent company sold its stake in the feminist co-working space to a group of investors earlier this year, its valuation was cut almost in half, Bloomberg reports, to around $165 million. WeWork reportedly took a $17 million hit from its investment. Maybe coworking isn’t as scalable as it seems?