Study Hall Digest 8/27/2018

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

LA Times Guild: Diversity Program and Parking Problems

Things are thankfully going very well over at the LA Times under the paper’s new leadership, and it’s great to see — while other papers are firing staff, it’s hiring, a lot (see our Opportunities newsletter). Staffers are reportedly optimistic about the way forward. But there are improvements to be made to build a more equitable workplace. The workers’ union on Friday published a study on Metpro, the company’s Minority Editorial Training Program, which finds the quality of the program has significantly slipped over the years, leaving the journalists it claims to champion vulnerable to being taken advantage of in service of some hollow tokenism. The guild is calling on management to overhaul the program.

The study, based on responses from 50 program participants, found that the once flourishing program had become exploitative since it was first founded in 1984. “Currently, there is no real program,” wrote one respondent. “It’s just a way to pay young, diverse journalists far less than they’re worth and then keep paying them less than they’re worth.” Many said they received little formal training, were underpaid, and were treated like interns — and that once they had graduated from the program into the newsroom, they were treated as lesser than the other reporters.

In other equity news, the reporters at Times Community News, the local news branch of the LA Times, have been pushing management to pay for parking costs. The employees make less than $40,000 a year and are often asked to shell out at least $150 per month to park at the paper’s Downtown Los Angeles office. The company is currently offering a $65 subsidy, Times Community News reporter Andy Nguyen told Study Hall, but it’s still a financial strain on him and his colleagues.

“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “The whole paycheck is pretty much used toward just parking for where we work.”

Nguyen added workers have tried to communicate to management the importance of the issue, but with no luck.

“I don’t know how to convey to them the seriousness of parking and having to pay for it,” he said. “I’ve sat there and told them about it.”

So the workers took matters into their own hands this week and hosted a bake sale, which was hugely successful thanks to an outpouring of support, sold out in an hour and 17 minutes and raised thousands of dollars. Well done! But it shouldn’t have to be done! In fact, now that I think about it, local news outlets in New York should pay for their employees’ MetroCards, given how little they pay. Come on, equip us to do our jobs without starving! It could be so great!

The Athletic Loves to Bleed Newspapers Dry!

Co-founder Alex Mather of subscription-based sports news service The Athletic once pledged to “let [newspapers] continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing” and to “suck them dry of their best talent at every moment.” Surely that’s not a quote from a real person! Oh, but IT IS. And not only does this guy have the intensity of a Nicholas Cage character in an action movie, but it looks like he’s followed through with his weirdly bloodthirsty projection. The Athletic simultaneously launched SIX localized verticals and poached a bunch of writers from local newspapers to staff them. Sports coverage always drives subscriptions — the idea is to siphon that money away from the papers toward The Athletic’s digital product. But is it like… tenable to launch that many publications at once? I mean, sorry to be a killjoy. Carry on collecting the skulls of your enemies, Alex.

The Trope of the Bad Woman Journalist: Is It Bad?

It should be said Camille Preaker of Sharp Objects isn’t just a bad woman journalist — she is one link in a televised lineage of bad woman journalists, as Sophie Gilbert noted at The Atlantic. She is building on the premise laid out by Marin Cogan in New York Magazine, who questioned why female journalists must be written as “slutty ambition monsters” in light of House of Cards’ Zoe Barnes, who isn’t above sleeping with sources for a scoop.

It’s worth examining why the gendered trope is so enduring, and it’s certainly reasonable to want to see ethical and competent female journalists on screen. But I’d argue there’s also something to be said for allowing female characters to be messy and even unlikeable — why should only men get to be unrepentant dirtbags? Besides, each bad woman journalist is bad in her own unique way. Zoe Barnes is exacting, ambitious, wildy unethical (on a show in which just about everyone is wildly unethical) but otherwise good at her job. Rory Gilmore is bumbling, juvenile, oblivious and blinded by insane privilege. And Camille Preaker, who kick-started this whole discussion, frankly doesn’t fit the mold of a “slutty ambition monster,” but is a troubled alcoholic thrust back into the field too soon after a series of traumas whose job seems almost incidental to her poor decision-making. [SPOILER!!!] She sleeps with a source not because it’ll get her a scoop but because she identifies with his sadness.

Maybe the best reason for messy women journalists is that all of the above also just makes for better television than watching someone stable be good at their blogging job (for that you could watch the new BuzzFeed newsroom show lol). Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

Why Is Everyone Talking about Chris Kraus?

You may have noticed a lot of arguing amongst feminist writers on Twitter this past week about some #MeToo-related drama within academia and, like I was initially, felt lost and confused. Fear not, for Jezebel penned a pretty comprehensive explainer of the controversy surrounding Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, the memoiristic novel in which Kraus documents her erotic obsession with a male academic (and which was made into an Amazon series last year). Essentially:

Kraus defended a female academic accused of sexual harassing a male graduate student. People were upset. Scathing jokes were made. Backlash-backlash ensued, with people upset by the purported “cancellation” of a writer who paved the way for other women writing about their interiority. I don’t know, we should probably be able to make jokes even about important female writers who defend accused sexual predators. Kraus made an uninformed leap into a controversy she probably didn’t understand very deeply, and her work was mobilized to make an argument that she might have disagreed with:

(Masha Gessen is now on the case for the New Yorker, and the piece has kicked off more ire.)

Bylines! What Are They Good For?

The New York Times re-designed its home page to be devoid of bylines — a controversial choice among those who click on articles in large part because of the bylines. I imagine this was more a stylistic choice than an ideological one, but it does seem odd to not have the name of a piece’s author up front along with the headline. And as Eric Lach of the New Yorker wisely observed, it seems unlikely any of the paper’s most important readership was consulted — that is, the reporters’ moms. In fact, the most significant outcome of this re-design is likely that the writers will now have to email their articles to their mothers, which takes time away from their work. Seems bad for journalism!

Longread of the Week: Lindsay Peoples Wagner interviewed more than 100 black individuals in the fashion industry to document What It’s Really Like to be Black and Work in Fashion.

Why-is-this-a-longread of the Week: Confused why it takes 6,500 words to explain that you still like most of Jordan Peterson’s points, but not all of them. Wonder what Medium could have spent all that money on instead. —Enav

SHORT LINKS:

— There’s a print issue of The Cut, and it’s beautiful.

— Let’s focus on what’s really important: Who is the MSNBC farter?? The consensus per Twitter seems overwhelmingly in favor of Chris Matthews.

— Phillip Picardi, head of Teen Vogue and founder of Them, is stepping down and becoming EIC of Out Magazine. That makes two Teen Vogue figureheads leaving Conde Nast, which is facing something of a youth identity crisis.

— Vanity Fair has a deeper look into the possibility of a NYmag sale or investment. Plenty of parties seem to be considering a deal.

— Criticize North Korea all you want, at least their pro-politician propaganda has more fun dancing than CNN’s.