Don't They Know It's Christmastime?
Welcome back! I’m Alan Henry, author of Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized. (That’s an affiliate link, by the way, to my own book, which I hope you won’t mind. If you do, just trim the affiliate ID off the URL, I won’t tell.) This is my very occassional newsletter, Productivity, Without Privilege, where I talk about what it takes to succeed in your career while being a member of a marginalized group, whatever group that may be.
Of course, I also use this newsletter as an opportunity to share writing tips, suggestions, and of course, talk shit about an industry well known for not treating marginalized people very well: mine. Journalism, or more broadly, media. So let’s get started, shall we?
2023 has been a brutal year for people who work in media, whether it’s strictly journalism or any of the adjacent fields, like audience development, social media, audio or video production, and so on. The layoffs have been especially brutal near the end of the year, and as people wiser than I have said several times, there’s a special place in hell for managers who conduct layoffs just before the holidays.
And of course, never forget that layoffs because of “budget” and “rightsizing for the long term,”—when the “long term” is usually a matter of weeks before executives scurry to hire their friends and dish out lavish bonus packages to one another—always, always, always disproportionately impact marginalized groups first. And of course, as my friend Robert Hernandez notes in his Neiman Lab predictions for journalism in 2024, the wrong people will be laid off…again.
And if the data doesn’t support that assertion, I can say that having “survived” yet another wave of layoffs are a major media org, yet again the layoffs immediately hit people of color first, including the people who were actively doing work to make our organization a better, more diverse and inclusive place to be. Funny how that works out, isn’t it? Remember what I said about second chances? The problem with being right about things like that is that you actually want, desperately, to be wrong.
And speaking of wanting to be wrong, that brings me to what I want to talk about: what to do when you see the oncoming train of marginalization headed directly towards you. The problem with knowing what to do about being marginalized at work, being aware of what it looks like, and understanding how organizations and managers marginalize their employees, is that you still can’t stop it from happening if a manager is intent on marginalizing you, or relegating you to doing the office housework instead of the glamour work that will advance your career, something I talk about in detail in Seen, Heard, and Paid.
Let me give you a few examples.
Earlier this month, I was been working on a few stories highlighting prominent women in a specific field. The process has been great: the parts I’ve had control over have been smooth sailing: I’d planned on being as far behind the scenes here as possible, and the writers I hired for the pieces earned good fees, are both women, and all of the profile subjects are women. Everything should be fine, right?
So tell me why over the course of my work on this project, the only people who have had issues with it have been men. Specifically white men, the most privileged group in any given workplace? One regularly questioned the merits of the package because it had a sponsor attached to it (but it was not, in any way, sponcon. The sponsor said “here’s money to do some cool reporting, we just want our ads to show up on it. You don’t need to clear your reporting with us, just do what you do!”) while another regularly questioned why we wanted to refer to the women by their professional titles (Doctor, in this case) citing an often mis-applied and widely-agreed-upon-as-sexist copy rule that many publications, including several I have worked at, where the rule is that the “Dr.” prefix is only given to medical doctors, not any Ph.D. Of course, in reality, that rule is almost never applied fairly across professions and genders, and it never, ever takes much energy to find a place where a male geologist gets a “Dr.” in front of his name while a female nobel laureate at the height of her field does not.
I’m not a copy editor, and I actually truly treasure copy editors as a wholly necessary vanguard in my profession, so this isn’t me shitting on them. It’s me shitting on old copy editing rules at major and legacy publications that serve to reinforce privileged groups as holders of professional and perceptual power. The usual defense in these cases is that it would “confuse the reader,” a shorthand that’s become so commonly heard in newsrooms whenever someone wants to use “Mx.” as their courtesy title (a real example I had to fight) or whether it’s okay to say “LGBTQ” versus “LGBT” (another real fight I had once) that the phrase is really code for “I don’t like it, it makes me uncomfortable and I’m going to blame it on our idiot readers instead of sit with my privilege.”
Anyway.
Like I said, knowing the marginalization train is coming, and also knowing how to deal with it, doesn’t make the process of dealing with it any better or easier. All you can do is batten down your proverbial hatches and try to weather out the storm, or—and this is my advice—do that and prepare yourself for your own better and brighter future. Remember, the company that you work for is not your friend. (I can’t believe I wrote that article almost 9 years ago, wow.)
If things at your job take a turn for the worse or a turn for the weird, the best thing you can do is to focus on reclaiming your own power and your own agency. Update your resume. Flag yourself as open to work on LinkedIn and see how many searches you show up for. Hit up the usual job sites and see what you qualify for. You don’t even have to apply for anything (unless you’re ready to!) or even reach out to people like you were really seriously looking for a new job (unless, of course, you are!) but the key here is to make sure you’re prepped and ready to tackle the job market on your own terms, not someone else’s.
I often say that layoffs, not just at a company but in an industry, is a good reminder for all of us, especially those of us most marginalized, to remember how valuable we are and how lucky these industries are to have us in them, rather than the other way around. Every laid off journalist, audio or video producer, event manager, copy editor, social media manager, or any other rank and file professional makes the media industry weaker, less accurate, and less relevant to the communities those publications claim to server. The same is true for every other industry—especially when senior managers and corporate executives pat each other on the back over the costs they’ve saved and walk away with bonus packages that could have funded the salaries of everyone whose holidays—and potentially lives—were just ruined.
So this holiday, look out for yourself. If you need to think of it as a “new year new you” kind of thing, do that. But whatever it takes to make sure you both protect your own peace and lean into your own power, do it. I’ll see you back here soon. Sooner than before, I promise.
[ Worth Reading ]
Poynter Opinion: Media industry cuts top 20,000 in 2023, report finds, by Angela Fu, Ren LaForme and Tom Jones: That’s 20,000 people fighting for ever fewer jobs in their fields in other industries. Of that 20k, around 2700 of them were journalists before they got laid off. The worst part about it is that I know so many of those people, and while I’m simultaneously grateful I still have work, I find myself wishing that I could throw a lifeline to every one of them.
PBS News Hour: Tens of thousands have joined pro-Palestinian protests across the United States. Experts say they are growing, by Kenichi Serino: I know Kenichi personally, and I know the lengths to which he had to go through to report this story, and the blowback that came from it. The headline tells the story, give it a click and encourage more truthful, timely reporting, would you?
Nieman Lab Predictions for Journalism, 2024: The Neiman Lab predictions, on the whole, are pretty banger this year. I wasn’t invited to contribute like I was last year, but some of my colleagues and friends did, like Robert Hernandez, who I mentioned above, and Gina Chua, who had great things to say about the media’s approach to trans people. Nikki Usher cast a light on broadcast journalism, which badly needs a shakeup. The whole package is great.
[ Try This ]
This is the second edition of this newly reimagined “try this” section, and the more I think about it, the happier I am about what I want to do down here. I actually want to offer you guys an insight into the things that I do, use, take up my time, and so on, so I like having a space to actually say “hey, I think this thing is pretty cool, maybe you will too?”
I’ve debated using affiliate links for those things, after all, every little bit helps, but right now I’m not going to turn this section into some version of The Strategist or whatnot. The only one I’ll use is at the top, for my book. If you guys have strong feelings against it or for it though, just hit reply and let me know. I’ll see it, even if I may not be able to respond.
Anyway, my recommendation for you this time is…Buttondown!
Yes, the newsletter platform that’s powering this message that you’re reading right now. That other newsletter platform is in the news again, mostly for hosting and profiting off of Nazis, which is something that they’ve done for a very long time, but just bullied anyone who said that out of saying it publicly. I distinctly remember when I commissioned the ever-excellent Justin Pot to write an article about Substack alternatives for WIRED, a story that he pitched and I agreed to after the last major Substack fallout over extremism and hateful content.
He wrote the piece, and included a line about how the platform had recruited extremists in the past, a statement that’s not only defensible but provable, but of course Substack’s PR took issue with the idea that a: “extremists” exist on their platform (they do, obviously) and that they “recruited” them, and demanded we prove how we knew that was the case. Now of course, internally we immediately pulled up a list of people that the platform had begged to come join with its very lucrative publishing program (in the earlier days, that is) but the issue was, of course, whether those people could be called “extremist” or having “extreme” views.
While any normal human being would probably agree that people who honestly believe Nazi talking points, thinks eugenics and race science aren’t that bad, or think that anti-asian discrimination or homophobia and transphobia are just “the other side” of a “debate” certainly count as extremists, we decided not to fight that fight and just tweak the article to make them go away. (Something I still hate having to do, and while I’d hoped that doing it would have saved Justin from harassment, it did not. Whether Substack knew it or not, some of the platforms most prominent “provacateurs,” as they would call them—intellectually dishonest pundits, as I would call them—started complaining about him and about WIRED on Twitter, and well, you can imagine how that went.
If you need any more proof that the company has a habit of churning out and enriching the most problematic people among us, just note that their loudest and blowhardiest PR flack eventually left the company (good) to go be PR for, drumroll please, Activision Blizzard (bad,) another company with more problems than empathy to solve them with.
Hilariously, Substack persists in the notion that hate speech is free speech, which is fair, most interpretations of the First Amendment note that while hate speech is abhorrent, it’s still protect speech unless it’s incitement, fraud, defamation, obscenity, child pornography, or any of the other usual carve outs that aren’t considered protected speech, although it’s arguable (and often) that hate speech can cross into defamation or incitement. So while Nazis are okay on Substack’s platform, sex workers, whose speech is protected as long as it doesn’t cross the border to unlawful obscenity, are immediately banned because, you know, if you let sex workers exist on a platform suddenly all of the content will turn into sexual content, and we can’t have that. I didn’t make that up, that’s what their founder said.
So with that in mind, if you’re thinking about starting a newsletter, or want a platform to move your newsletter to that actually gives a crap about the people reading it and writing it, consider Buttondown. I’ve had nothing but positive experiences here, and while my newsletter is and will remain free for the foreseeable future, I’ve seen some great paid newsletters launch here as well.