How good publications cut off new voices
A friend of mine recently asked, “why are publications, both in terms of journalism but also when it comes to books and publishing, so hostile to new voices?” And while this person and I both knew the usual systemic issues that lead to specific groups being shuffled to the side and having their voices silenced, I could tell that they were probing a little deeper than that. In this week’s Productivity, Without Privilege, I want to talk about why that might be.
I’m Alan Henry, but I think you know that by now. I’m your host here, pleasure to have you. Are you comfortable? Welcome to all the new folks who recently joined! I send this newsletter every other week (at most) because I have no desire to fill up your inbox, and also because I totally acknowledge that we’re all busy. This is also where I say that I’m the author of Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, which I would love you to buy, but if you can’t for whatever reason, I’m giving away 10 copies! Just sign up here. I'll keep the giveaway open a few weeks longer since there are so many new faces here!
So let’s get started, shall we? This week I want to talk a little bit about how publications cut off new voices, and how to be on the lookout for it as you begin to work with organizations that are one day super eager for new and diverse voices, and then another day put you and your work on the chopping block for whatever reason. I’ve been thinking about this ever since The Washington Post shuttered its very very good gaming vertical, Launcher, less than five years after launching it.
When Launcher shut down—and most of its staff laid off—some of the things I heard from colleagues were eerily similar: “they were doing so well, what happened?” and “they hit all of the metrics they were asked to hit, and they were bringing in new audiences. It doesn’t make sense,” and truly, that’s correct: it doesn’t make sense. If, of course, your goals were actually the same as your stated ones from the outset.
Now I’m not going to spin a conspiracy theory here. I’m absolutely sure that when Launcher took off everyone was indeed happy about the way the project was going. All of the folks working on the project, especially folks who wound up making a name for themselves both in terms of bring a “games journalist” with all of the pros and cons that comes with online, did incredible work. There’s no doubt that Launcher was one of the most successful vertical launches in years, and it inspired similar projects at other organizations.
I remember begging editors at The New York Times to follow in their footsteps and take gaming seriously as a cultural force and a multi-billion dollar industry, only to be told that there was no money for it at the time, and that if a big sponsor came in and promised to support it with ad revenue, we could talk about doing something (some of you may be familiar with the whole “built-if-bought” approach in media.) When I left The Times and started at WIRED, there were similar conversations here about building a gaming vertical, which turned into WIRED Games.
So far, so good though, right? Launcher was doing very well, and everyone loved it. So what did happen? Well, the official line is, and likely will always be, all about economic headwinds and uncertain financial forecasts, or maybe a major advertiser involved with the project pulled out or ended their contract. Those things are all possible, and very real risks when you launch new projects or initiatives in media today. But it’s very difficult to believe an organization like The Washington Post couldn’t have found the money to keep the work they were doing alive, especially to the point where they had to lay off several people.
My thinking is simpler: when organizations need to tighten their belts, they look to the parts of their organization they feel are most disposable not because they are, but because those parts don’t feel essential to the executives and managers making the decisions. So when The Post saw some rough chop ahead and knew they needed to batten down the hatches, they would never lay off the one or two overpaid political commentators or op-ed analysts they could survive without in order to keep a shining star in games journalism alive: they would imply that on some level, they felt that gaming, and the people who were contributing to that section, were somehow equally or more important to their organization.
So instead, they cut loose the thing they don’t understand, don’t appreciate, and of course, appeal to audiences traditionally underserved by the same people making the decisions in the first place. This is how new, diverse, and up-and-coming journalists and storytellers get sidelined. Because the people contributing to new projects at legacy media orgs don’t look like or come from the same backgrounds as the people calling the shots, there’s no way to convince them that the kind of work that they’re doing is important. In short, when push comes to shove, if it doesn’t win a Pulitzer, they don’t care.
I saw similar things at The Times. One of the best things about my role there was that I had the freedom to bring in new, diverse writers who often never thought that their work had a place in a paper as prestigious as The Times. And when someone would tell me they thought they weren’t “good enough,” I would point out that I saw far worse from regular columnists every day, and they should disabuse themselves of the notion that because the paper has a storied history that somehow the paper’s writers were a different class of writer than they could ever be.
And I still feel that way. It doesn’t take an especially deep dive of some of The Times’ regular columnists (and I’m not even talking about the op-eds) to find people who are very clearly phoning it in because they’ve always been able to, and because no one’s going to hold them accountable (or tell them to make way for people who are willing to put in real effort.)
I’m pretty jaded obviously, and I’m sure there’s some pushback here that I can and would accept, but truly the proof is on the page. And what I see after the latest round of media layoff are fewer bylines from underrepresented writers, fewer diverse editors taking interesting pitches, and fewer stories that approach interesting topics from a place of nuance and empathy instead of the usual “us versus them” approach from a lot of traditional banner reporting.
Even worse, it means more same-ey editors commissioning same-ey writers and publishing same-ey pieces that often echo the same arguments that don’t push the social conversations forward in any meaningful way. It also means the lack of diverse perspectives in the newsroom and in the pages result in what we see at The Times these days, which is an editorial wagon-circling that reveals an in-group that’s so allergic to accountability for its own coverage that it would rather alienate and demonize its own reporters and readers than do any critical thinking about its own coverage. But, of course, that’s not unique to The Times. Any sufficiently isolated ingroup gets to that point.
So what does all of this have to do with you, and your words, and where you can place them? Well, it means that at least right now, media companies are so focused on the things that matter to them, as opposed to what may matter to their readers, that odds are low you’ll get a job, or get freelance gigs, unless you shift your pitches and ideas into something that sounds more like it matters to them. In corporate circles, we call this managing up, or making sure that your priorities line up wit the priorities of your manager as much as possible.
So sadly, this means having an interesting, compelling story isn’t enough: you have to remind editors why your story lines up with the kinds of things their publication thinks are important and dedicates resources to. Doubly so if you come from a marginalized group, or you want to pitch a story that centers the experiences of other marginalized groups. Reminding editors how your story lines up with and advances the broader discussion of a specific topic is key to getting them to acknowledge that they’re not so much taking a risk on your work, but that your work contributes to what they already do. Call it a little ego-stroking, so to speak. And if you’re an editor, that’s also a great way to remind those above you why you’re doing the kinds of stories that you already do.
I still remember getting laughed at when I was the editor-in-chief at Lifehacker, when I told our newly-appointed executive editor that I wanted to reach out to audiences traditionally underserved by tech and lifestyle media. Why she laughed is…well…something that I don’t want to speculate about, although I think I know why, but ultimately the better approach would have been to highlight how the stories I wanted to do were a “return to form for some our most high-performing content,” or something that would have said all the right things to her so she could walk away to leave me to run my site the way I saw fit. Keep that in mind: even editors, forward-thinking and approachable ones, aren’t immune to the chopping block when someone decides that new voices and diverse perspectives are luxuries, not integral to their publication or their business.
And as we see more media layoffs, more publications and outlets getting swallowed by venture capital firms with no journalistic mission beyond SEO churn and ad revenue, and as the phrase “independent journalism” comes to exemplify massive, centralized, moneyed pubs owned by billionaires while local newsrooms suffer and shutter, keep in mind that sometimes the survival of a new venture in media is a matter of your support for it, and sometimes whether new voices thrive or die on a platform has less to do with the quality of their work and more to do with whether the appropriate egos are smoothed over in the boardroom when times get hard. Never, ever take it personally.
[ Worth Reading ]
Three ways social psychology is deepening my thinking about racial bias in newsrooms, by Michelle Faust Raghavan: This is an incredible dive into how we can go from a base-level understanding that’s easily proven by data—that diversity in our spaces makes us collectively smarter, more efficient, and more engaged with the problems we face—to why diversity initiatives often stumble and fail, and what we can do about that. And Raghavan discusses how a very psychological approach to the topic reveals exactly how and why newsrooms and publications suffer and struggle with this concept themselves.
Inside the Secret Working Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Country, by Madison Pauly: If you haven’t seen the massive wave of legislation designed to persecute, demonize, and otherwise marginalize transgender people across the United States, you’re not paying attention. It’s bad out there for my trans friends and colleagues, and it was bad before this. But what some of you may not know, regardless of your feelings about the legislation, is that it’s part of a concerted effort to demonize a minority group in order to chip away at civil rights and freedoms for everyone. It’s a pretty predictable page out of the bigotry playbook, but it works all too often, and in this case, Pauly looks at the people responsible for it. Oh, and don’t just take our word for it, the emails themselves from the people involved aren’t hard to find.(h/t to Erin Reed and her amazing substack for reporting on this too.)
Neuroscience Has a Race Problem, by Jackie Rocheleau: I love this story, because it highlights something that we often don’t think about in terms of health care. Brains are brains, right? The same technology we use to monitor, evaluate, and examine one person’s brain should work on other people, right? Well…not in a world where structural racism and inequality exist. Rocheleau explains that even at the base level, the tools used in neuroscience and neurological care were designed by one group of people, for that same group of people, and tested on and used on that same group of people, without care or consideration for the myriad people they would eventually be used on. That’s how you get EEGs that can’t read through natural hair, or don’t work well with dark skintones.
[ See You, Space Cowboy ]
Okay, this dispatch has been fairly heavy, so let’s lighten things up a little down here.
I don’t truly dare suggest that spring is around the corner, mostly because I live in New York City, where it’s never so much “spring” as it is “mild winter” and then suddenly “bearable summer,” but I’ve always been a fan of the idea of spring cleaning. Maybe not so much as a big to-do, but as an opportunity to refresh my spaces and remind myself of what’s really important. So if you’re also a bit of a Marie Kondo-stan (don’t come for me, I’ll die on this hill) you might enjoy The Organized Soprano as much as I do. Is this a YouTube channel featuring an opera singer’s tips and tricks for a more organized life? Yes. Is it exactly what you would expect based on the name, right down to videos like “the 10 best things to buy at The Container Store?” Also yes.
But here’s the thing: I’m not promising you life-changing tips here. I’m suggesting a little aspirational YouTube fodder for your evenings or downtime that may teach you something you can apply in your everyday life. And if that means you kick everyone out of the apartment and do a massive cleaning one weekend, so be it. It’s not like I would do that or anything…
Enjoy, and I'll see you back here in two. Probably.