Newsrooms face an internal reputation crisis
We've built a foundation but where do we stand?
In mid-March, right before New York City went into lock-down, media companies here had frequent discussions about how to handle the coming typhoon.
Some listened to their employees, and began working from home immediately. Others, well, didn’t. And when we do eventually return to work, some employees will be reminded of the poor decisions media CEOs made in those early days.
When we first started working from home, I spoke to several CEOs (on background, as at the time, CEOs told me they didn’t want to make “the story” about them, instead making sure their staff was safe) about how they’re planning on running their companies, and mostly, they all said “day by day.”
One told me on March 13 that a third of their 300 employees were uncomfortable riding the subway.
Another CEO of a large media company told me on March 16 that safety comes first, focusing on the “health, personal/loved ones, productivity, and continuously monitoring people's emotional and mental well being. It’s an emotional time, but we’re offering support; whether peer support or making sure they have access to counseling.”
Flash-forward 12 or so weeks later and media companies are still trying to figure this out.
As one CEO told me just yesterday, “[It’s] definitely been more than challenging.”
Clearly, the work is being done. Journalism is still happening. Sales are still happening. Also still happening: the division between the haves and the have-nots in media companies.
At least that’s the frame of this week’s Ben Smith’s New York Times Media Equation column, a piece I’ve been thinking about since Sunday.
The piece outlines a who’s who of executives across New York’s media landscape that fled the city throughout the pandemic. The piece uses a question—with the decision-makers not at the epicenter of the biggest news story of our lives, is this having an effect on how the news is covered—to establish a core tension in New York’s newsrooms:
“So the clearest effect of the exodus has been to highlight internal class divisions, which are boiling over in private Slacks and Zoom chats largely invisible to executives. There, employees are sometimes organizing to change their internal cultures, and sometimes challenging rules that had previously seemed sacred.”
On the one hand, it’s obvious execs were going to leave New York City. When business and newsroom leaders make more than the on-the-ground reporter, and who most likely have second homes already, why would they stay?
Smith interviewed a former BuzzFeed colleague, Amber Jamieson, who had pointed comments:
“The biggest story in the world came to your front door and you left — that to me is insane,” she said, adding that her experience — the woman who works the front desk of her gym died, and she wrote about a funeral procession for another neighbor — has been essential to her reporting. “You left for your own personal safety and because it made you stressed and anxious.”
On the other hand, as Jamieson noted, newsroom leaders had the opportunity to build a strong relationship with their troops, have the shared experience of facing whatever it is we’re facing: “Being a leader means staying with your people and seeing what they see.”
Many I’ve spoken with on the sales side and in newsrooms over the last few months have echoed this: how do I trust the company I work for when my boss left the city to gallivant around the Hamptons but didn’t provide any guidance, let alone help, for my well-being? And adding insult to injury, they tell me that I need to step up and continue to pump out content?
It’s tone-deaf, at best, to implement a story quota from your staff while you’re hanging out on a quiet beach and your reporters are in their 600-square-foot apartments surrounded by the wail of ambulance sirens for weeks on end.
Herein lies the rub: if your organization already treated staff the way a dog treats a chew toy, this pandemic was only going to exacerbate that.
It’s ok to be scared—it’s a pandemic! It’s ok to do whatever you need to do for your family to be safe. But if you’re doing that for you and not providing resources or tools for the staff who remained at the epicenter of the pandemic to manage the crisis in the best way possible for them, you’re going to have problems.
There’s a moment where newsroom leaders and senior management cross over to the upper ranks and they forget what it’s like to be on the ground. This is a small industry, but also a chatty one. Reporters talk to each other; sales reps talk to each other. The biggest PR function of a company is its employees, and those media companies that treat its staff solely as line items on a P&L will not be able to retain talent, nor grab talent in the future.
Reputation matters, and these newsroom leaders and media management, in the eyes of many, have lost theirs.
And adding fuel to the enmity fire, newsrooms are also grappling with decades of inequity and inequality.
Yesterday, NPR reported that”
“Some journalists have used terms such as "internal uprising" to describe their anger over racial inequity at [the L.A. Times]. Scores have participated in intense internal debates over the LA Times' coverage of recent protests and hiring practices, to the point that senior editors have weighed in, promising to listen and learn.”
L.A. Times reporter Esmeralda Bermudez took to Twitter to show how newsroom leadership has failed to diversify after “a historic hiring spree” when Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the company in 2018 for $500 million.
The Wall Street Journal also reported on how its own newsroom, as well as newsrooms from Bloomberg to the New York Times to CNN have all
dealt with a host of difficult questions regarding race and diversity in the wake of the protests sparked by the death of Mr. Floyd, a black man who was killed last month when a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck.
From newspapers to cable news channels, the events have fueled debates in newsrooms over the extent and nature of protest coverage, how much editorial staffers should be able to express themselves publicly, news outlets’ commitment to diversity and conditions in the workplace for minorities.
More than 150 WSJ staffers sent and signed a letter to its new boss, Almar Latour (a former journalist) and Matt Murray, the paper’s EIC, “expressing concerns about diversity, hiring and coverage, among other issues.”
The media business is a tricky one under the sunniest of skies. Today, in the grips of a pandemic and protests, newsrooms and media companies are having conversations that will affect how journalism (and its business) is done.
For an industry that relies on a “show me, don’t tell me” operating principle, how media companies show their staff that they’re valued (or, sadly, not) will ultimately determine the fate of that company.
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Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Bad Moon Risin’”
Some interesting links:
Former Trump adviser John Bolton's impending book elicits angry reaction from President Trump (CNN)
Former eBay security director arrested for harassing journalist with live cockroaches (The Verge)
Pence Misleadingly Blames Coronavirus Spikes on Rise in Testing (NYT)
Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020 (Reuters)
Facebook says it doesn’t need news stories for its business and won’t pay to share them in Australia (The Guardian)
Once Pariahs, Location-Tracking Firms Pitch Themselves as Covid Sleuths (WSJ)
US Ad Market To Decline 4% to 8% In 2020 - With Political Ads, SMBs And Digital Providing Relief (AdExchanger)
'Facebook doesn't care': Activists say accounts removed despite Zuckerberg's free-speech stance (NBC News)