Thread by @biblioracle

This piece on Harper's Magazine is frustratingly "cute" or maybe "coy" is a better way in a way that feels deliberate, but to me reads as a failure to actually get the full story. nytimes.com/2021/03/28/bus…

It mixes color and anecdotes that on the one hand are meant to make us think, "What a weird and quirky place funded by the noblesse oblige of a cultured heir to a massive fortune." On the other hand it's a portrait of a massively dysfunctional and exploitive workplace.

Maybe this is the prerogative of a media reporter/columnist working a beat broadly, as opposed to e reporter chasing a story, but I found the whole thing odd.

These consecutive paragraphs present an incredible strange dynamic. On the one hand it indulges the whimsy of the wealthy scion. On the other it characterizes what's happening in the offices as "insane."

This characterization of the Harper's office is in the story despite no on-the-record cooperation from current Harper's staff, by the way. The staff is characterized as "not rebellious." Coy. Why not "frightened for their jobs." Is one more or less accurate than the other?

This is an implicit endorsement of the Harper's letter by Ben Smith himself without saying as much. Smith is a very skillful writer and knows how to draw implications without stating them outright. Another coy moment.

The kicker is off the charts coy. It marries the indulgent tone of the eccentric rich guy with a recognition of an exploitive workplace, but that exploitation is softened, even made whimsical by painting MacArthur as a weirdo un-self aware "character."

The upshot of the column is a highly highly sympathetic portrait of the current ownership and management of Harper's written in a way that acknowledges what seem pretty clearly to be a f-d up place to work so it can't be charged as being ignorant of reality.

Very very clever work from Ben Smith, but this reader would rather not read columns that ask us to read between the lines or that contain so many winking notes to people deeper inside the industry.

I can promise that if the Harper's workplace were not controlled by a "cultured" (bilingual!) rich scion of the family that mints geniuses, it would be the tale of a horror story workplace that crushed the working writers and journalists at a storied magazine.

Forget it, I'll just put it plain because what do I have to lose? This piece is B.S. It treats the audience like suckers and is so full of winks to insiders it actively obscures any deeper understanding. It's the opposite of what a columnist should do. nytimes.com/2021/03/28/bus…

Great pickup here. Ben Smith is trying to define what "working" means because he's good with an exploitive workplace that maintains space for smarty guys like him.

https://twitter.com/aegallagher/status/1376357507451457537

One of the great weaknesses of a number of the Times columnists and op-ed writers is that they're clearly writing for other people inside the opinion-making and shaping industry, rather than, you know, readers. They may not even be aware of it, but it's apparent.

The pattern of writing for the other "players" is endemic to many of the most popular culture/politics Substackers, but it didn't start there by any means. It's mostly a good strategy for a newsletter because you can make bank with very niche readerships relatively speaking.

The difference is that even the most popular substacks will top out at 10's or low 100,000's of thousands of views while the New York Times is read by millions. I would rather not have my Times columnists adopting a niche approach to their work.

I can't imagine having potential access to millions of readers and writing a piece that can only be engaged with at the level and intention with which it was written by a few thousand people at best, but that's how one makes a reputation in media circles, I guess.

Getting more irked by this. It's a piece that ultimately notes, but excuses both a lack of diversity and exploitive workplace because the product is dubbed "working" by an important cultural gatekeeper. It fails to grapple with the full complexity. nytimes.com/2021/03/28/bus…

The "anti-woke" crowed claims a high ground of values around questions of quality, while both implicitly (and even explicitly) arguing that efforts to diversify are challenges to existing quality, that to diversify would somehow compromise something essential.

But increased diversity is a push for improved quality! It may alter the product, but the product will be improved by that alteration! E.g., @Sulliview's column today about women Vietnam War correspondents. washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/medi…

These women saw the war differently and because of it told different (better) stories. So much of this non-woke/anti-woke posturing is simply fear of no longer being in charge of the gates of quality. True in journalism, academia, other "high culture" spaces.

Said it before, I'll say it again. Talent is abundant. Failure to recognize the different kind of talent a marginalized voice would bring is a failure of management that ultimately harms quality. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…

I've got a joke in my new book vis a vis how academia handles diversity, that if jazz had a tenure system and Miles Davis came up for tenure on Bitches Brew, he would've been rejected. To be excellent in these spaces requires one to "fit" above all.

I suppose this is my big takeaway as someone who had a task to finding new writers to share with the world and was also interested in maximum quality.

TL/DR. You could write a "holy crap is Harper's f'd up" story from the same set of details as a story that declares that Harper's is "working." That choice is the most meaningful thing about the column.

I wonder if the anti-cancel culture crowd who signed the Harper's letter are concerned that the Harper's employees are too afraid of their owner to speak on the record to a newspaper columnist.