Don’t be fooled: Independent Media is Whitewashed Too
By: Michael Jones
Tags: Race, Identity, Media

Don’t be fooled: Independent Media is Whitewashed Too

The homogenous corporate pipeline that feeds the growing crop of worker-owned upstarts has largely excluded Black journalists from participating in media’s great migration.

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

In 2018, after NBA superstar LeBron James gave a wide-ranging interview in which he said Donald Trump “doesn’t give a fuck about the people,” Laura Ingraham — one of Fox News’s resident racists and host of The Ingraham Angle — infamously advised the 35-year-old athlete and media mogul to “shut up and dribble.”

As Paul Ringel, an associate professor of history at High Point University, wrote for The Atlantic a year earlier, Ingraham’s “stick to sports” message is part and parcel of a decades-long conservative argument that “focuses as much on preserving a national system of economic and social inequality as it does on maintaining white supremacy.” Ringel continued: “It presents sports as increasingly important to the national culture but nevertheless distinct from the rest of Americans’ economic, religious, and political lives.”

Stick to sports was also the mandate given to the staff of Deadspin, an irreverent website launched by Gawker Media in 2015, by its new owner G/O Media last year during a public tug of war that started when editors acknowledged reader complaints about interruptive autoplay ads in their articles.

Instead, the staff quit in a highly publicized protest.

Come September, 18 of those 20 former Deadspin journalists are teaming back up to launch Defector, a subscription sports-and-anything-else-they-feel-like-writing-about site that each employee has a roughly five percent stake in.

Stories like Defector’s represent an emerging media trend. In March, the former staff of the defunct G/O Media-owned news and opinion site Splinter launched Discourse Blog, an unapologetically progressive politics and culture blog, to legitimate fanfare. “Even though it’s been more than four years since Gawker shut down, I think one of the easiest ways to get a sense of what’s new and cool in digital media is just keeping up with what their alums are doing,” Delia Cai, BuzzFeed growth and trends editor and author of the dailyish media newsletter Deez Links, said. “You can definitely see the scrappy Gawker DNA in their writing and their approach to the internet.”

But while Substack, the de facto publisher of Discourse Blog and a spate of other independent publications, enables journalists to seamlessly transition from the instability of ad-supported media to the perceived promised land of subscription journalism, the fact remains: Corporate media is a white-washed, male-dominated industry. What’s worse is that since these new independent ventures are as homogenous as the organizations from which they left, the majority of Black journalists are excluded from the collective opportunity to participate in media’s great migration.

According to Samer Kalaf, Defector’s managing editor, the site will employ one Black editor at launch: Billy Haisley, who was at Deadspin in various roles from 2013 until he resigned in 2019. “To the extent these new ventures pull from traditional media’s pool of established writers and editors when hiring, they will be recreating their forebears’ diversity shortcomings,” Haisley said. “The promise of this new brand of independent media, though, lies in its ability to allow writers and podcasters and anyone else with a following to bypass traditional media’s gatekeepers entirely by cultivating an audience and plugging directly into it.” Haisley envisions a landscape that replicates the indie rap record-label scene led by No Limit, Cash Money and Rap-A-Lot in the South in the ’90s, “where previously overlooked creators and audiences find each other on platforms of their own making.”

There’s enormous value in a media ecosystem with fewer gatekeepers. And as I mentioned in my last post, a direct relationship with your supporters is one of the straightest paths to a sustainable creative practice. But what troubles me is that there are so few environments outside of traditional media and journalism school to learn the reporting, writing and editing skills that separate amateurs from professionals and gain access to the tight-knit networks the media is notorious for. It’s this opportunity gap that spells doom for so many Black journalists.

During my time at Condé Nast and Hearst, I covered A-list events, learned how to edit and be edited, cultivated sources and secured exclusives, and wrote stories on deadline — including a style column that carried my name. All of this was possible due to mostly white editors who led by example, were generous with their training and gave me plenty of room to fuck up. It’s easier to say I don’t need traditional media now because I already had traditional media. More journalists who look like me should be able to say the same, whether it’s at an established or emerging publication.

To diversify its staff, editors at Defector are formalizing on a document which includes a requirement that half of the candidates interviewed for any position be from a “diverse background,” a phrase Kalef acknowledged is vague and will necessitate specificity before the document is finalized. (Discourse Blog did not respond to a request from The Supercreator for comment on how many Black editors it employs or if it is taking meaningful steps to diversify its digital newsroom.)

Kalef pointed to the Rooney Rule, an NFL policy that requires teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs that is often practiced in bad faith by league owners, as evidence that unapplied policy and documentation is a waste of everyone’s time. “Historically — and I’m talking about before 2019 — Deadspin had hired and developed a number of non-white editors and writers, but failed at hiring and developing many Black editors and writers,” Kalef said. “It’ll be Defector’s priority to remedy that. The only meaningful step is for Defector to actually hire Black staffers. I’m hoping that we’ll be a lot more proactive, open-minded, and diligent than the people who run NFL teams.”

It’s worth noting though that not all Black journalists — including the one writing this post! — enjoy fulfillment on a staff publication, indie or otherwise. But the startup costs to the types of “mini-media empires” that tech-powered publishers like Substack have enabled are often a barrier to entry for creators without deep savings or a reliable safety net. (Disclosure: I launched what is now The Supercreator on Substack last November before migrating it to a new website and email host in February.)

In a recent article for The Washington Post, Jacob Bogage featured Emily Atkin, a former climate reporter at The New Republic who writes a popular climate newsletter called Heated. According to WaPo, Substack gave Atkin a $20,000 advance when she launched. Atkin, who has 28,000 subscribers, 10 percent of whom subscribe for $50 to $75 per year, did not respond to The Supercreator when asked if she would have had the resources to launch and scale Heated without the advance. And Substack declined a request for comment before The Supercreator could ask how Substack determines who receives this level of support or if any Black journalists have been the recipient of an advance to launch their Substack publication outside of its formal fellowship program.

Another challenge for Black indie journalists: Attracting press coverage. Since reporters are often against tight deadlines, we rely on sources we already know for story ideas. If you’re not actively seeking diverse people and subjects to feature, it’s difficult to uplift the work and causes of folks who are outside your media network or Twitter timeline.

Then there’s the fear of Black tokenization. “I am trying to be careful about how I go about it because especially now, there’s this risk of tokenizing people and the work they’ve been doing their whole lives just because you know, racial justice is ‘trendy’ now,” Cai, who publishes an interview in her newsletter every Friday, said. “My view is that people can always tell if you’re actually interested in their work and their path [versus] if you just want to check a box for yourself. It takes a lot more time and work to find potential interview subjects who aren’t already being pitched to you via corporate [communications] teams, for example, but when you have a platform, that’s your duty.”

I’m sure many non-Black people share Cai’s concerns. But non-Black creators are covered in the media based on their work — never mind how mediocre it may be — not whether a reporter feels terrible for ignoring their work all this time or is looking to meet a quota. Black creators should be able to decide for themselves if a press opportunity makes them feel like a token. And although racial justice may feel like a trend to non-Black people, it’s the key that could unlock the upward mobility of a generation of Black creators.

Generally speaking, the formula for most indie journalists is to riff on what worked at their previous publication and improve on what didn’t. And Defector will be no different. “Something we did well before was covering the issues of race and racism endemic to sports, sports media, and sports fan culture with frequency and tenacity. We want to continue doing this,” Haisley said. “What we didn’t do as well was featuring Black writers — something I am intimately familiar with, being one of only two Black staffers to ever work at Deadspin prior to this year. This is something we’d like to fix.”

And since future hires will have the same amount of control of the company as the rest of the staff, Kalef said he’s confident that having a worker-owned business will not only lead to actual progress in newsroom representation, but make that representation meaningful. “I say this all with the understanding that some will read this and only believe it when they see it. I don’t blame them if they want to wait for tangible results.”