Why I'm Going Independent

A tale of two herbs.

Some of you may recall that on February 1, I started a new gig I was very excited about as executive vice president of a Midwest-based media company called Big Lou Holdings. They hired me to run the journalism division, which consisted of six long-running alt-weeklies and local magazines across Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, and Missouri. The job seemed too good to be true at a time when every other media company was laying off journalists en masse—and it was. I lasted only 90 days there.

I’m going to tell the bizarre story of what happened, but first, some context: I met the CEO, Chris Keating, when he was one the prospective buyers of Jezebel in the fall. Jez’s owners, G/O Media, had just shut the whole site down and put it up for sale, shortly after I resigned as editor-in-chief in August. Keating called me to ask questions about my two years running Jezebel, why I’d resigned, and whether I’d consider running it again if he resurrected it. I told him in no uncertain terms the reasons I quit, only a few of which I’d laid out in my leaked resignation letter. I said the CEO of G/O Media, Jim Spanfeller, was a noted herb who’d made my life and the lives of my writers hell for two years. After I joined my staff on strike for basic worker protections and livable wages, Spanfeller retaliated by freezing all hires, promotions, and raises for Jezebel staff. That was just the tip of the iceberg.

As I watched my staff numbers dwindle (I wasn’t even allowed to backfill writers that left), Spanfeller only cracked down harder on our traffic and output expectations, demanding more and more content from a burnt-out, badly underpaid team. He introduced “scorecards” to rate writers on the number of blogs they were posting per day and the clicks they were getting, which made it impossible for them to do the quality of work they wanted to be doing. He required everyone to live in New York on criminally low salaries and commute to our depressing Midtown office daily, even as COVID still raged through the city.

Meanwhile, Spanfeller regularly questioned in our weekly traffic meetings whether feminism was even relevant or necessary anymore—around the same time the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—and asked me once, point blank, “What is feminism?” Management suggested we pivot just to focusing on fashion and beauty, supposedly because no company wanted to place ads adjacent to our abortion and politics stories. So after two years of working nights and weekends to try to meet our unreasonable traffic goals, being unable to give raises to my frustrated writers, and being so stressed out that my hair was falling out in clumps, I resigned.

When I recounted all this to Keating on the phone, he sounded horrified. He said he’d seen my writers’ salaries and didn’t understand how they could live in New York on that money. He asked me specifically, more than once, why Spanfeller was called a “herb,” and I send him a few links explaining the moniker. We seemed to be on the same page about how to run a news outlets and how to treat writers, and Keating suggested his company was in very good financial standing, despite the dire state of the industry writ large. So when G/O decided to sell Jezebel to Paste magazine, Keating suggested I come join his company anyway and oversee his existing newspapers. I really needed a job, and I’d been watching my friends in journalism lose theirs left and right, so I jumped on board.

You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next! (You Will.)

Two weeks into my new job, after I’d only met one of the newsrooms in person, Keating cleared my first hire. A talented journalist, we’ll call him Eric, decided to leave his stable, well-paying job in media to become managing editor of one of our alt-weeklies. He believed—as I did—that our company was investing in great journalism and expanding throughout the Midwest.

Days later, my boss called me to say that in exchange for giving me a new hire, I should submit a plan to fire all or most of the entire existing newsroom. I was pretty stunned and pushed back strongly, reminding him that I’d told him when I accepted the job that I would not be coming in to lay off journalists. I said this felt like a bait and switch after he’d assured me that his company was well-resourced compared to other media companies. He said this wouldn’t count as a layoff because we’d be firing them for cause, due to lagging digital traffic.

Twenty days into the job, I woke up to an email from Keating threatening to fire me if I was uncomfortable “making staffing changes,” aka firing the entire staff of a beloved local newspaper. I managed to talk him off the ledge for a few more weeks, during which time we roughly doubled digital traffic on the paper in question. But he laid me off anyway in mid-March, citing severe budget woes. He said he’d hoped to see a bigger jump in traffic across his portfolio sooner, that 90 days just wasn’t fast enough.

Then—and this part is undoubtedly the worst—he rescinded Eric’s job offer, three days before Eric was supposed to start as managing editor and after he’d already left his job and announced on social media that he was starting a new job with us. So Eric now joins the legions of jobless editors in this flailing industry, for absolutely no good reason.

Here’s Where You Come In

I am pretty demoralized after years of working for toxic media executives who are gutting once-thriving news outlets and shifting the burden onto badly underpaid writers to turn a profit. Our industry is in a tailspin, yes. Newspapers are hemorrhaging money. Readers have come to expect to get news for free. Google and Facebook have a stranglehold on the digital ad market, and the latter is throttling traffic to news sites by featuring AI-written summaries of our work. But cracking the whip on the writers to churn out more slideshows is not going to solve the problem.

So for now, I’m taking my writing, serious political analysis and less serious political analysis here, and I’d be endlessly grateful if you decided to support my work. Nightcap is an irreverent, twice-weekly (for now) rundown of the standout news, political developments, and *online discourse* of the day, plus some reporting, personal essays, and special bonus content for subscribers. Just $7 a month, or the equivalent of buying me one (much-needed) beer.

Thanks for reading, and I do hope you’re here to stay!