Plus: Bon Appétit gets further filleted, and McClatchy is giving employees a raise.
By The Objective Staff Feb. 12, 2021, 12:01 p.m.
Feb. 12, 2021, 12:01 p.m.
Editor’s note: The Front Page is a biweekly newsletter from The Objective, a publication that offers reporting, first-person commentary, and reported essays on how journalism has misrepresented or excluded specific communities in coverage, as well as how newsrooms have treated staff from those communities. We happily share each issue with Nieman Lab readers.
“Despite even major public failings, they keep coming back because they work behind the scenes to protect themselves and each other to stay in power and preserve the status quo,” writes Jennifer Barnett in her Medium piece: “I Left My Career in Prestige Media Because of the Shitty Men in Charge and They Are Still In Charge and Still Fucking Up.” While working as managing editor of The Atlantic, Barnett discovered a pattern: Men, after leaving newsroom
On January 27, a piece published on Medium began circulating among folks who work in media. Jennifer Barnett, a former managing editor at
The Atlantic, published a lightning rod of an essay about the verbal abuse, backbiting, shunning, pettiness, and threats she endured from her former male boss. Barnett withstood that treatment until she couldn’t, and eventually left the industry altogether. “I knew I was walking away from a career I spent decades building,” she wrote. Barnett didn’t name names, but she left a breadcrumb trail that made it clear she was writing about James Bennet,
The Atlantic’s former editor-in-chief, who left in 2016 to become the editorial page editor at the
I had the plum job. The top of the masthead of one of the most prestigious and respected publications with more than a 150-year-old history. I left because I blew the whistle on my boss for doing…