The editor of the Atlantic maligned a reporter for getting the story right.
The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg took some heat on Twitter Thursday for remarks he made in an interview about why there are so few women and people of color writing cover stories at his magazine. Then he tried to pin the blame for his words on the woman journalist who published them.
Goldberg spoke with Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen about recent diversity achievements at the Atlantic, when he conceded that the writers of the print edition’s most important stories are overwhelmingly white and male. Nieman Lab noted that of the 15 issues published this year, 11 had cover stories written by men.
Here’s what Goldberg said:
It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!
That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.
It’s difficult to take this position seriously since there are obviously lots of women and people of color who already have the particular journalistic muscle required to write excellent longform nonfiction, as evidenced by the fact there are lots of women and people of color doing it all across America, including for the Atlantic! For example, “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates changed the political debate in the Democratic Party on the question of reparations. “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” by Anne-Marie Slaughter is a defining piece of our era on women and work.
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Brewster Kahle: what I think we’re missing out there are tools for context and citation
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/AU79zwAvKa0″ frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>69:40necessarily know about so Wikipedia is69:45still primarily created by Western young69:49male contributors they tell the story of69:55you know the worst knowledge from an69:58extremely limited and privileged69:59standpoint there are ridiculous gaps in70:04this knowledge and then skews what a my70:07favorite example is that there are70:1020,000 articles on French Wikipedia70:13about individual asteroids but a70:15language like Hausa that is spoken by 3070:18million people in Central Africa doesn’t70:20have an entry on the universe so if you70:23think that the the sum of all knowledge70:26representing Wikipedia and you look at70:28where it comes from and who created it70:30it’s ridiculously skewed and slanted70:33towards the demographic of the70:35contributors the problem with that is70:37not just with Wikipedia Wikipedia not70:40many people they know but the contents70:43get translated into our70:45d/f via a project like dbpedia they’re70:49then propagated to the rest of the70:51internet and basically every single70:53linked data system they used today what70:57is like a search engine for music or70:59biomedical information gets its entities71:02gets is like a fundamental relations71:04from Wikipedia so biasing by us out the71:10fact that is a small population of71:12contributors that are creating data and71:16information that powers the entire71:18ecosystem that AI relies upon I think71:21the fundamental problem that we all71:22should be worried about I’ve been veryencouraged by watching some of thestudies of how people use the web peopleare very particular and very peculiarnobody wakes up in the morning sayinghey I want to live a biased life or heyI really want to go to the biased andunfair news channel what I think we’remissing out there are tools for contextand citation we’ve made it hard forpeople to actually know what the hellthey’re looking at that we’ve made it sothat it’s really difficult to go andunderstand is this some babble that justhas been bouncing around for a long timeand long discredited or is this umsomething that actually is real and Ihave trusted sources behind itso I’m encouraged by people want to haveaccess to this stuff the InternetArchive gets three four or five millionpeople a day coming and using its72:24service as best we can tell it’s about72:26the three hundredth most popular is is72:29about the first the fifth most popular72:31okay I’m a little envious um but it does72:34indicate that there’s a lot of interest72:37in finding deeper information than it’s72:41casually available so people want it72:44that’s the good news72:46now we need to build some of the tools I72:48would suggest for citation for context72:51and embed it and that’s what this whole72:53conference is about I’m really glad to72:55be here72:57sorry one last note on context I think72:59you’ve gotten to the heart of a really73:01really big problem which we missed out73:02on the entire problem of knowledge73:05production is about context not just73:07merely switching from one platform to73:09another but you know to take a perhaps a73:12banal example at a researcher who read a73:17paper of a lab that performed a set of73:21experimental conditions that requires a73:24context change for if you are working on73:27a different organism if even if you’re73:29trying to validate and reproduce those73:30results that is a context change which73:32requires translations so big new big73:35problem we should definitely work on73:37this I think with that we will wrap it73:41up and just want to say thanks to the73:43panelists and for coming up here and73:45sharing73:47[Applause]
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