The Daily Beast and Daily News both need to grow up
And not for Shaun King’s sake
I’ve never screwed something up so badly someone had to get fired. I imagine you haven’t, either. I would think it feels like hell.
You may have read last week that someone at the New York Daily News had to get fired. The firing followed some very loud accusations of plagiarism by employees of the Daily Beast against Shaun King, the Daily News’ prolific and sometimes polarizing social justice writer.
The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald characterized the accusations as “mob journalism”. The “mob” part seems well earned, but “journalism” not so much. There were no questions asked or even token research or fact-checking, just a loud and smug Twitter gotchagasm.
Collateral damage
The Daily News had indeed published material from other publications without attribution, and, accordingly, someone had to pay. The person caught in the crossfire was Jotham Sederstrom, the editor of the stories in question.
Sederstrom explains what happened in his own words, and you should read his account if you haven’t already. It is unflinching, thoughtful, and restrained:
I am taking Sederstrom at his word here, and I believe that these were honest mistakes, indicative of an overloaded editorial review process and not of ill will, lack of effort, or lack of ability on Sederstrom’s part. The explanation rings all too true to me as someone who is sometimes himself responsible for designing systems and processes for content review and publication. (If this is a line of thought you find interesting, see also max read’s article, “Don’t Trust Your CMS”, for New York magazine, and Paul Ford’s comments on Twitter, for example.)
Now, I like me a good scandal as much as the next guy, but the popcorn we’ve been served with this one is awful bitter. The guy who got screwed here isn’t King (not that that stopped him from penning a mostly self-pitying account of the whole thing), nor is it his accusers (whose brand of smugness appears to be anodized and prehardened against such subtleties and nuances as, well, the actual facts of the matter). And it isn’t the Daily News, which apparently puts its writers and editors out on a professional limb on a routine (daily, even) basis. It’s Sederstrom, whose account of this affair is the one candid, mature, and un-self-serving account we’ve seen so far.
I have a finger, and I will point it
Mistakes happen. Sederstrom has owned his.
Has anyone at the Daily Beast? Its writers made the biggest mistake, in terms of wrongheadedness, sloppiness, and disrespect (to the Daily News). They forced the Daily News’ hand into firing Sederstrom. Never mind that they haven’t apologized to King — have they apologized to Sederstrom? Does anyone there in a management role realize how toxic an organization looks when this kind of reckless amateurishness goes unremarked and unchecked?
And has the Daily News? Firing an editor isn’t taking responsibility if your system set him up in the first place. Did they give their fall guy a severance package? Are they doing anything to change their process and protect their remaining writers and editors from this happening to them, too?
I didn’t get Sederstrom fired, but it this whole thing feels shitty enough to me (an amateur “justice” writer at best) to put my name on this useless rant. What have the people who were actually involved done about it?
