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The author of a viral Medium post explains how she was compelled to write it
When Jennifer Barnett’s explosive Medium post about newsroom sexism, “I Left My Career in Prestige Media Because of the Shitty Men in Charge and They Are Still In Charge and Still Fucking Up,” came across my morning Medium recommendations, I devoured it while still lying in bed, all 3,559 words of it.
I wasn’t the only one. Within hours, every other journalist I knew was discussing Barnett’s experiences, and some 150,000 people have read the piece to date.
Parts of what Barnett described resonated deeply for me, as a woman who has worked for more than two decades in the media. And the anecdotes that didn’t correlate to my direct experience, disturbing as they were, still felt vitally important for me to think about.
I was fascinated to learn that Barnett wrote her viral article much as I read it—in a kind of fugue state, from bed, as she described in a fascinating follow-up post on Medium:
