On the Shaun King Mess, and The Editor in the Age of Churn
So, finally, the story so many of us were waiting on is here: Firebrand columnist Shaun King’s editor at the New York Daily News, Jotham Sederstrom, taking to Medium to accept the blame, and explain his role in what happened when King was accused — incorrectly — of plagiarizing material for his columns.
The aforementioned “us” aren’t some group of media elites, or Salinger-backpocketing right-wing conspiracy theorists, assuming King to be setting up his white editor (or the diametrically-opposed-but-ultimately-same-corny-shit from the other side, who were frothing for a story about a white editor being caught maliciously and intentionally introducing errors into King’s copy). Both groups, who rushed to suss out and spread their own fact-less version of the story (including those who rushed to embrace the basic narrative of King being a plagiarist), are all equally despicable and terrifying.
The “us” are people who have worked with Jotham, who were stunned, who otherwise know him to be a diligent, level-headed, morally-centered human and have personally watched him work under pressure with grace.
The story Jotham tells is simple: He got sloppy, he made a mistake. A formatting error in the NYDN’s CMS stripped indented quotes from their original text. It was moved to the web. CMS text-importing tools have always been imperfect at best, and totally cumbersome the rest of the time, so none of that comes as a surprise.
What did? That Jotham didn’t catch the strips. And I’ve still got questions about why Five Thirty Eight wasn’t mentioned in the copy leading up to the blockquotes, as is more or less the standard for introducing text from somewhere else.
But I also know — having had my own stories basically ripped and rewritten for the tabloid dailies, sans attribution — that the daily tabloids’ historical hyper-competitiveness has bred an institutional distaste and stigma against using copy from (or sourcing) other publications’ information. This also happens at some of the larger newspapers, too, over the reporting of substantial stories.
To be fair, this history and institutional angling definitely doesn’t get Jotham out of the doghouse. Here’s how he explained what happened:
In those two cases where no citation or hyperlink appeared in the column, I believe I likely cut attribution from the top of Shaun’s quoted text with the intention of pasting them back inside the block — only to get distracted with another of the many responsibilities I juggled as an editor.
The error speaks for itself. But let’s be clear: When we talk about knowing of Jotham’s grace under pressure, this…
On any given day I was tasked with editing not only Shaun’s column but roughly 20 other news stories from five reporters, all of whom filed early and often.
…isn’t pressure. That’s a setup for failure.
Nobody I know, in the almost decade I’ve been working in media, edits that much on a daily basis. And when you work on an omnibus desk like those at the dailies, and your job is to move copy from original format to a CMS, while also rewriting for house style, clarity, and fact-checking (if one even can fact-check at that point), well: That strikes me as less of a fuckup and more of a careening inevitability.
Again, that’s not to say the mistake wasn’t Jotham’s, or that he didn’t have the opportunity to speak up at his workload.
But the caveat answers itself, no? It’s the American job market in 2016: A bunch of statistically, objectively overworked people who fear losing their jobs if they point out the systemic incapabilities of their positions, and if they do, they’re told there’s someone else to do it better, faster, or more commonly, to embrace some Orwellian, quasi-Marxist bullshit about being part of a more “mindful” workforce. And, yes, “systemic” being the operative term, there: Consider our teachers, firefighters, air traffic controllers, construction workers — people who figuratively and literally hold people’s futures in their hands every day.
And, yes: I fully understand how “it’s the system, maaaaan” is the most cliche cop-out trope ever when discussing a worker at fault. But the system (maaaan) is also why certain unions offer literal protections for their workers—limits on on-worksite time, precautions taken to prevent fuckups like this from even happening to begin with. I’ve never been fully sold on the need for unions in media when so many other workforces so obviously need those protections more (but don’t have anyone to sell their story quite so well), but the kind of workload Jotham faced makes a hell of a case for the protections from self-immolation that they offer other workers, which, in this instance, obviously could’ve been pretty useful.
Anyway, all that said, it’s pretty clear to me that the Daily News — a consistently, publicly embattled and overburdened publication — has no plans on doing the soul-searching necessary to see what their role in this might’ve been. Which is too bad: Jotham’s managed to take full responsibility for his mistakes. They should be able to see how they, as employers, clearly failed him as well.
