This was supposed to be a season for celebration at the New Yorker.
A year’s worth of 100th-anniversary festivities for the crown jewel of Condé Nast’s media empire is set to culminate on Dec. 5 with the release of a Netflix documentary, “The New Yorker at 100,” meant to offer a glimpse behind the scenes for the reading public — and a moment of pride for the people who work for a standard-bearer of magazine journalism.
Instead, the abrupt firing earlier this month of a senior fact-checker and New Yorker union member, Jasper Lo, has set off a swell of outrage among magazine staffers and contributors, including some of the most famous writers in America. “A line, long smudged, has been crossed,” staff writer Tad Friend wrote on an all-staff email chain. “Union busting sucks,” wrote author Susan Orlean.
Dozens of other notable writers including Calvin Trillin, Alex Ross, Larissa MacFarquhar, Keith Gessen, Tammy Kim, Jay Caspian Kang, and Julian Lucas also weighed in. A group of New Yorker managers sent a letter last week to Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch saying that Lo’s firing has created a “crisis of confidence in our workplace that threatens to do lasting harm,” according to a draft reviewed by The Washington Post.
The contretemps inside the New Yorker after the firings have not been previously reported.
Layoffs are hardly uncommon in a media industry facing challenging economic realities and distracted news consumers. And even at Condé Nast, a redoubt of magazine glamour whose stable includes Vogue, Architectural Digest and Vanity Fair, layoffs have regularly kicked off skirmishes between the company’s union and its executives.
But the particular circumstances that led to the dismissal of Lo and three staff members of other Condé Nast titles have triggered a broader reaction this time, particularly at the New Yorker, which has 1.23 million subscribers and solid financial footing thanks to a combination of paid subscriptions, advertising and live events. Staffers have questioned what Lo’s firing signals about the magazine’s independence within Condé Nast and whether editor David Remnick was involved in the decision.
“There has been a lot of talk this centenary year … about The New Yorker as a place of integrity, decency, excellence,” deputy poetry editor Hannah Aizenman wrote in the email chain. “Condé’s termination of Jasper and our other colleagues is a gross demonstration of hypocrisy, cowardice, and contempt for every single worker here — and New Yorker leadership either co-signed it, or lacked the power to stop it. I’m not sure which is more disturbing.”
Through a spokesperson, Remnick, who has been the magazine’s editor since 1998, declined to comment.
At the nub of the conflict are the events of Nov. 5, when a group of more than a dozen unionized employees of several Condé Nast publications gathered on the executives’ 34th floor of Condé Nast’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan to confront its human resources chief, Stan Duncan, about recent cuts across the company.
Their concerns centered on the Teen Vogue website, which was folded into Vogue.com on Nov. 3 “to provide a more unified reader experience,” according to the company. The Condé Nast union said minimizing Teen Vogue, a publication with a left-leaning political bent, was “designed to blunt the award-winning magazine’s insightful journalism at a time when it is needed the most.”
Two video clips of the incident, obtained by The Post and first published by the Wrap, show staffers demanding that Duncan talk to them about the decision to shutter Teen Vogue and Duncan telling the staff they could not congregate outside his office and to return to work. An employee is seen following him as he walks down the hall, asking if he is “running away” from the union members. “We’d like you to move forward,” Duncan says, waving the employees away. “We’d like you to answer questions,” a staffer says. As the video shows Duncan entering his office and the door closing, a staffer is heard booing.
By that evening, Lo and three other employees involved had been fired: Wired senior writer Jake Lahut; Bon Appétit writer and producer Alma Avalle; and Condé Nast Entertainment videographer Ben Dewey.
Condé Nast said its action was necessary and justified. “Extreme misconduct is unacceptable in any professional setting,” a company spokesperson said in a statement the day after the firings. “This includes aggressive, disruptive, and threatening behavior of any kind. We have a responsibility to provide a workplace where every employee feels respected and able to do their job without harassment or intimidation. We also cannot ignore behavior that crosses the line into targeted harassment and disruption of business operations.”
Lo, 37, said he was at the retirement party for the head of the New Yorker’s copy department when his union representative called around 9 p.m. to tell him he had been fired. He said he had not spoken a word during the interaction with Duncan earlier that day. “I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong,” he said.
“It’s frankly embarrassing that executives would make baseless claims about a fact-checker,” said Daniel Gross, a New Yorker fact-checker and co-chair of the magazine’s union.
Avalle, 27, who had followed Duncan down the hallway and called after him to answer their questions, said she thought this month’s “march on the boss” was “relatively tame.” Unionized employees have taken similar actions multiple times in recent years, prompting complaints but no disciplinary action from the company. “It’s a gargantuan leap in the level of aggression that we’ve seen from the company compared to what is a pretty routine type of union action,” she said.
After the videos were published, Condé Nast representatives said there was additional footage of the confrontation. “Most people recognize that the misconduct exhibited by union members wouldn’t be acceptable in any workplace,” Condé spokeswoman Danielle Carrig said in a statement. “Their employment was terminated with cause, as they were in violation of our company policies.” She declined to provide any additional footage or further describe the “extreme misconduct” the company alleges on the part of the four fired employees.
In a memo sent to some staff last week, Condé Nast said it would not be commenting publicly on personnel matters. “We remain deeply committed to treating people fairly, upholding our values, and protecting the integrity of our journalism, especially across our titles engaged in news and political coverage, including Wired, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker,” the memo said.
At a rally last week, New York Attorney General Letitia James and other New York politicians joined more than 150 Condé Nast employees in calling on the company to reinstate the four employees.
“I want you to know that I’m not afraid to march into a courtroom to assure that the rights of these individuals, and the rights of all workers, is respected and honored,” James said. “And that the rule of law is on the side of those individuals who simply asked the question, ‘What is going on?’”
There is no immediate prospect of a court case, however. Condé Nast and the employee unions, represented by the NewsGuild of New York, each filed grievances against each other with the National Labor Relations Board. The company accused the unionized employees of violating the labor peace clause in the contract, and the guild accused Condé of terminating employees for participating in protected union activity. The two sides must negotiate agreements on the grievances or the process will go to a third party for arbitration.
While that process runs its course, it isn’t clear whether or when unrest could be stilled at the New Yorker and other Condé Nast properties, staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe suggested in the internal email chain. “This feels like the sort of hasty decision that would be relatively easy to reverse in the near term — and more complicated to unwind the more time is allowed to pass,” he wrote.
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