The Markup faces staff exodus and funder scrutiny following Julia Angwin ouster | Hacker News Reader

The Markup faces staff exodus and funder scrutiny following Julia Angwin ouster

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51 pointskaboro28 comments

FWIW, CJR's interview with Sue Gardner executive director -- i.e. the person who fired Julia Angwin -- has been the most revealing thing so far, because it's the first interview in which Gardner has spoken out in detail about her reasons (Jeff Larson, the managing editor, had written a Medium post but did not go into details about the reasons for firing Angwin [1]).

This is one of the biggest clusterfucks of media drama I have ever seen. Because Angwin was the first to take this fight public, and because she has obvious reasons to feel aggrieved, I had assumed her framing would be as uncharitable as possible to the co-founders who fired her. But accepting Gardner's claims at face value in defense of her decision only makes Angwin's case seem even stronger:

> Gardner felt that, as a senior executive, Angwin should be willing to take part in team-building exercises by submitting to a Myers-Briggs personality test, and should be more enthusiastic about attending meetings. She was alarmed that Angwin did not agree to formal performance assessments for herself and her team (Angwin says she never refused to do performance reviews). Gardner says she found such behavior “unnerving coming from someone in an executive position” and that she believes Angwin wanted an adversarial relationship between editorial staff and management.

(disclosure: I used to work at ProPublica, but did not intersect with Angwin's time there, but do admire her journalism work)

[0] https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the-markup.php

[1] https://medium.com/@jeff_larson/about-the-markup-6adc6a77810...

Well in her defense the Myers Briggs is tarot cards for people with LinkedIn profiles. There’s not a bit of scientific validity behind it. It’s an entertainment experience not a psychometrically valid diagnostic instrument.

A data driven exploration of Myers briggs might make a good article.

It would be a short article. There's really no reliable data.

Nah, there's quite a bit.

However, saying that the Myers-Briggs is the worst personality test available is a little bit like saying the Holocaust was the worst genocide ever. It's true, but that doesn't mean that the others were good.

In general, personality psychometrics is a pretty difficult field to work in. We don't have another source of data for personality, and as such, it's difficult to measure constructs appropriately.

Additionally, modern psychometric methods like IRT work best for tests where the answer is known, and so without another source of evidence, personality psychometrics is a very difficult field.

Finally, the "supported" model in psychology, the Five Factor Model is potentially not robust. The issue is that the authors refuse to use confirmatory factor analysis on their model, and invent new methods (procrustean rotation) to justify their particular choice of constructs.

When these analyses were done by others and suggested that their model was incorrect, they huffed and puffed their way through the ensuing academic catfight in the journals.

tl;dr myers briggs bad, nothing else is much better.

The only time I've ever taken Myers Briggs was during a team-building retreat for being a college residence hall advisor. It was just a "for fun" thing, like doing the trust fall exercise. For the director to say she judged Angwin for refusing to do Myers Briggs is as comical and absurd to me as whining that Angwin was scared to do the trust fall, or didn't like playing icebreaker bingo.

Too long to develop stories, eh? To be honest, that sounds like an encouraging sign, to me. Any news publication that can churn out stories in quantity, is probably not doing much that is data-driven. Collecting good data takes time, cleaning the data takes time (because even good sources have typos, format issues, etc.), analyzing it takes time, writing coherently about it takes time, making good graphics to illustrate it takes time. We may not, as a society, be currently equipped with a business model to support that, but we should.

Encouraging..? They have yet to launch.

Buzzfeed and Uproxx are the ones you're thinking of that started out with the "pithy clickbait gradually transitioning into legitimacy" business model, some with more success at that than others. From what I gather this is not what The Markup was built to do.

Exactly. Investigative journalism is the stuff that takes weeks or months, while clickbait is churned out all day long.

Sounds like the whole idea here was to have a journalistic organization that skips the fluff and just does big stories. Hard to fund, but a noble goal nonetheless.

> We may not, as a society, be currently equipped with a business model to support that, but we should.

There are many newsletters that are thriving. I can only point to Steel on Steel as the one paid bit of content I subscribe to, but I think there are many like it.

To me, the most salient and remarkable aspect of this story is the upheaval among the rest of the team. I’ve found, in leading my own company, that the right decisions are typically met with comprehension and sometimes even relief. If you understand that CEOs are the last to know about problems, especially problems of culture, this makes intuitive sense. You, the CEO, sees something going sideways, you react, and the rest of the company is like, it’s about time you dealt with that!

But this sounds like the opposite problem, where the team doesn’t know that the managers have an issue. Such an incident would alarm me greatly, since I generally consider my team to be something of a Greek chorus, mourning my decisions before I even make them.

I read somewhere that Steve Jobs would figure out if a person was good or not by talking to the person's coworkers and saying the person sucks. If they vehemently denied it and stood up for the person, that was a sign the person was good. If they didn't, the person might indeed suck.

sooo... if the rest of the team posted a statement and people resigned...

That's very interesting psychology, but it is horrible and psychopathic.

Nobody go out and trash people just to see if it sticks. Please.

SJ was good at his job, but I don’t think he is thought of as “being nice”.

That said I feel there are better ways to find out if people are competent.

Of course not. But hearing from the SJ story how people behave when this sort of thing happens aligns with the staff's determination at the markup.

That would only work if the people Steve Jobs talked to were happy to argue with Steve Jobs.

I'm 99% sure my reaction to that situation would be "I thought X is great, but if Steve Jobs says he's not then I'm probably wrong. I'd better just agree with Steve."

How do you ever give useful feedback with that attitude?

I'm not like that with everyone. Steve Jobs is a bit of a unique case.

This Jobs story sounds like some myth-building BS that shouldn't ever be applied in the real world.

Angwin said elsewhere that when she approached Gardner to be involved, Gardner said it would only work if she was CEO. To me, a statement like that is at least a yellow flag about collaboration and control issues.

In a normal publication, editorial has to do some things they might not like in order to meet business objectives—-like crank out stories about Game of Thrones or whatever is trending on Reddit so that they can maintain ad views.

The whole point of The Markup was that it was not supposed to be a normal publication. That’s why Craig and those foundations funded it.

The whole point of the site was unique, high quality editorial content you could not get anywhere else. So to me at least, the reaction of the editorial team is a big indication this was a bad move.

It's a sad state of affairs when someone like Angwin is ousted because she stood in the way of what appears to be the formation of another Vox/Gawker clone. Hopefully she and her editorial staff manage to pick up somewhere else with the original vision.

I definitely lean toward sympathizing with Angwin, but it's worth noting that this characterization is under dispute. The other two co-founders deny that they wanted to dilute the mission. And Angwin also says that while this bothered her, it was still something under discussion rather than decided upon:

> Angwin told CJR she didn’t know “where we were going to land on this advocacy or neutrality question, maybe we could have reached a compromise. But the fact is she was pushing really hard for stuff that I was feeling uncomfortable with.”

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the-markup.php

How can a founder and the entire editorial staff have a vision that differs from that of another founder? It seems like they were hired to accomplish opposite goals.

It could be one person was “we should have actual researched real news, not fake news”, and the other was “we need real news, but still politically biased”

I'm curious how Gardner is escaping coverage through this so far.

Very different sides to this story.

Hopefully there will be some data-driven way to find the truth of the matter.

Someone makes the data, someone collects the data, someone formats the data, and someone shares the data. Each step can be, and often is, corrupted. There is no path to 'truth' through only 'data'. Hence the news being the shitshow it is.

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