
The Markup faces staff exodus and funder scrutiny following Julia Angwin ouster - kaboro
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/25/the-markup-faces-staff-exodus-and-funder-scrutiny-following-ouster-of-julia-angwin/
======
danso
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](https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the-markup.php)

[1] [https://medium.com/@jeff_larson/about-the-
markup-6adc6a77810...](https://medium.com/@jeff_larson/about-the-
markup-6adc6a778100)

~~~
crsv
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.

~~~
m463
A data driven exploration of Myers briggs might make a good article.

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

~~~
disgruntledphd2
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.

------
rossdavidh
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.

~~~
jvagner
Encouraging..? They have yet to launch.

~~~
rhizome
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.

------
netaustin
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.

~~~
m463
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...

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

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

~~~
m463
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.

------
snowwrestler
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.

------
Chazprime
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.

~~~
danso
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](https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the-markup.php)

------
gatherhunterer
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.

~~~
olliej
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”

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

------
fastball
Very different sides to this story.

Hopefully there will be some _data-driven_ way to find the truth of the
matter.

~~~
whenchamenia
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.

