Tag: Editor

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Health

Editor of JAMA Leaves After Outcry Over Colleague’s Remarks on Racism

Editor of JAMA Leaves After Outcry Over Colleague’s Remarks on Racism

Following an outcry over comments about racism made by an editor at JAMA, the influential medical journal, the top editor, Dr. Howard Bauchner, will step down from his post effective June 30.

The move was announced on Tuesday by the American Medical Association, which oversees the journal. Dr. Bauchner, who had led JAMA since 2011, had been on administrative leave since March because of an ongoing investigation into comments made on the journal’s podcast.

Dr. Edward Livingston, another editor at JAMA, had claimed that socioeconomic factors, not structural racism, held back communities of color. A tweet promoting the podcast had said that no physician could be racist. It was later deleted.

“I remain profoundly disappointed in myself for the lapses that led to the publishing of the tweet and podcast,” Dr. Bauchner said in a statement. “Although I did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast, as editor in chief, I am ultimately responsible for them.”

Last month, the A.M.A.’s leaders admitted to serious missteps and proposed a three-year plan to “dismantle structural racism” within the organization and in medicine. The announcement on Tuesday did not mention the status of the investigation at JAMA. The journal declined further comment.

“This is a real moment for JAMA and the A.M.A. to recreate themselves from a founding history that was based in segregation and racism to one that is now based on racial equity,” said Dr. Stella Safo, a Black primary care physician at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Dr. Safo and her colleagues started a petition, now signed by more than 9,000 people, that had called on JAMA to restructure its staff and hold a series of town hall conversations about racism in medicine. “I think that this is a step in the right direction,” she said of the announcement.

But other critics said they were withholding judgment to see how the organization addressed what they saw as pervasive neglect of covering racism’s impact on health in its journals.

“In the entire history of all the JAMA network journals, there’s only been one non-white editor,” noted Dr. Raymond Givens, a cardiologist at Columbia University in New York. In October, Dr. Givens wrote to Dr. Bauchner, noting that editors at the JAMA journals were overwhelmingly white and male. Dr. Bauchner did not respond, according to Dr. Givens.

“This is not cause to celebrate,” he said of the announcement, adding that he had not intended to jeopardize Dr. Bauchner’s job. Nor will appointing a top editor of color resolve the issues, Dr. Givens said.

“Looking for just a person of color misses the point,” he added. “I’m more interested in a bold voice. I want somebody who is willing to take a stand, push to move things forward.”

The podcast that set the events in motion aired on Feb. 24 and did not include any Black researchers or experts on racism in medicine.

“Structural racism is an unfortunate term,” Dr. Livingston, who is white, said on the podcast. “Personally, I think taking racism out of the conversation will help. Many people like myself are offended by the implication that we are somehow racist.”

The podcast was promoted with a tweet from the journal that said, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?” Following widespread protest in the medical community, the journal took down the podcast and deleted the tweet.

“Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, hurtful and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA,” Dr. Bauchner said in a statement released a week later. “We are instituting changes that will address and prevent such failures from happening again.”

Dr. Livingston later resigned, and the A.M.A. placed Dr. Bauchner on administrative leave on March 25.

The JAMA family of journals added four new titles under Dr. Bauchner’s leadership, and expanded to include podcasts, videos and new, shorter article types. But critics noted that the journals rarely addressed structural racism in medicine, and more often published papers linking health disparities to socioeconomic or biological factors.

Dr. Bauchner’s exit offered the journals a chance to improve, said Dr. Mary Bassett, professor of the practice of health and human rights at Harvard University.

“Medical journals have helped build the racist idea that races have intrinsic differences that have a bearing on health,” Dr. Bassett said. Journals are “challenged to embrace, not only accept, racism as a health issue.”

Dr. Bauchner told The New York Times last month that JAMA had published “more than 100 articles on issues such as social determinants of health, health care disparities and structural racism over just the last five years.” He also noted that JAMA accepted only a tiny fraction of the manuscripts it had received.

He said in the statement on Tuesday that the journal would be better served by his resignation. “The best path forward for the JAMA Network, and for me personally, is to create an opportunity for new leadership at JAMA,” he said.

In an editorial published in JAMA on Tuesday, colleagues at the journal lauded Dr. Bauchner’s leadership, saying he “has left an indelible legacy of progress, innovation and excellence in medical journalism.”

The A.M.A. said it has begun a search for Dr. Bauchner’s replacement. The journal’s executive editor, Dr. Phil Fontanarosa, will serve as interim editor in chief.

Whoever the new editor may be, he or she will need to acknowledge the profound impact of structural racism on health outcomes for communities of color, Dr. Bassett said.

“Racism works in ways that are structural and not simply as the result of ignorant, misguided or even racist individuals,” she added. “As a new editor in chief is sought, there will be a chance for JAMA to lead in dismantling this idea. I hope they grab it.”

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Health

Studying Dan Frank, E-book Editor and ‘Champion of the Unexampled’

Reading Dan Frank, Book Editor and ‘Champion of the Unexampled’

I met him through Alan Lightman, who had emailed me to say he was coming to New York to give a talk, and did I want to have dinner with him and two guests — his daughter and a man named Dan.

I instantly felt this, just, radiance, a kind of humble warmth but also a very lively mind. He was such a lovely human being, so subtle and generous, an embodiment of what a great editor does: gets out of the way, taking with him the rubble that writers put in their own path.

He was very interested in the intersection of the novelist and the scholarly. He understood uniquely how all history is a kind of narrative superimposed on reality — an invention and interpretation. Science is a human-driven search for truth. Not in a social-constructivist way; there is an elemental truth. But the search can fold in on itself, because we only have the tools of human consciousness to work with. Whatever the prostheses — telescopes, microscopes — it’s still a human mind that does the processing and analysis, that filters everything through its life, its loves, the Dans it lost, everything.

The history of science is ultimately the history of human experience. Dan saw that there was something there to look at that defies the robotic model of objectivity. There is an animating question common to all the books he did: “What is all this? What is all this?”

Alan Lightman is a physicist and writer at M.I.T. He has published a dozen books with Dan Frank, starting in 1986 with “A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court. and Other Essays on Science.”

In March 30, 1983, I got a letter from an editor I had never heard of, saying that if there was ever a book I wanted to write, I should get in touch: “I have been reading your column, The Physical Element, for over a year, and I am particularly impressed with the ease and grace with which you elucidate complex ideas.”

That was powerful encouragement. Before the internet, Dan would always send me a letter before anything else; not a phone call, but a letter. I kept that letter and all the letters I ever got from him.

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Business

Former Condé Nast Editor Plans a Self-importance Honest for the Substack Period

Former Condé Nast Editor Plans a Vanity Fair for the Substack Era

A former editor at Vanity Fair has been working on creating a digital publication with a business touch for more than a year: the authors will share in the subscription revenue.

Imagine Vanity Fair meets Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has attracted well-known authors.

The new company behind the release, Heat Media, is hoping to showcase it in the coming months, said four people with knowledge of the matter. The startup comes in part from Jon Kelly, a former editor at Vanity Fair who worked under its former editor-in-chief, Graydon Carter.

If everything goes according to plan, the startup’s contributors include writers whose contacts include the power elite of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington, and Wall Street. An annual subscription would cost $ 100 and could include a daily newsletter, website, and access to events. The publication does not yet have a name. One of them is Puck, the name of an American humor magazine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The writers were offered equity and a percentage of the subscription income they would generate, people said. This is one of the first attempts to reconcile the new talent economy with more traditional media institutions. The publication would rely on an algorithm to measure how many readers buy a subscription because of a particular writer, people said. Mr Kelly has been actively recruiting some of his former colleagues, people added.

Another new aspect is the financing. One of the backers is private equity firm TPG Capital, which would take three seats on Heat Media’s board of directors, one of which goes to its co-managing director Jim Coulter.

In business today

Updated

April 14, 2021, 1:40 p.m. ET

Another investor is 40 North Media, the investment arm of Standard Industries, a construction materials company. David Winter, its co-managing director, would also take a seat on the board.

Mr. Kelly declined to comment. TPG declined to comment. 40 North did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Kelly left Condé Nast, the publisher of Vanity Fair, in March 2019 and shortly thereafter joined private equity firm TPG. The company’s head, Mr. Coulter, is friends with Mr. Carter, and TPG supported Mr. Carter’s Post-Vanity Fair project Air Mail.

The start-up’s business model is an early attempt to combine Substack’s entrepreneurial system of allowing writers to earn money directly with subscribers with that of traditional publishing.

For TPG, the investment is the latest in the media business. In 2018 the company invested with Jon Miller, a former CEO of News Corp., in the website “Geek Culture” Fandom, which had recently acquired the gaming website Focus Multimedia. Last year, a TPG partner acquired the soccer website Goal.com, and the company recently announced plans to acquire a stake in DirectTV.

The two companies’ money would give the startup some security if some of the biggest players in digital publishing like BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox Media and Group Nine stumbled upon as the pandemic hit the advertising industry.

Kelly’s business partners are Joe Purzycki, founder of podcasting company Luminary Media, and Max Tcheyan, who helped set up the sports website The Athletic.

Two people who saw a pitch deck on the company’s plans said its potential competitors are Washington-based news site Axios, tech news site The Information and Vanity Fair.

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Health

JAMA Editor Positioned on Go away Following Racial Controversy

JAMA Editor Placed on Leave Following Racial Controversy

Following controversial comments from a deputy editor at JAMA on racism in medicine, the editor-in-chief of the renowned medical journal was put on administrative leave on Thursday.

An American Medical Association committee that oversees the journal said Dr. Howard Bauchner will be replaced by an interim editor pending the results of an independent investigation. The decision was announced in an email to employees on Thursday.

JAMA is one of the world’s leading medical journals, publishing research that shapes the scientific agenda and public order around the globe. The controversy began when Dr. Ed Livingston, an associate editor, said on a February 24 podcast that structural racism no longer exists in the United States.

“Structural racism is an unfortunate term,” said Dr. Livingston who is white. “Personally, I think it will be helpful to take racism out of the conversation. A lot of people like me are offended that we are kind of racist. “

The podcast was promoted with a tweet from the magazine that said, “No doctor is racist. So how can there be structural racism in healthcare?” The response to both was quick and furious, causing the diary to shut down the podcast and delete the tweet.

A week later, Dr. Bauchner on the controversy. “The comments made on the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, hurtful and contrary to JAMA’s standards,” said Dr. Bauchner in a statement. “We’re making changes to fix these types of errors and prevent them from happening again.”

Dr. Livingston later resigned. On Thursday evening, JAMA officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Many in the medical community said that the diary did not go far enough and that events provided an opportunity to make more systemic changes. In an email to the AMA leaders, a group of doctors called for “a careful investigation into the editorial and board of JAMA, including the removal of Dr. Howard Bauchner.”

The authors also initiated a petition, which has now been signed by nearly 7,000 people, calling on the journal to contact Dr. Hold Bauchner accountable and review and restructure the editorial process.

“It’s not only that this podcast is problematic – it’s also that there is a long and documented history of institutional racism at JAMA,” said Dr. Brittani James, a black doctor who practiced on the south side of Chicago and helped start the petition.

“This podcast should never have happened,” said Dr. Uché Blackstock, an ambulance doctor in New York. “That tweet should never have happened. The fact that podcasts were conceived, recorded, and published was incomprehensible. “

“I think it’s caused an incalculable amount of pain and trauma to black doctors and patients,” she said. “And I think it will be a long time before the diary heals this pain.”

More recently, other prominent journals have faced their role in perpetuating racism in medicine. In January, Health Editor-in-Chief Alan Weil admitted that “the magazine’s employees and executives are overwhelmingly white and economically privileged,” and committed to reviewing the editorial process.

The AMA’s email to staff promised that the investigation would look into “how the podcast and related tweet were developed, reviewed and ultimately published,” and that the association had hired independent investigators to ensure objectivity.

The email did not include a deadline for completing the investigation.

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Business

Danielle Belton Named Prime Editor of HuffPost

Danielle Belton Named Top Editor of HuffPost

Danielle Belton, who led The Root for the past five years, will take over the top position at HuffPost next month, taking on a role that has been empty for more than a year.

Ms. Belton’s appointment was announced on Wednesday by Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, who acquired HuffPost in February.

“I realized that journalism was right for me when I was in J-School in college, and I realized that these are my people. I had the same feeling of speaking to HuffPost employees, ”Ms. Belton said in an interview. “These are people who are really passionate about giving people the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their daily lives. These are people who love to inform the world. “

BuzzFeed began looking for a top new HuffPost editor after the acquisition was announced in November. This was revealed in an internal email that Mr Peretti sent to staff on Wednesday. In the email received from the New York Times, Peretti said BuzzFeed had prioritized finding a HuffPost leader with a long-term vision who could “champion its urgent, compelling and far-reaching journalism.”

Belton, 43, editor-in-chief of The Root, a black news and culture site operated by G / O Media, was offered the position last week.

HuffPost, originally known as The Huffington Post after its founder, Arianna Huffington, has had financial problems in the competitive digital news arena for the past several years. The youngest editor-in-chief, Lydia Polgreen, a former Times editor who had run the site since 2016, traveled to Gimlet Media last March. HuffPost has since been headed by Editor-in-Chief Hillary Frey.

BuzzFeed announced in November that it had acquired HuffPost from Verizon Media. On March 9, shortly after the deal was signed, BuzzFeed laid off 47 HuffPost employees and closed the Canadian edition of the publication. Mr Peretti said at the time that the cost cut was needed as HuffPost lost more than $ 20 million in 2020 and forecast it would lose the same amount this year.

The company was criticized for the way it handled the layoff notice. This included that the employees use the password “spr! NgisH3r3 ”, a variation of“ Spring is here ”, to take part in the video conference.

Ms. Belton is now faced with the task of uniting a tumbling newsroom and setting a new course for posting on BuzzFeed. She will report to Mark Schoofs, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, although the two publications will have separate editorial teams and websites.

“I’m very excited about this healthy competition between HuffPost and BuzzFeed,” said Ms. Belton. “I’m excited about the moment HuffPost hits BuzzFeed on a ball.”

Ms. Belton, who describes herself as a “hardcore media nerd,” said her priority was to create a more diverse newsroom. She said the leadership told her it was committed to diversity and that it could hire more workers.

“I firmly believe that all newsrooms should be different and that all newsrooms should reflect the different communities that make up this country,” she said.

Ms. Belton said that “there is simply no good way to fire people” and that she wants to turn to her new team “in a healing way.”

“I’m so excited about the journalism and the journalists who work there every day to make HuffPost an amazing publication,” she said. “So I really want to focus on them and make them feel good about their situation and their place of work and continue to feel the pride they have always felt.”

Ms. Belton was the first editor-in-chief of The Root. She has written and edited for publications such as TheGrio, Essence, The Washington Post, and The Times. She also created the award-winning blog, The Black Snob.

Ms. Belton will begin her new role on April 12th. Her appointment was previously reported by The Daily Beast.

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Business

Highly effective German Editor, Accused of Misconduct, Takes Depart

Powerful German Editor, Accused of Misconduct, Takes Leave

The editor-in-chief of Bild, Europe’s largest newspaper and an influential force in German politics and society, has been on leave while a law firm is investigating allegations against him, the publication’s owner said.

Julian Reichelt, the editor, denies allegations of misconduct, said Axel Springer, Bild’s publisher, in a statement. Springer said there was no “clear evidence” of wrongdoing and instead hired the Freshfields law firm to investigate the allegations. It was not stated what they were.

The allegations were first reported by the magazine Spiegel, in which it says that the law firm questioned half a dozen female employees who worked for Bild and complained about coercion by Mr. Reichelt about complaints about coercion by Mr. Reichelt. Spiegel did not name the female employees. The magazine states that Mr. Reichelt was accused of abusing his position of authority and creating a hostile work environment, but did not provide any explicit information.

“In order to ensure that the investigation process can be seen through to the end undisturbed and that the editorial team can work without any further burdens,” said Springer, Mr. Reichelt, “the Axel Springer Management Board has asked to release him from his functions until the allegations are made.” have been clarified. “

Alexandra Würzbach, editor of the Sunday edition of Bild, will take over the tasks of Mr. Reichelt, said Springer.

The #MeToo movement has hit Europe with much less violence than the United States, and cases of powerful men overthrown on allegations of wrongdoing against women have been relatively rare.

Germany and most European countries protect the identity of suspects in legal proceedings, which makes it difficult for the media to report cases of harassment.

Dishes were often unsympathetic. In 2019, a French court ordered the leader of the country corresponding to the #MeToo movement to pay damages to a former television manager whom she accused of making brutal and humiliating advances.

With a circulation of 1.2 million copies, Bild is Europe’s largest newspaper, but like most publications it has seen a sharp decline in its print readership. In 2011, daily printing revenue averaged 2.8 million, according to the newspaper’s website, down from 4 million in 1965.

With its colorful graphics and the focus on scandal, celebrities and sport, Bild – which means “Bild” – is Germany’s populist daily newspaper. The readership distorts masculine. Until 2012, Bild published a photo of a topless woman on the front page every day and continues to publish photos of half-naked “Bild Girls” online.

Unlike Britain’s right-wing tabloids, Image is relatively impartial yet empathetic, with an aggressive tabloid style despite being printed on a broadsheet format. Because of the reach of Bild, it is often the publication that leaders use to communicate with voters and offer exclusive interviews or juicy leaks.

Mr. Reichelt, 40, a former war correspondent who became editor-in-chief of Bild in 2017, also frequently wrote opinion pieces. He recently railed against the federal government’s mismanagement of the pandemic crisis. Earlier this month, he complained that the authorities fined joggers for not wearing masks, while the federal and state governments botched the introduction of vaccines.

Axel Springer, the parent company of Bild, is one of the best-known media companies in Europe. Springer also owns Welt, a German daily newspaper; the Business Insider online news site; and Politico Europe. The private equity company KKR owns 36 percent of Springer’s shares and has three seats on the company’s nine-member supervisory board. Friede Springer, widow of the founder Axel Springer, remains the main shareholder and board member.

Springer said in a statement on Saturday that the investigation involving Mr. Reichelt would include “an assessment of the credibility and integrity of all parties involved”.

The publisher added: “Prejudices based on rumors are not acceptable for the corporate culture of Axel Springer.”

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Business

Wired names Gideon Lichfield as its new prime editor.

Wired names Gideon Lichfield as its new top editor.

Condé Nast has named Gideon Lichfield as Wired’s new global editor-in-chief.

Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer and Vogue’s global editor-in-chief, announced this in an internal memo on Tuesday.

“I am so happy that he is bringing his expertise to Wired and I am very much looking forward to the future of the title,” Ms. Wintour wrote in the memo. She said Mr. Lichfield will be responsible for both Wired US and Wired’s international editions, including in the UK, Italy and Japan.

Mr. Lichfield comes to Wired with extensive experience in technology and business journalism, most recently at MIT Technology Review, where he was Editor-in-Chief since 2017. In 2012 he helped launch the digital news site Quartz and was previously with The Economist.

Mr. Lichfield said in a Condé Nast press release that he was “thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Wired’s great journalists and develop his legacy”.

“Wired is iconic and vital in shaping the place of technology in culture,” he said.

It will begin on March 22nd.

The statement found that Wired saw web traffic grow 15 percent over the past year, reaching 44 million people a month across all platforms.

Nicholas Thompson, who became Wired Editor-in-Chief in 2017, was named Chief Executive of The Atlantic in December.

The Shuffle at Wired is the latest in a string of industry shifts as a multitude of publications look for top editors. Vox Media announced The Atlantic’s Swati Sharma as the new Editor-in-Chief of Vox.com in February. The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Reuters, and HuffPost continue their search.

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Wall Road Journal Opinion Editor Defends Merchandise on Dr. Jill Biden

Wall Street Journal Opinion Editor Defends Item on Dr. Jill Biden

The editor of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal accused strategists of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. of initiating a coordinated response to an article published Friday night urging Jill Biden, wife of Mr. Biden, not to refer to himself as “Dr. Biden ”because she is not a doctor, but is doing a doctorate in education.

After two master’s degrees, Dr. Biden from the University of Delaware in 2007. She also taught English at a community college in Virginia, and hopes to continue to do so while serving as first lady.

“The Ph.D. may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the loosening of standards in university education in general, ”Joseph Epstein wrote in the comment.

In the response, published on Sunday evening and for the Monday newspaper, Paul A. Gigot, the top editor of the journal’s opinion division for nearly two decades, pointed out negative comments on Mr. Epstein’s article, that of two Biden employees as well Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Senator Kamala Harris, the elected vice president, was posted on Twitter as evidence of a campaign.

“Why go so far as to highlight a single comment on a relatively small subject?” wrote Mr Gigot, who elsewhere said the replies reflected “which was clearly a political strategy”. “I suspect the Biden team concluded that it was a chance to use the great weapon of identity politics to send a message to critics as they prepare to take power. There’s nothing like playing race or the gender card to stifle criticism. “

Mr. Gigot said the press generally supported the negative interpretation of the article (he referred to an article in the New York Times about it). And he defended the play.

“Ms. Biden is America’s most prominent graduate student today and has a leadership role in educational policy,” wrote Gigot. “She cannot be closed to comment.”

He also noted that Mr. Epstein’s argument that PhD students were not the “Dr.” Biden is out of place because Mr Biden also used the term in relation to his wife. He compared the tweets from Biden employees to those in which President Trump described the press as an “enemy of the people”.

A Wall Street Journal spokeswoman declined to comment. A Biden spokeswoman did not comment immediately.

The conservatism of the journal’s opinion side – which preceded Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones & Company, in 2007 for $ 5 billion – has occasionally caused friction with the Journal’s newsroom, which like most newspapers, does not is officially political.

Mr. Epstein’s play is likely to create further tension. For example, a college reporter for The Journal said on Twitter over the weekend that such opinion pieces “make it harder for me to do my job”.

As with other newspapers, including The Times and The Washington Post, the journal’s news sections and opinion pages are maintained separately, each monitored by a top editor who reports to the newspaper’s editor.

At least three times this year members of the journal’s newsroom have sent letters criticizing the journal’s columns.

In July, nearly 300 news workers sent a letter to the journal’s editor, Almar Latour, stating a “lack of fact-checking and transparency” on the opinion counter. The letter referred to several articles, including Vice President Mike Pence’s June 16 essay entitled “There is no coronavirus, second wave”. In response, the journal published an unsigned editorial complaining about the “progressive abandonment culture”. it was said that the letter was typical.

In June, the union’s board of directors, which represents the Journal’s staff, sent a letter to Mr Latour and Matt Murray – the Journal’s editor-in-chief who oversaw the news section – asking Gerard A. Baker, the former editor-in-chief and now an editor in general , be placed in the opinion area and criticize an article by him and several of his Twitter posts. He was reassigned the day after the letter was posted, despite a spokeswoman for the Journal saying a move was in the works.

In February, the headline of an article by columnist Walter Russell Mead criticizing China’s response to the coronavirus prompted more than 50 news workers, many of whom were based in China, to sign a letter to the Dow Jones chief executive and Mr. Murdoch’s chief executive News Corp. asks to withdraw. The headline calling China the “Real Sick Man of Asia” was “derogatory,” the letter reads. The headline was not withdrawn and the Chinese government soon expelled three journal reporters in what it termed retaliation.

In response on Sunday, Mr. Gigot promised not to be impressed by the reaction to the article. “If you disagree with Mr. Epstein, fair enough. Write a letter or shout your objections on Twitter, ”he wrote. “But these sites won’t stop posting provocative essays just because they insult the new government or political censorship in the media and academia.”