What Test Kitchen Could Have Been
*updated October 22nd 2021, this post has been moved to my permanent website, shardsandwords.xyz
On February 4th, 2021 Gimlet Media launched what was supposed to be a series on its Reply All podcast called Test Kitchen to cover Bon Appetit’s toxic work environment.
On February 16th 2021 Eric Eddings laid out a concise twitter thread on how hypocritical Gimlet, Reply All, Sruthi Pinnamaneni, P.J. Vogt, Alex Blumberg, and Lydia Polgreen have been with regard to Gimlet’s own toxic environment.
On February 26th 2021 Alex Goldman published an anemic apology to listeners and told us P.J. and Sruthi were stepping back.
The Test Kitchen Band Aid Tear
The Reply All/Test Kitchen scandal is an example of power in corporations, shitty human nature, and failure of executive responsibility to be accountable to everyone in their company - not just the moneymakers. It’s a testament to the speed of today’s communication. It’s a testament to Eric Eddings’ persistence and expectation his place of work would hear him out.
The background to all of this is in August of 2019 Gimlet Union organized around core tenets that will help Gimlet Media become a more equitable organization. Over a year’s time, nothing significant changed at Gimlet and people like Sruthi Pinnameneni and P.J. Vogt instead chose to malign union organizers — their co workers. Eric Eddings let us know some of the shitty things they said and did.
Test Kitchen Schotoma
The Test Kitchen Series intro is:
“In the summer of 2020, Bon Appétit faced an online reckoning. It imploded, seemingly overnight, former employees calling it a racist and toxic workplace. But the story of what actually happened there started ten years earlier. This is Chapter One, “Original Sin,” of our series The Test Kitchen.”
That Sruthi, P.J., Alex, Alex, and Lydia to the person failed to see their hypocrisy in that paragraph while acting in precisely such shitty ways real time is what the problem is in corporate culture, capitalistic mindset, and pure territorial power protection.
Gimlet media has a lot of unremarkable shows on its roster. Reply All is a standout leader, hosted by Alex Goldman and previously P.J. Vogt. Reply All has grown into a show listeners trust(ed) to bring interesting, humorous and well explained content with a wide reach.
Test Kitchen was squaring up to be a true peer among Gimlet’s broadcasts in its concept. Maybe eventually it would have become its own show because we all know there is a never ending source of people using power to hurt other people. And that’s exactly what Sruthi and P.J. did directly. Alex Blumberg and Lydia Polgreen did so indirectly like every good executive does.
If Gimlet — by Gimlet I mean Alex Blumberg and Lydia Polgreen — had taken the year’s time since Polgreen came on board to do the work, dive into staff concerns, talk to teams, groups, and individuals; they would have heard a lot of what Eric Eddings told us on twitter. Maybe they did take that time. If so, then they’re both absolutely the problem. Because when a company claims their intent is to improve a culture in the ways Polgreen said in her email to Gimlet staff, it is supposed to mean something:
Hello Gimlet,
I want to begin by acknowledging the complicated and emotional nature of what has unfolded on social media and in conversations over the last 24 hours. I have had direct discussions with those involved and many others of you who are feeling the impact of this, and I plan to continue these in the days and weeks ahead.
From the moment I arrived at Gimlet, it was clear that our culture needed work, and that there were big things that needed to change to make this a better, more equitable place. We have spent a lot of time working to make those changes in partnership with many of you. These events are a reminder of how much work remains.
PJ has asked to step down from his role on the show and take a leave of absence, and I have agreed. It was always intended that this miniseries was to be Sruthi’s last story for Reply All before she moved to other projects at Gimlet, but instead, she will be stepping back from the show immediately. The Reply All team and I will be discussing the plans for The Test Kitchen in the days ahead.
At Gimlet, we make creative work in collaborative teams. That work is really rewarding and also hard. It involves honest and sometimes difficult conversations. But those conversations must happen with respect. No person at Gimlet or Spotify is too important or powerful to escape accountability for their behavior, very much including me.
These events are also a reminder that we are in the midst of a collective bargaining process that is by its nature confrontational. We sit across the table from each other and negotiate. But I know that the people who organized the union are motivated by a desire to make Gimlet better. We may disagree about the specifics of how to achieve that goal, but we are united in wanting to make Gimlet the best place for the most ambitious creators of audio to work. I believe that thanks to hard work on both sides we have made a lot of progress.
We have a lot of work ahead of us. Despite our recent challenges, I believe that the world needs more of your exceptional storytelling. We’ll have time to talk about this together at our All Staff next week but I’m happy to talk before then as well.Lydia
I mean hindsight right? That’s every executive’s/company’s/disgraced person’s excuse. “I didn’t know” “I didn’t see it” and that’s pure bullshit. If Anita Hill’s and Christine Blasey Ford’s experiences have taught us anything — and I’m sad to say this culture has not gotten the message — it should be that the second someone brings up a concern, it’s worth putting light on it. Hell, the centuries of Black women telling us to our damned faces what this country needs to do to make it equitable being ignored tells me Gimlet’s problem is one more of the flawed features of this corrupt culture, not a bug.
Polgreen joined Gimlet March of 2020. A year ago. As content director.
Polgreen’s comment falls short. A year is plenty of time to have met with and talked to Eric Eddings and anyone else who had grievances. Alex Blumberg certainly knew who P.J. is and what his opinions are since they spend so much time together in their explainer episodes of Reply All where Alex B feigns ignorance of a technical topic and P.J. and Alex Goldman delight in his willful blindness while deftly explaining said topic to him. It all seems pretty disingenuous in this moment.
What Test Kitchen Could Be
For what it’s worth, Test Kitchen as a project could have been handed to other staff to continue. It is a good concept and there are plenty of people who would take it, run with it and treat the topic with the respect it needs — including investigating Gimlet. That’s what this could become. But there isn’t a company that has the ability to pick at their own wounds I’m afraid. Too bad. It could turn into something beautiful. Casualties and all.
