Abstract
Traditional media’s convergence with online media platforms intensifies the already unpaid and unrecognized affective, immaterial and emotional labor expected of women of color and other historically marginalized media workers. This article uses the example of Bon Appetit (BA) and the downfall of their popular YouTube channel to argue that understanding this intensification is critical to envisioning possibilities for media workers to address exploitative working conditions. In the wake of Black Lives Matter uprisings in the summer of 2020, Black and Brown women food writers took to social media to point out that while BA profited from portraying a diverse workforce on their YouTube channel, the reality was very different. At the time, popular press and social media discourse largely attributed these issues to entrenched histories of racialized and gendered discrimination in legacy media. However, recent research on online platforms has engaged feminist studies, Black studies, and critical STS epistemologies to demonstrate that intersectional oppressions based on race, gender, class, and sexuality are reinscribed in the labor and technical infrastructures of platforms. Together, theorizations of the racialized and gendered aspects of unpaid and unrecognized labor alongside research on the biases reinscribed into algorithmic and internet platform infrastructures inform my analysis of a variety of texts related to the BA YouTube channel: BA YouTube channel metadata and videos, advertising trades coverage of Conde Nast’s digital media efforts, popular press coverage of the racial reckoning at Conde Nast and BA, and disclosures about BA and Conde Nast workplace cultures shared in public interviews by BA workers. By analyzing these texts together, I argue that the downfall of the BA YouTube channel demonstrates how media convergence and the platformization of legacy media intensifies racialized and gendered inequalities for media workers, but opportunities to publicly disclose these discriminatory workplace dynamics also galvanize worker organizing.
Keywords
Introduction
Bon Appetit (BA), Conde Nast’s prestige food magazine, launched its YouTube channel in 2011. Nearly a decade later, the channel had cultivated a dedicated following through their Test Kitchen video series. These YouTube videos featured BA editorial and kitchen staff as they cooked and ate beautiful food while hanging out and cracking jokes at work
With that said, in order to avoid a reductive framing of the platformized cultural labor of the BA YouTube channel as ‘precarisation versus emancipation’ (Duffy et al., 2019), I note that this analysis is limited to a specific timeframe where public interest and socio-political conditions particularly empowered workers to share their experiences with racism and discrimination throughout Conde Nast publicly. I look at public disclosures about working at BA that were made through media outlets and social media posts from the first accusations of racism and pay disparity in 2020 through the announcement of a successful union organizing drive intended to address such issues in 2022. Although food and culture writers extensively discussed the downfall of the BA Test Kitchen on social media platforms, I’ve limited my use of worker quotes and social media posts to those that were part of published interviews or linked in online articles. I do not aim to enact a comprehensive account of the various industrial, professional, and public discourses regarding the BA Test Kitchen during this time. Instead, I place specific critiques former BA workers made regarding issues of racialized and gendered discrimination throughout their time creating editorial and digital content for the magazine in conversation with intersectional analysis of offline and online unrecognized and unpaid labor. Although the public nature of these industrial disclosures means that there will be elements of ‘spin and narrative’ in these forms of insider knowledge (Caldwell, 2008: 2), they are still useful for relating worker experiences to theorizations of the racialized and gendered biases reinscribed into algorithmic and internet platform infrastructures.
The rise and fall of Bon Appetit’s ‘accidental’ YouTube success
It was a perceived connection to the actual experiences of BA workers that helped to popularize the Test Kitchen videos. A chronological scan of the BA YouTube channel’s Videos page reveals several years of slow and inconsistent viewership growth, leading up to a popular video in 2016 that departed significantly from the channel’s usual focus on aspirational lifestyle content. Titled ‘How to Brew Your Own Kombucha with Brad’, the video focused on then-Test Kitchen manager Brad Leone’s workplace misadventures and mixed unscripted staff interactions with a more casual editing style. In so doing, BA video staff discovered a format that caught on with YouTube viewers. From late 2017 through mid-2020, BA Test Kitchen videos steadily hit viewership numbers in the millions, prompting even their corporate competitors to take notice. In early 2020, BuzzFeed – a company that produced a competing series of viral cooking videos – ran a feature lauding the Test Kitchen video personalities as ‘…YouTube’s Most Beloved Stars’ (Strapagiel, 2020). Even amid the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic, the BA YouTube channel maintained its success. In April 2020, Test Kitchen video production shifted to filming staff and video contributors at their own homes in response to COVID-19 stay-at-home orders in New York. While other media workers and content creators suffered through the loss of jobs and income as a result of the pandemic (Poell et al., 2022), the Test Kitchen series continued on, uploading 31 new videos on YouTube with views usually holding in the 1 million or higher range.
With the shift from Test Kitchen to home kitchens, BA video hosts and contributors were sharing more of their personal spaces and relationships, projecting to viewers an even more intimate sense of disclosing the behind-the-scenes operations of the magazine. However, these disclosures would take a more critical turn in May 2020. As Black Lives Matter groups organized in response to the police killing of George Floyd and other acts of racist violence against Black people, BA released its weekly newsletter from Editor-In-Chief, Michael Rapoport. Like many other corporate brands at the time, BA attempted to use its Web site, email list, and other social media platforms to send a message that the company was on the right side of history by voicing support for the Black Lives Matter protests. The note from Rapoport (2020) acknowledged ‘blind spots’ at BA on issues of race and promised to ‘[tackle] more of the racial and political issues at the core of the food world’. Days after the newsletter was published, Puerto Rican food writer Illyanna Maisonet shared on Twitter a direct message exchange she had with Rapoport after he responded to her social media post pointing out the hypocrisy of the BA newsletter and the magazine’s known history of rejecting pitches from food writers of color. 1 Freelance wine writer Tammie Teclemariam added to Maisonet’s post by sharing an Instagram screencap of Rapoport and his wife, Simone Shubuck, at a Halloween party dressed as urban Latinx stereotypes with a caption from Shubuck that read, ‘me and my papi’ and used the hashtag ‘boricua’. Rapoport and Shubuck are white. Teclemariam posited ‘I do not know why Adam Rapoport simply doesn’t write about Puerto Rican food for @bonappetit himself!!!’ 2 This exchange led to an outpouring of social media posts from former and current BA staff members and freelancers of color sharing their experiences of being dismissed, undermined, and underpaid while working for the magazine, a series of workplace disclosures extensively documented by Rachel Premack’s reporting for Business Insider (Premack, 2020a).
Media coverage and insider reports of the ‘reckoning’ at BA focused on the prevalence of systemic racism in legacy media management and the tailoring of food media content toward white audiences in the United States. Yet, the exploitation of digital labor in the BA YouTube production culture went relatively unexplored. Media workers in an era of media convergence and platformization experience gendered and racialized discrimination and labor exploitation as interconnected. Legacy media companies like Conde Nast exacerbate already persistent racialized and gendered inequalities among media workers by blurring their job roles and responsibilities in reaction to convergence and increasing demands on them to create content for digital platforms. To understand the digital labor issues that the BA incident brought to light requires interrelating research on the economic and cultural impact of media convergence and platformization on legacy media workers; racial and gender biases encoded in algorithms and internet platforms; and the unrecognized and uncompensated forms of affective and immaterial labor expected of marginalized workers in both online and offline professional settings.
My examination of the production culture and worker self-disclosures regarding the success and decline of the BA Test Kitchen YouTube series also draws from research on the impacts of platformization on the media industries and cultural production. Duffy et al. (2019) include the labor practices of platform content creators within the types cultural practices that are impacted by platformization and enact their own impacts on platforms as well. Issues of workplace discrimination, racism, sexism, and uncompensated labor were not explicitly foregrounded by BA or Conde Nast Entertainment in the nonchalant, feel-good content of the Test Kitchen YouTube series. However, culinary media workers took to their personal social media accounts – following after the Black women food writers who made the first public disclosures about Rapoport – to render the racialized and gendered labor exploitation of BA and Conde Nast visible by exposing the contrast between the BA workplace as portrayed on YouTube and their real-life experiences at BA. Due to precarious job security in competitive industries, media workers generally use social media platforms for self-branding, self-entrepreneurial, self-promoting and other employer-facing efforts (Cohen, 2019; Duffy et al., 2019; Poell et al., 2022). However, the case of the BA YouTube channel affirms that within a particular set of social, cultural, and labor conditions, precarious media workers can break from these norms to use platforms to critique employers, advocate for themselves and their colleges, and push for material change throughout their industry.
Media convergence and platformization shape worker precarity
Media worker self-advocacy and organizing efforts, such as the demands by BA staff and contributors for Conde Nast to end racialized pay disparities and discriminatory editorial practices, often emerge in response to labor pressures related to widespread changes in media industries and production such as media convergence and platformization. Media convergence initially conveyed the insight that media content was no longer bound to a particular medium, market, industry, or method of delivery; instead it was produced and consumed in an increasingly integrated and interconnected manner with both corporate media producers and audiences having agency and influence in this development (Jenkins, 2004). In the instance of BA, this dynamic can be seen in the magazine’s attempt to broaden their readership, a notable change from the targeted and exclusionary ‘class publication’ model originally pioneered by Conde Nast in order to attract high-paying advertisers from luxury brands (Chayka, 2019). Conde Nast cultivated a wealthy readership with the intention of alienating non-wealthy audiences. This elitism may have helped Conde Nast outlets like BA to differentiate themselves and attract luxury advertisers prior to Web 2.0, but the mass amounts of consumer data that internet platforms like YouTube were now able to capture made digital media more attractive to advertisers. Yet, there are indicators that Conde Nast still aimed to adhere to a revenue strategy based on exclusivity, exacerbating its existing focus on content for an implicit wealthy and largely white audience.
Initially in the late 2000s, even as social media platforms proliferated, digital content production was not a top priority for Conde Nast. The corporation made appeals in advertising trade magazines, publicizing internal marketing research that argued print lifestyle magazines still maintained significant readership among millennials, particularly those in high income brackets (Bazilian, 2012; Media Industry Newsletter, 2012a, 2012b). However, by the 2010s, Conde Nast and other legacy print media conglomerates had to concede that in the era of social media and digital platforms, their businesses could not be sustained on print circulation and traditional forms of revenue. From 2000 to 2015, print advertising revenue fell across the industry by an estimated US$40 billion while Google and Facebook established a duopoly over digital advertising worth nearly US$60 billion (Wells, 2018). Competition from emerging online platforms as well as declining readership and advertising revenue signaled that publications like BA had to find a foothold in digital content.
In 2011, Conde Nast Entertainment launched to create digital video based on Conde Nast magazine articles and brands, signaling one way the company was developing itself in response to the digitalization of the publishing industry. By 2015, Conde Nast’s marketing department touted the expansion of their digital audience and their significant investment in talent and content for their publications’ web and social media presences (Entertainment Newsweekly, 2015). As Conde Nast Entertainment maintained and developed 18 YouTube channels, including BA’s, it became clear that the global media conglomerate was fully integrated into the digital media economy and the infrastructures of platform capitalism. As defined by Poell et al. (2019), platforms are ‘data infrastructures that facilitate, aggregate, monetize, and govern interactions between end-users and content and service providers’. Given the centrality of integration and interaction in media convergence, digital and social media platforms have become essential to the function of contemporary media corporations. In the case of Conde Nast Entertainment, the data infrastructure provided by YouTube allowed them access to a market for Conde Nast brands based on digital video. Conde Nast and BA were still able to offer advertisers targeted access to specific audiences through the affordances of the YouTube platform but at a larger scale than what a print publication provides.
Platforms necessitate an ever-increasing user base in order to generate value and are designed to extract user data to further attract more users. Nick Srnicek (2016) notes that platforms obfuscate their politics in order to appeal to the broadest base of potential users, and scholars such as Tressie McMillan Cottom (2020) and Safiya Noble (2018) stress the importance of specifying how platform opacity and algorithmic analysis of data, respectively, reinforce and reinscribe existing class and racial hierarchies. Even on a platform such as YouTube where the interface appears to offer users the ability to directly choose the content they watch, José van Dijck (2013: 113) emphasizes that these choices are ‘heavily directed by referral systems, search functions, and ranking mechanisms (e.g., PageRank)’. Additionally, researchers have observed that YouTube does not promote all content on the platform equally as algorithms privilege particular videos from preferred content sources to match to targeted audiences van Dijck (2013: 115). Because platforms like YouTube are created in and constitutive of political economies that produce and profit from global hierarchies of racism and other social, cultural, and class-based oppressions, they consequently deepen the material and economic consequences of those divisions.
However, the structural inequality exacerbated by algorithmic bias is often hidden in the presumed ‘objectivity’ of computational data that drives these platforms. Journalists on digital platforms must now compete with algorithmically derived metrics to justify their professionally developed editorial judgment on what stories deserve to be covered (Carlson, 2018). This means cultural production optimized for visibility on platforms is steeped in hidden but discriminatory decision-making as media industries and their workers adopt ‘platform practices’ to meet the consistently changing standards their content must oblige to reach their desired audiences (Duffy et al., 2019). A resignation statement posted on Twitter from Carla Lalli Music, a former BA editor and YouTube video host, demonstrates how the growth of the BA YouTube channel exacerbated existing issues with structural racism as content creation for internet platforms became an increasingly important part of their business model: By that time, video-related revenue was integral to Bon Appétit’s budget, and [Condé Nast Entertainment] relied on algorithms instead of instinct when determining who could appear in videos. Content decisions were largely data-driven. The editorial team had diminishing influence over video strategy. I felt that the expertise and interests of the hosts was less important to the decision-makers than platform-specific trends. The BA YouTube channel was large and continuing to grow, but my BIPOC colleagues had been sidelined, and I did not do nearly enough to check my privilege or help elevate the people around me.
3
One of the ways that BA management and Conde Nast Entertainment executives ‘sidelined’ workers of color could be seen in their decision to select white employees almost exclusively for paid video contracts while expecting employees of color to participate in video production without additional compensation (Pashman and Morgenstern, 2020). Even after this situation was made public through social media posts and BA staff interviews, Conde Nast Entertainment executives continued to enforce the pay disparity during negotiations in the summer of 2020 with BA employees and freelancers of color. The Sporkful, a podcast on food that tracked and reported on the BA Test Kitchen negotiations, summarized comments they received from Conde Nast about their rationale behind unequal pay for hosting and video appearances: While Conde Nast would not confirm details of the negotiations, they acknowledged to us that in general, yeah, some people from the Test Kitchen are paid more than others. And they say with good reason. Some hosts do better with the YouTube algorithm, they get more clicks, so they generate more revenue. Conde says it’s not about race (Pashman et al., 2020).
Inequitable decisions were justified and rationalized based on algorithmically derived metrics to promote senior staff (who had the highest performing videos on the YouTube channel based on those metrics) while clear racial bias was ignored.
Pay inequities among BA YouTube channel video hosts and contributors demonstrate how racial discrimination is structurally embedded in the cultural and business practices of legacy print media and continues to be a problem in an era of digital media predominance (Wilson and Constanza-Chock, 2011). Historically, Conde Nast practiced exclusion as an editorial strategy by intentionally alienating lower- and working-class audiences to cultivate a wealthy readership that they could sell to advertisers, resulting in largely white decision-makers driving content to appeal to largely white subscribers (Chayka, 2019). Even though Conde Nast and BA shifted from this outdated editorial strategy and began promoting more accessible, progressive, and diverse content to appeal to a broader base of potential readers on digital platforms, whiteness and class-based elitism still heavily influenced managerial decisions on video strategy, as well as their assessment of and interactions with staff. Testimonies from Black women and other people of color who worked at BA described how BA and Conde Nast management regularly engaged in favoritism and perpetuated racialized and gendered microagressions on their staff, limiting economic and professional opportunities for marginalized workers (Curto, 2020; Premack 2020a).
Race and gender in digital labor
As seen in the labor and compensation issues related to the BA YouTube channel, industrial and economic shifts have significant repercussions for those who must navigate these changes in their day-to-day work, especially workers who are minoritized along the lines of race and gender. The framework of digital labor helps illuminate the impacts of media convergence and platformization on the individual worker. Digital labor can be generally understood as any work that is part of the ‘collective work force that is required for the existence, usage and application of digital media [and is defined by] the industry they contribute to and in which capital exploits them’ (Fuchs, 2014: 4). This understanding of digital labor is not exclusive to jobs within the information and communications technology industry but recognizes digital labor across different occupations variably, as digital media and ICT capital impacts the daily labor of workers to varying degrees. At this point in the convergence and platformization of traditional print and digital media industries, it would be hard to find any print media worker whose job duties are entirely devoid of digital labor. Even media workers who aren’t employed by exclusively digital outlets are subject to the impact of media convergence and platform capitalism on the print industry.
Nicole Cohen’s (2019) research on the journalism industry highlights predominant digital labor issues that print journalists face in an era of media convergence and platform capitalism. These issues largely parallel the experiences of BA editorial and Test Kitchen workers who were increasingly asked to host and appear in YouTube videos. Continuous content creation while multitasking and multiskilling for duties that were not part of the worker’s initial job description increased the labor burden for journalists, and the eroded boundaries around job expectations and consequent feelings of stress, exhaustion, overwork, job insecurity and precariousness were also connected to the digitization of newsrooms (Cohen 2019). Poell et al. (2022: 124) additionally detail the particular conflicting pressures news workers face regarding social media platforms as they both compete with platforms for advertising revenue while also needing to engage with platforms to follow developing stories and promote their own work. This demonstrates how media convergence extends beyond its industrial and economic impacts and acts as a ‘cultural logic’ where the blurring of established models of production and distribution becomes an accepted mode of doing business that creates more instability and precarity for media workers overall (Deuze, 2009). For BA staff and other journalism and magazine workers, this blurring of production and distribution models was exemplified by the media industry’s ‘pivot to video’ in the mid-late 2010s (Barr, 2017). This shift was largely attributed to social media platforms’ prioritization of video content at that time, meaning video became a larger potential source of advertising revenue than ads presented on media outlet websites. It resulted in resources for editorial staff being diverted to video production and layoffs for many writers as well as pressure on existing writers to be able to assist under-resourced video operations (Moore, 2017).
The making of professional video content is time and labor intensive, involving pre-planning, day-of, and post-filming labor that is largely invisible to viewers and others not regularly involved in the production process. In an article focused on the digital labor issues of the BA YouTube channel, tech writer Victoria Song (2020) reported on her own experiences with the media industry’s ‘pivot to video’ amidst media convergence and the rise of internet platforms. Executives focused on ad revenue driven by video content push workers to produce more short online videos, expecting that they can be planned, shot, and published within the span of a few hours. Song labels these expectations ‘pure comedy’ and details the long list of tasks that video production encompasses: scripting, drafting shot lists, prepping or shopping for props (kitchen equipment and ingredients in the case of BA), camera setup, lighting setup, sound setup, shooting multiple takes, editing, pickup shoots, re-edits, and more. In Song’s estimation, a single YouTube video for a professional media outlet produced over 2 days is ‘speedy, and likely means multiple people have pulled long hours to make it happen’. A time demand shorter than that is ‘asking someone to work themselves to death’. Even as BA videos shifted from set-based, TV-style production methods toward on-location, vlog-style setups, the videomaking work still took a significant amount of time, skill, and labor for both the professional off-camera crew and the BA editorial and kitchen staff who were being asked to add video hosting and appearances to their regular workloads.
Premack’s (2020b) follow-up reporting on labor issues at BA also uncovered that the system used to vet pitches for digital video production at Conde Nast compounded managerial and algorithmic biases, effectively making it harder for employees to push for diversity and equity in video content. The ‘scale check’ system relied on both algorithmic data and managerial approval in order to greenlight concepts for video. Editorial gatekeepers at Conde Nast did not think video pitches featuring people of color – specifically Black women – would appeal to advertisers or viewers. Platform companies are similar to legacy media workplaces like Conde Nast due to their ‘notoriously homogeneous work cultures [that] are ill-equipped to navigate the intricacies of identity politics’, and this lack of understanding is replicated in platform content curation policies (Poell et al., 2022: 170). Managerial and platform logics both defaulted toward a conservative strategy of only wanting to produce more of what was successful in the past. In effect, this exacerbated racialized and gendered discrimination both onscreen and off as video ideas generated by women of color employees were undermined or subject to more scrutiny before being approved for production. Data driven algorithms reinforced managerial bias by providing apparently objective metrics that could be used to justify the reproduction of long-standing racialized and gendered workplace hierarchies at BA and throughout Conde Nast.
Along these same lines, Cohen (2019) notes that the problems digital labor creates for workers are not solely rooted in technological changes, but in the way management and industries navigate those changes while operating under the logics of platform capitalism. Cohen (2019: 572) further elaborates: …work pressures are not inherent to digital technologies themselves, but rather flow from management and production strategies, which now require media companies to produce massive amounts of content for a variety of media platforms—over which companies have no direct control—due to media concentration, declining print advertising revenue, shrinking staff, strategies of social media platforms, and competition, all stemming from for-profit logics of capitalist media production…
There were pathways to equity and fairness that Conde Nast Entertainment could have pursued to keep the BA YouTube channel operating with the same cast of on-camera talent that had unexpectedly captivated the internet and brought the BA brand back to cultural relevance for the younger audience the magazine sought to bring into their subscriber base. Instead, Conde Nast corporate executives refused to acknowledge the value of their employees and contributors of color, preserving structural discrimination and pay inequities while sabotaging their own media property whose success took years to figure out.
Production culture of the BA YouTube channel
An overview of the evolution BA’s YouTube channel provides context to as to how issues of discrimination and digital labor intensified as the channel changed its content strategy over several years. Early BA YouTube content largely functioned as filmed versions of magazine content and were produced in a manner aligned more with broadcast television, but the growth and popularity of the channel took off after the videos switched to a more casual, reality TV aesthetic that began to feature the personalities and interactions of BA employees. The first few years of the BA YouTube channel show inconsistent viewership numbers as the production team experimented with a variety of formats: recipe tutorials, restaurant reviews, interviews with celebrity chefs, and educational behind-the-scenes peeks into the food industry. These videos were mostly 1-3 min long, focused on informing audiences versus entertaining them, and were visually similar to the type of short segments one would find while flipping through food shows on television.
The BA YouTube channel had experimented with turning editorial staff into on-camera talent early in the channel’s history, but it took a few years for video producers to transition BA writers from stilted cooking experts preparing recipes in generic kitchen sets to relatable personalities who make food while joking around with coworkers in a bustling Test Kitchen workplace. In the earliest videos that bring in BA editorial staff as on-camera talent, the camera focuses on the ingredients and food preparation rather than the individual behind the counter. The BA and Conde Nast Entertainment production team began to make more progress in growing their YouTube audience as they developed different approaches to video content. An example of this can be seen in a video from February 2015, the earliest video on their page to break over one million views. ‘Working 24 Hours Straight at Waffle House’ followed Andrew Knowlton, the magazine’s Restaurants and Drinks editor at the time, as he carried out the task named in the title. It is a professionally produced video on the level of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives or other similar television food reality shows, but differs from earlier BA video content with its focus on entertainment versus education and its spotlighting of Knowlton and his interactions with Waffle House workers and diners rather than the Waffle House food itself. Subsequent videos between ‘Working 24 Hours Straight at Waffle House’ and the October 2016 release of the first episode of It’s Alive with Brad begin to bring in more BA editorial staff for instructional cooking videos but with a less formal aesthetic than the channel’s earlier videos. Video editors began to leave in moments of humor, small mistakes, and asides to the camera crew, and the cooking is now filmed inside of the Test Kitchen, a real working kitchen where the editorial staff try out the recipes before running them in the BA magazine or Web site. The evolving style of BA video content appeared to catch staff in their natural element, cooking while working for a vaunted food publication. Notably, this more casual approach on camera did not necessarily mean the videos were less work to produce than their previous incarnations.
Additionally, the directive to make video appearances was not meaningfully accompanied by on-camera training or reskilling for BA workers whose original jobs were primarily off-screen. During a behind-the-scenes panel event with fans, BA magazine staffers recalled the first time they were asked to film a video for the YouTube channel. Several similarities in their experiences emerged: resistance to becoming on-camera talent, being given little to no prep or pre-direction prior to filming, not knowing what to expect of the filming process, initially feeling nervous about being on camera, and reassurance from producers that it was fine if they made mistakes while cooking or ended up with a flawed dish at the end (The Bon Appétit Test Kitchen in Conversation, 2020). Amateurism and authenticity (which may either be genuine or performed) are often considered hallmarks of successful social media influencer content (Abidin, 2018). But these conditions of video production supported management’s presumption that BA staffers and contributors were not professional on-camera talent, rather their involvement with video production was minor in comparison to their compensated editorial or cooking work for the magazine. In an interview with Camille Squires (2020), Priya Krishna recalled that her initial unpaid video appearances were framed as an opportunity to do PR for her upcoming cookbook. Krishna, who was a contracted worker with BA, she soon realized that shooting videos for BA amounted to 3-4 h of unpaid work for her that generated material revenue for Conde Nast for only the immaterial benefit of ‘publicity’ she received in return. Krishna later requested compensation for her video appearances as part of her contracted work, but Conde Nast Entertainment refused additional compensation for salaried BA employees of color in exchange for their contributions to the YouTube channel. This pattern began with white BA employees who also appeared in videos without additional pay, though most of those workers then received video hosting contracts as the BA YouTube channel and the need to produce more video content grew.
When demand for video production increased, the staff selected for contracts with Conde Nast Entertainment were mostly white or white-presenting. However, the practice of asking BA workers to appear in videos uncompensated did not end. Workers of color were now being expected to participate in video production for the increasingly popular YouTube channel as a perk of an already desirable job in a competitive media industry. Discrimination and inequity in prestigious cultural industry work is well documented, but platform studies researchers are making it clear that these intersectional oppressions also exist in digital content creation – despite platforms having a perceived lower barrier to entry in comparison to legacy media (Poell et al., 2022: 128). In the case of the BA YouTube channel, the practice of uncompensated work preceded the division of paid video appearance and unpaid video appearances, but ultimately management chose not to confront the racialized inequality this arrangement now created.
The question arises – why did compensation issues not come up immediately once BA employees were tasked with additional on-camera duties? Submitting to exploitative working conditions is normalized in the creative and cultural industries. Research on media worker labor reveals a dynamic where the value of enacting the passion, creativity, and autonomy associated with media occupations elides structural issues such as the decline of sustainable pay, standard benefits, and unionization (De Peuter, 2011; Ross, 2009). This initially passionately embraced insecurity is replicated or heightened for digital media workers and others creating content for social media platforms (Bishop, 2021; Duffy et al., 2021; Hou, 2019; Poell et al., 2022; Prasad, 2019). Requiring precarity and uncompensated labor as conditions of employment generates a labor pool limited to candidates from more privileged backgrounds and makes it more difficult for marginalized workers to break into media industries as well as sustain their careers. But when BA decided to turn the camera onto their own workforce in order to create popular YouTube content, they also set the stage for exposing their own management’s perpetuation of systemic racism and digital labor exploitation.
Following the success of It’s Alive with Brad, the BA YouTube channel shifted to producing more videos that combined culinary infotainment with behind-the-scenes access to the workplace and work relationships of BA staff members and freelancers. This formula was successful in attracting millions of YouTube subscribers who largely encompassed the millennial and young adult markets that the magazine had been working to entice for years. But, it also meant that BA was no longer just making content about food, they were telling a story about themselves as a brand and an employer. As John Caldwell (2008: 5) notes in Production Cultures, industry produced self-reflexivity is not a window into an authentic behind-the-scenes reality but allows for ‘studying the industry’s own self-representation, self-critique, and self-reflection’. For BA, the increased use of their real-life staff and workspace inadvertently provided a revealing look at the types of people who worked – and who didn’t work – at the magazine. The heretofore behind-the-scenes exclusion of people of color in legacy media, systemic racism in managerial practices at Conde Nast, culture of racist microaggressions at BA, and biased algorithms of social media platforms produced and revealed a situation where all the editorial staff hosting their own YouTube shows were white.
Notably, although Black chefs and guests had been featured in a few BA videos, no Black staff members (of which there were only one or two during the height of the BA YouTube channel’s popularity) were asked to make recurring appearances or host Test Kitchen videos. Video producers made some attempts to diversify the on-camera talent by hiring a few freelancers of color – such as Indian American food writer Krishna and Somalian chef Hawa Hassan – and enlisting four Asian American and Latinx BA staff members to make increasingly frequent appearances in videos. However, this was diversity as tokenism rather than substance as the BA video contributors of color attained visibility on the YouTube channel, but not increased editorial or managerial power or equity in pay or status compared to their white coworkers. None of the BA staff members of color were paid for their video work and Hassan stated she was paid a day rate of US$400 for each of the two videos she filmed – which were shot in October 2019 yet released in February 2020 for Black History Month (Nolan, 2020). Although Test Kitchen videos and interviews with on-camera staff from 2018 to 2020 portrayed an increasingly diverse kitchen where colleagues collaborated easily and were fond of one another, unresolved tensions around existing racial inequalities regarding pay, editorial opportunities, and respect at work intensified as the popularity of the BA brand was on the rise.
Unrecognized and unpaid labor offline and online
Digital labor and platform practices are understood as contemporary sites of worker exploitation, but legacy media companies have long relied on worker self-exploitation and uncompensated labor to function (Fast et al., 2016; Poell et al., 2022; Ross, 2009). As a case study, the BA YouTube channel highlights a continuation of this established dynamic when BA staff and freelancers took on the work of becoming social media microcelebrities to promote the magazine’s brand with younger audiences. This phenomenon was especially true for women of color at BA whose presence in YouTube videos enhanced the appearance of a diverse and progressive workplace that BA desired to portray. Feminist scholars of labor and STS emphasize that women’s offline reproductive labor is essential to the development and growth of digital platforms, even as it is often obscured and understudied (Gregg and Andrijasevic, 2019). Additionally, Marion Crain et al. (2016: 4) explicate that technology and precarity exacerbate invisible work that is not only gendered but racialized in offline workplaces where ‘invisibility applies to a larger range of labor performed inside formal employment relationships’. Women of color who worked at BA often took on the burden of pushing management to take issues of diversity and inclusion seriously, especially as the production of digital content meant the magazine’s stories were being read and viewed more widely online. In 2016, editorial staffer Christina Chaey, a Korean American woman who also appeared uncompensated in Test Kitchen YouTube videos, connected BA’s lack of racial diversity among their employees and management to the racism endemic in their online content. Chaey was writing in response to the outpouring of negative social media reactions regarding a BA video featuring a white chef telling viewers the correct way to eat pho. She specifically notes that ‘the conversations happening while this video was being scripted, shot, and edited would have been radically different if just one person of color (POC) had been involved in the editorial process’ and that a desire for ‘sexy packaging that would make this video stand out and get clicks’ contributed to the video’s racially reductive framing (the title of the video was ‘Pho is the New Ramen’) (Chaey, 2021). Ultimately, Chaey’s article offering a corrective to the unexamined whiteness behind the editorial decisions at BA went unpublished at the time and only resurfaced after reporters began investigating the pay inequities and other discriminatory practices at BA and Conde Nast after the summer of 2020.
Racialized invisibility conducted by minoritized workers in majority white organizations is theorized by Skeete and Harvey Wingfield (2016) as ‘racial tasks’. Racial tasks are often not compensated as additional work, even though they demand extra affective and emotional labor from minoritized workers in order to ‘maintain [the] normative whiteness in organizations’ (Skeete and Harvey Wingfield, 2016: 48) that majority white workplaces – such as legacy media corporations—rely on to keep functioning on a regular basis. In interviews with the only Black employees at BA during the summer of Conde Nast’s ‘racial reckoning’, Ryan Walker-Hartshorn and Jesse Sparks discussed the types of unpaid racial tasks they carried out for the publication. Their unacknowledged labor helped the magazine’s print efforts and involved engagement with BA’s growing online audience – despite not being featured in Test Kitchen videos. Their editorial contributions expanded the diversity of BA’s food coverage, but they were also called to act as ‘cultural consultants’ to help assess the magazine’s responses to social media criticism and skepticism to the magazine’s coverage of communities of color (Lee, 2020; Walker-Hartshorn and Moore, 2021). BA management deployed Black and Brown workers to bolster the apparent diversity of their workforce in YouTube videos and relied on of workers of color to create digital content related to food experiences and expertise that were not in the purview of white staffers. The performance of racial tasks also extends from the workplace to workers’ accounts on social media platforms. Williams et al. (2019) contend that people of color must maintain surveillance over their own emotions in online spaces and on their personal social media accounts as a condition of work in majority white spaces. Social media usage also often occurs in an environment of ‘context collapse’, meaning disparate audiences from normally disconnected social and professional settings are now privy to a singular feed from an individual’s account (Pitcan et al., 2018). In the media industries, workers frequently use social media for personal branding, self-promotion, and networking. The combination of personal and professional audiences for a single social media feed can compel marginalized workers to moderate their online reactions to instances of discrimination in their workplaces or in the larger society to remain employable in an industry still managed by mostly white powerbrokers. For many years, workers of color kept their criticisms of BA off of their personal social media feeds, but Teclemariam’s tweet referencing former Editor-in-Chief Rapoport’s brownface photo opened the door for more people to come forward with the truth of what it was like to work at BA. As people across the country were also navigating the stresses of a pandemic and refusing to be civil in the face of blatant anti-Black violence, the momentum at the time of the BA scandal was on the side of speaking truth to power.
Conclusion: Opportunity for change or more of the same?
BA resumed posting YouTube videos in October 2020 following the hiring of a Black Editor-in-Chief and more people of color in managerial and on-camera roles, but the publication quickly replicated old mistakes when a featured recipe in their December 2020 issue culturally appropriated Haitian cuisine and included a Haitian chef in the byline without her consent (Haylock, 2020). In this incident, as before, BA and Conde Nast attempted to resolve the perception of their being a racist workplace without addressing the fundamentals of fair attribution and equitable labor and material compensation. Although digital media has been heralded as a more democratic and accessible entry point into media work for people of color, legacies of discrimination in traditional media and discriminatory systems embedded in the structure of the internet and mechanics of social media are still significant obstacles for people of color who are part of successful media enterprises or who have achieved recognition and acclaim for their work. Digital labor, which increases the responsibilities of media workers without equivalent increases in pay, exacerbates inequalities, especially when management and editorial gatekeepers already undervalue workers of color and limit their opportunities. Bon Appetit and Conde Nast’s failure to retain the vast majority of the on-camera Test Kitchen talent who made their YouTube channel a success demonstrates how easy it is to project the illusion of a diverse and inclusive workplace on social media and how stubborn media institutions can be when faced with the need to make changes that grant workers of color parity, especially when it comes to fairly recognizing and compensating their work.
As the divisions between legacy media and digital media continue to erode, it remains urgent to address existing racialized and gendered inequalities as well as emerging and exacerbated forms of exploitation arising from the platformization of legacy media work. During the same time period when BA staffers and freelancers of color were negotiating their pay for video appearances, three other Conde Nast publications were also in negotiations with the company over their first union contract. Union members who worked for The New Yorker, Ars Technica, and Pitchfork actively posted on Twitter about their campaign for additional pay and benefits, engaging readers of those publications and other media workers. In contrast to the BA workers who tried to leverage individual contributions to the Test Kitchen video series in order to argue for pay equity between white hosts and employees of color, workers at The New Yorker, Ars Technica, and Pitchfork organized across their full digital newsroom staff. Negotiations between BA video contributors and Conde Nast Entertainment broke down after a few months, but the unionized workers of Conde Nast’s other publications were able to bargain their first contract with the company in the fall of 2021. A joint press release from the three publications’ unions outlined their contract victories, including some that address issues of digital labor and gesture toward pathways to equity for historically marginalized workers:
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• Clear language around what constitutes a workday or workweek in order to protect employees’ work-life balance • An end to nondisclosure agreements that prevent employees from speaking out about workplace harassment or discrimination • Policies to hire and retain new staff who come from traditionally underrepresented groups
These are major wins for digital media workers who previously had no contract to protect themselves from continually eroding job standards. And more recently, BA workers helped to initiate another opportunity to organize more broadly across Conde Nast.
In March 2022, 500 staff members from Conde Nast legacy media brands (including BA) and the video production workers of Conde Nast Entertainment went public with their campaign for union recognition. To promote the Conde Union effort, members released a video riffing off of Vogue’s popular ‘73 Questions’ digital video series. In contrast to the ‘73 Questions’ format which typically consist of a camera following one celebrity as they answer the titular 73 questions in one take, Conde Union’s ‘73 Answers with Conde Workers’ features a variety of Conde Nast employees answering the question, ‘Why are we forming a union at Conde Nast?’ 5 Notably, the first person to appear onscreen is Chaey from the BA Test Kitchen YouTube series, but many other workers covering several other Conde Nast brands and job classifications are also featured. Additionally, the video’s cinematographer flips the camera around to allow video production workers to appear and then zooms into a computer screen to highlight workers who labor for Conde Nast off-screen. The video communicates the breadth of the different types of workers that the legacy media company employs to produce its various print, web, editorial, social media and digital video content through a lower-third graphic that displays the worker’s name, job title, and which Conde Nast brand they work for. The company’s long-standing problems with discrimination are also referenced directly in the video from 1:31 to 1:40 with workers calling for ‘all voices [to be] represented equally’, ‘more than just one person of color in every meeting’, and a working environment where ‘any worker from any background can thrive’. Conde Nast voluntarily recognized Conde Union in September 2022, but the lessons from the BA YouTube channel’s tumultuous summer of 2020 highlight important areas where future contracts for Conde Nast and other legacy media workers can more deeply address multi-layered, systemic problems in their industry. Of particular importance is the need to recognize and compensate marginalized workers for the invisiblized labor they already take on when working in majority white institutions in addition to the emerging work duties and expectations created through digital labor. Examples of policies to explore could include compensation for video and social media content creation on official and personal accounts related to work, commitment from management to give more weight to workers’ editorial judgment on news and digital content pitches versus overreliance on biased algorithms, compensation for uncredited work on issues of diversity that are publicly attributed to management or the larger brand, and compensation or additional time off for employees of color who are often expected to help lead on company-wide diversity initiatives. As journalists and other legacy media workers continue to unionize in the wake of the digitalization of their industry, the contract language and workplace policies these efforts champion should specifically redress the digital continuities and changes in the offline and online discrimination and unrecognized labor imposed on marginalized workers.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author Biography
Emmelle Israel is a doctoral candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is researching the impact of labor unions and guilds in the media industries, unionization efforts in the videogame industry, and cultural representations of work, labor, and unions.