The toxic culture of the Lawrence Journal-World

It’s been nearly four months since I left what was the closest thing I thought I could have to a dream job at age 23.

Working at a solid, mid-size daily newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas covering my alma mater (an always-interesting beat that churns out almost more news than one reporter can cover) and the Kansas Statehouse was something I thought was ideally suited for me.

And for seven months, even through the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was. Even with remarkably busy stretches that included double digit story counts in a 60-hour work week, it was important work that I was happy to do.

This idealism about the job itself never went away. Even after everything that happened following those first seven months, I would go back in a heartbeat if I knew things would be different — but I’m certain it wouldn’t be.

I joined the Lawrence Journal-World in February 2020, just before the pandemic changed everything. And for the first few months, everything about the job functioned as well as one could ask for.

Then, my coworkers and I started a book club and had our first meeting over the summer (we read and discussed Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, which I promise is relevant to this piece). This was around the time that America was appropriately jolted with nationwide protests and calls for structural changes to policing after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (and the countless other Black folks that came before them).

The combination of Just Mercy and the nationwide unrest we were all watching unfold in real time led our book club into discussing our workplace and how the newspaper of a supposedly-liberal bastion of Kansas covered racism, People of Color, and a myriad other topics that media across the country were introspectively examining at the time (or at least should have been).

We realized that as reporters we felt a distinct lack of ability to advocate for our own work or the sources who oftentimes risked a lot to talk to us and tell their stories. Yet there were many times in which we were surprised by editorial decisions that ended up in the published versions of our work — and the few times which we’d later raise concerns, they were mostly rebuffed.

We also discovered some alarming pay disparities amongst ourselves at that first book club meeting (side note: talk to your coworkers about what you make! It’s not taboo!). For example, I started at the paper making at least a few thousand dollars more in annual salary than reporters who had been there for years without a substantive raise. I’m not going into specifics here because I don’t want to speak for my former coworkers or make their current jobs any harder than they already are — but needless to say, finding this out rubbed all of us the wrong way.

This meeting is what jumpstarted conversations that we’d only previously had in passing, and mostly as a joke when a inconsequential managerial decision was made that we didn’t agree with: form a union to protect our work and give ourselves the ability to advocate for ourselves without fear of losing our jobs in the middle of a pandemic.

With a small staff, we knew that getting a union approved through the required federal processes wouldn’t be very difficult in and of itself. We announced that a union had formed in September, and thankfully my former colleagues voted to approve that union in a formal election just after Christmas.

What we weren’t expecting was the complete and utter retaliation we faced from our local management once they were notified of our efforts —especially because the impetus to form a union really was more about the Journal-World’s parent company, Ogden Newspapers, than how the paper ran locally.

***

While I don’t pretend like any workplace is ever perfect, the Journal-World newsroom (even though it was virtual due to Covid-19) metastasized into a comprehensively toxic environment after the top brass was officially notified of our union in September.

• Reporters, myself included, began to get called into the office (again, in the middle of the pandemic) for one-on-one meetings with the two top editors. These were pitched as meetings to touch base, but would ultimately devolve into disciplinary meetings about supposed “job performance” issues that were either resolved months earlier, or more importantly hadn’t been an issue at all prior to the unionization.
• The one-on-one meetings then slowly escalated into more substantive staff-wide changes that never existed (at least in my tenure) before we organized. Mandatory staff meetings now took place every Monday morning where each reporter had to detail what was on their plate for the coming week, and get tacit approval for whatever story was to run over the coming weekend.

(To be clear, this is a common practice in most newsrooms, but was never something the Journal-World required of its reporters before they took a stand for their rights as workers).

• Management also required reporters to clear every request for public records with them before sending it to a public agency, and forbade reporters from communicating with those agencies about the requests unless the communications were also explicitly cleared beforehand.

(This is not a normal newsroom practice. Of course, the appropriate parties have to be consulted before *paying* for public records out of the newspaper budget, but never before have I worked for a publication that required prior approval of FOIA requests themselves. This practice served only as a method for editors to retain control over reporters and slow down an already-gridlocked process due to Kansas’ open records laws.)

***

Content warning: Going forward, I discuss events that involved racism and the coverage of sexual violence, sexual assault, and rape.

While there were several other day-to-day atmosphere changes following the unionization, I want to lay out a timeline of some key events before, during and after our collective organization that led to the unceasingly toxic environment that I understand is still continuing.

To be clear, these are things that I personally experienced while still on staff. I’m not going to detail stories I’ve heard from my former coworkers since I left at the end of October, simply because I wasn’t there and they aren’t my stories to tell.

However, it’s my hope that sharing this information gives the Douglas County community and the greater Journal-World readership some insight not only into why the reporters and copy editors unionized, but why it remains so important for the long-term future of the newspaper.

• June: The phrase “expletive-laden” is edited in to a story about Black folks who were protesting at a local government meeting. This was not my story, but as far as I can remember, the edit was made without the reporter’s consent and the change was discovered in the next day’s print edition.

First, this is an edit that undoubtedly would never have been made if the protest was made up of white people swearing. It would’ve been described as “passionate” or “lively”. In other words, it was a racist edit.

Second, one of my former coworkers bravely took it upon themselves to write management a lengthy and well thought-out email seeking to further discuss how the newspaper frames protests and greater issues about covering people of color.

After several days with no response, the staff finally received a lengthy email from the editor that essentially said “we didn’t mean to offend anyone with this phrasing, so we didn’t.” It was a collective slap in the face to the concerns raised by my coworker, and an even bigger affront to the people of color that the Journal-World has just as much responsibility to cover and cover fairly.

Note: Around this same time, several reporters inquired with management about changing the newspaper’s style and capitalizing the “B” when writing about Black people and the Black experience. Each time, the request was flatly denied since the AP Stylebook had not made the change official. It’s crucial to point out, however, that world-renowned media outlets across the country (New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etc.) quickly made the change on their own without waiting for the Stylebook. For reference, George Floyd was killed on May 25, sparking months of nationwide protests and calls for change. The AP Stylebook, and therefore the Journal-World, didn’t make the style change to capitalize Black until July 20.

• October: Prior to the 2020 election, the paper put together a voter guide for all of the area candidates in the federal, state and local elections. I was assigned ~90 inches of copy for the section, which is a hefty additional workload given how small our staff is and the need to still put out a paper each day. But political science is one of my two degrees, so I truly didn’t mind the work.

I finished filing the three stories maybe an hour past our given deadline, which I freely admit was a mistake and not one I intended. But it’s still a fact that those stories, combined with my other daily workload, resulted in some 6,000 words of copy having to be written in one day—while I did the best I could to get everything in on time, it just didn’t quite work out that day.

The stories, though, ran as scheduled in the voter guide, and I didn’t get any questions about them from the copy desk nor the paper’s editors, so I was under the impression everything was fine with the content.

Then a few days after the voter guide was published (and not long after the union was publicly announced) I received an unexpected call to meet in the office on maybe two hours notice.

Once I arrived, I was raked over the coals for the next 45 minutes—my work ethic questioned, my journalistic integrity challenged, and my job status vaguely threatened.

This, I was told, is because the voter guide stories weren’t up to par.

I was completely caught off guard, as the stories were about a subject matter I know well, and again, I received no inquiries about the content from a single person at the Journal-World before they were published.

Yet, I was lambasted about the missed deadline and accused of being a biased reporter. The top editors screamed (at times literally) at me for three of the six candidates I was tasked with covering not responding to interview requests—which any reporter knows, you can only control up to a certain point.

And I was accused of overstepping my bounds as a reporter by pointing out that Roger Marshall, now Kansas’ junior senator, lied in an interview with me about his senate candidacy when I asked him about the government’s response to Covid-19.

Dr. Marshall stated that in the beginning months of the pandemic, official death estimates from the respiratory virus were projected to be somewhere in the range of 2 million Americans. Since, at the time, the virus had killed only 200,000 Americans, the government had obviously done a good job and far exceeded expectations, right?

No.

That estimate of 2 million deaths? Marshall left out a key caveat: That’s if the government does *nothing*. In reality, early projections of Covid-19 showed that experts expected loss of life in the country to range from 80,000–160,000 by August, at which time containment measures could take place and the pandemic could ultimately subside. Other countries have, of course, shown that with proper government intervention, Covid-19 spread can be managed and lives can be saved.

But Marshall ardently defended the Trump administration’s response to the virus, and I was explicitly told that pointing out the flaws in his reasoning was “PR spin”.

I want to be clear here: A claim made by a then-sitting Congressman and now a member of the U.S. Senate that fell apart with the slightest bit of scrutiny was left in a story meant to educate voters on their choices in a looming election, while subsequent information which indicated that Congressman was lying was removed from the story without my knowledge or any institutional discussion.

I was dejected after this meeting, in which my bosses launched the types of attacks at my character both as a person and as a journalist that typically only come from the worst kind of internet trolls. They did this after over seven months of my never having received a single piece of negative feedback from either of them—yet coincidentally, less than two weeks after my coworkers and I formed a union.

Then came two weeks later.

• September/October: (The timeline here is a little wonky, but it all eventually connects) On top of managing an unprecedented pandemic, all universities that get federal funding had to implement sweeping new rules about how they must handle reports of sexual violence under Title IX in roughly 100 days, or risk losing that federal funding. Those changes had to be implemented by August, so around September, I began trying to write a story about it, specifically how it would impact KU (which has been in the news for the last half-decade about how poorly it handles reports of sexual violence).

Trying ended up being the operative word with this story.

The first time I tried to file it for a weekend edition, I was told that another story was more timely and pressing:

A few days earlier, I’d had a brief conversation with an editor about the butterfly migration, but was unaware it had been assigned to me as an actual story. That same week, a colleague had asked all of the reporters for any lingering story ideas we had, as they were in search of ideas for that week—I was swamped with the Title IX story and a number of other stories that needed written, so I offered up the butterfly migration story as an option for them.

After the editor realized this, I was told that I had to write the migration story and that the Title IX piece needed to wait.

“Title IX is a complete abstraction for most readers,” the editor told me.

When I attempted to explain the timeliness of the Title IX story and why I’d passed along the migration story to my colleague in search of ideas, the editor’s attitude toward the topic became even more concerning:

“Something to consider: readers have asked us about the butterflies, no one has asked about Title IX,” they said.

On top of being entirely untrue (I’d had several people inquire with me about how the federal policy changes would impact KU), it was a deeply insulting and flippant manner in which to discuss the newsworthiness of one story versus another.

Sexual assault affects 1 in 4 college women, a lesser percentage of men, and a disproportionately high rate of BIPOC. Experts said when the policies were first finalized that they would give universities leeway to even further shove off reports of the worst thing to happen in a person’s life, so to not explain them to a readership that includes college students for 9 months out of the year was absolutely ridiculous to me.

However, I also made clear during these initial discussions that I wasn’t refusing the monarch migration story, which I did write, and then came back to the Title IX story the following week.

I spoke with the director of the university office that handles Title IX reports (a notoriously tough topic to interview KU officials about at all) for almost an hour about the changes, and read through a majority of the thousands of pages of federal regulations to decipher the impact for the KU community.

It was a lengthy story, 2,600 words or so, and the first time I filed it, it didn’t run because I didn’t “give enough notice” about how long it was for it to go in the weekend print edition. It was longer than any story I’d previously filed at the paper, so I didn’t think too much of it.

Then, I was told it needed significant cuts, edits and additions before it could run—this is normally a common occurrence in newsrooms, and I went ahead and made the changes discussed with my direct editor.

The next draft, which was 700 words shorter than the first filing, the story’s length became the top issue. All of a sudden, it was no longer acceptable to run a 2,100 word story in the Journal-World. However, given the complexities of the story topic, I wasn’t comfortable cutting anymore than already had been without drastically taking away from the average reader’s understanding.

Still, I was told to cut another *30 inches* from the story, which would’ve chopped a third off of its total length. Again, I wasn’t comfortable with this, as cutting that much of the story would’ve severely diminished the story’s quality and squashed its purpose of informing people about these complicated and potentially important rules.

If you search the Journal-World archives, you won’t find this story. It never ran. After I tried to advocate for running the story at its full length due to the importance of the topic and asked for advice on where other cuts needed to be made if that’s what it took to get the information to the public, I was told that reporters were routinely given length limits (at least at the Journal-World, this is entirely untrue. Other than this story I was not given a single length requirement for any article I published) and if I couldn’t adhere to that policy, there would be the equivalent of a disciplinary meeting.

That disciplinary meeting came during the last week of October, and was the single most shocking experience of my (albeit short) professional career. I was told that I was a bad and biased journalist for writing that former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was “controversial” (she’s the only presidential cabinet member in the history of the United States to require a tiebreaking vote from the vice president) and was told that I essentially stepped outside the bounds of journalism for not giving enough credence to the idea that men being falsely accused of sexual violence is a pervasive issue and that it was a legitimate impetus for the DeVos administration’s changes being implemented.

That’s because it’s not. Rape is statistically the least falsely reported crime in existence, and those statistics don’t differ much (if at all) on a college campus. In fact, if anything, sexual violence is underreported on college campuses because of attitudes just like what my former editors displayed toward me.

I referred in the story to instances of men being falsely accused of rape on a college campus and having their lives ruined as “mostly anecdotal evidence” with regards to the DeVos administration’s implementation of the new Title IX policies. That’s because the instances are just that: anecdotal. There are absolutely singular instances of college-aged men being falsely accused of rape and having those charges follow them for years — that’s despicable and is never OK.

But it’s simply not a statistically significant factor in how sexual violence is handled on college campuses. In the #MeToo era, I felt a keen responsibility to make sure I didn’t give too much credence to this false dichotomy surrounding sexual violence. Those who report sexual violence should be believed in all cases, and it’s blatantly inappropriate to do anything otherwise, even from a standpoint of journalistic objectivity.

So in this final disciplinary meeting, I was again insulted as a person and as a reporter for writing facts in a declarative manner. I was told that I “wasn’t the kind of journalist” the newspaper was looking for because I didn’t want to write about issues such as sexual violence from a both-sides perspective (because there are not both sides to that issue, just to be clear).

I decided during that meeting that the editorial decisions being made at the Journal-World were nothing short of editorial malpractice, and that I would submit my resignation from the paper soon after (which I did two days later).

***

Some final thoughts:

I hoped that I would never have to release this piece. But after my former colleague Mackenzie Clark had to leave her position at the paper today (Feb. 9, 2021), I felt compelled to speak out and let the Journal-World readership know that my leaving the paper and Mackenzie following suit a few months later were not isolated incidents of disgruntled employees.

Our terminations were constructed by local managers Chad Lawhorn and Kim Callahan. In labor law terminology, this means that the work environment was deliberately made so intolerable that we were left with no other choice but to resign.

I’m as close to 100% certain as I can be that our constructed terminations would not have happened if we hadn’t unionized. To my knowledge, neither Mackenzie nor I received a single piece of negative feedback or substantive disciplinary action prior to the newsroom’s unionization.

Yet less than two weeks after we notified the company of that decision to unionize, the two employees with the most willingness to speak out in the workplace were systematically pushed out of it during the middle of a pandemic.

This is also illegal, just for reference.

I also want to make this clear: The Journal-World could still be a thriving newspaper that provided an important service to its community. But because local management and an oppressive corporate cash cow decided they didn’t want their employees to advocate for wages over $40,000 and affordable health care, that they’d blow up the infrastructure that made the paper valuable.

It didn’t have to be like this.

Now, Douglas County, this is what you’re left with: a newspaper ran by editors who refuse to acknowledge points of view different from their own, and three full time news reporters to cover an area of over 100,000 people (my former colleagues are fantastic, please don’t take this to mean you shouldn’t support their work!).

I was at the Journal-World for nine months. In that time, I witnessed active racism in the editing of stories about people of color, a blatant disregard for covering this community in any way other than the status quo, the covering up for politicians who now sit in the greatest deliberative body in the country, and editors who think that the issue of Title IX and sexual violence is “a complete abstraction” for most readers.

Lawrence has been my home for almost six years now, including my time in college, and it simply deserves better. It deserves a newspaper that will hold truth to power, even when unpopular, and that continues to evolve with the needs of all of its community members. My colleagues and I tried valiantly to deliver on that need, but as you can see, those efforts came up short.

The folks I worked with who remain at the paper still do great work, and I don’t want this message to detract from that at all.

But Douglas County might want to ask itself how much greater that work could be if editors at the local level weren’t actively hampering the efforts of their reporters.