The Erin Overbey Saga: How to get into and excel at The New Yorker

There’s soon going to be a vacancy in The New Yorker, and if they’re not hiring internally, you can probably think of applying! That is, if you’re a white male. Because then, the world’s your oyster — and so is The New Yorker!

There are some important things you must remember while applying. But before we delve into this, do you know how this vacancy suddenly opened up? Funny story. The New Yorker recently put their Archive Editor, Erin Overbey, under a performance review, and shortly after, had to let go of her. She must have really messed up — after all she was with them since 1994. What did she do to suddenly not be worth it?

Whatever it was, please make sure you do not end up doing what Overbey did.

The former Archive Editor began receiving multiple complaints about having “factual inaccuracies” in her copies and was said to display an immense amount of “disrespect.” And, while this can be purely coincidental, I think it’s also worth mentioning that just before Overbey’s abilities took a dip to the point of conducting a performance review on July 17, she sent across a ‘scurrilous email raising concerns about the gender inequality and inclusion at the magazine on July 14. So yes, don’t ever do that either. Just in case.

As a word of caution, a couple other things she did should also be mentioned. She kept her two weekly archive newsletters consistently as the most top-performing ones at the magazine with a unique open rates of ~72% and ~54% respectively, and a subscriber base at around ~270K. And she held more experience than the male editor before her, but drew a 20% lesser salary at the same job.

And Overbey began calling out the management. She both publicly and internally called those out who hired the underqualified male editor. She claimed that there were no Black editors for feature pieces working at The New Yorker; and this meant that “almost none of the longform feature pieces — those sent up for Pulitzers, etc. — had been edited by a Black editor in nearly 15 years.” Further, the former editor also stated that most prestigious magazines continue to have mastheads that resemble “member registries at Southern country clubs circa 1950.”

She also criticised her former employer for becoming the “ground zero for a kind of regressive literary gatekeeping, class exclusivity & old-school cultural thinking that simply no longer have any relation to, or frankly relevance in, the modern world as we know it.” And what did her vocal activism result in?

Not only did Overbey lose her job, but she also faced an attack at her reputation. Before her sacking, she was a well performing editor at one of the world’s biggest media houses, and now she is targeted by the very industry as an ‘unprofessional’. Let’s take a quick look at how Daily Mail presents the case.

They took the effort to mark her as a ‘FIRED EDITOR’, highlighting it in a red colour that pinches your eyes. No respect to her position in the industry, no respect to the readers eyes, no respect to aesthetics. Any concern about diversity seems like an afterthought.

Among the many replies on Overbey’s tweets, Ahmar Khan stands out. He extended his support and offered to help if she was planning on taking the matter to the court. Khan was fired by CBC earlier and fought a similar battle. It all began when, like many others, he was outraged after hearing Don Cherry’s xenophobic outburst on a game preview show, Hockey Night in Canada, in November 2019. Let’s briefly glance over what both the men did.

• So Cherry, talking about the immigrants, said: “You people … you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada, these guys paid the biggest price.”
• And Khan, offended by Cherry’s remarks, tweeted that his Coach’s Corner segment should be cancelled because Cherry’s “xenophobic comments being aired weekly are deplorable.” When CBC forced him to take down the tweet, he mentioned it to another news site that he hoped would be more empathetic.

CBC chose to fire both.

Little has changed from 2016 when CNN’s internal data showed that African-American employees were forced to hit a “glass ceiling” at work as they consistently received the lowest ratings on performance reviews and rarely got to be in the upper ranks of management. DeWayne Walker, one of their African-American employees, was the one who sued CNN mentioning that he had been passed over for promotion nine times.

Notice a pattern yet?

The problem, although is larger than these three incidents — it’s all part of larger issue of systematic discrimination. Between 1997 and 2018, there were 1,889,631 complaints of discrimination filed with the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). This is the governmental organization that enforces civil rights in workspace across USA. In 2017, about 34% of these were related to race and 30% to gender. Of all the complaints, 64% were officially dismissed as invalid after investigation and 82% delivered no form of relief to the worker.

I wonder if Overbey would try her luck against these odds. I can only imagine the mental, monetary and physical toll this would take on her.

And I am delusional enough to let myself hope something will come out of it.

Anyway, she has now left the company and leaves behind a vacancy. So if you’ve been wanting to get into one of the most prestigious media houses, now you know how to, and you can apply, if you dare to.