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Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Senior editor at Automattic. Editor at Longreads.
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‘Social Media Managers Are First Responders’

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INDIA - 2019/08/30: In this photo illustration online social media logos are seen displayed on a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Constantly navigating a 2020 news cycle that eats itself and a Twitter stream that endlessly flows, “social media managers are first responders,” writes Marta Martinez. The people tasked with handling social media at a company are expected to stay abreast of what’s happening in the world, react swiftly, and act as an official voice for a brand. Yet individuals in these roles are not always provided the support and resources to do their jobs well, and the time and effort involved in this type of work, including strategy, content creation, and community management, is often dismissed as trivial. Hey, can you whip up a few tweets? Can you promote this on our accounts? Let’s launch more channels! Let’s build a community! 

Under “normal” circumstances, social media management is hard work that requires a varied skillset. In 2020, it’s a stressful and hazardous job, says Matthew Kobach, who worked as the New York Stock Exchange’s social media manager, and one that should be paid accordingly.

At OneZero, Martinez reports on the experiences of social media managers and strategists during the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, at organizations like DCist, the University of Michigan, and Mount Sinai Health System.

Brown has not been able to meet most of her co-workers in person yet and, as a social media manager and a young Black woman, she often wonders whether she is being taken seriously as an equal professional within the newsroom. Social media managers are in high demand. But these jobs are often performed by young people who are underpaid. The national average salary of a social media manager is about $57,000, considerably less than what marketing managers make — over $135,000.

Social media managers are making important — and very public — decisions all the time. They need to respond to news and conversations quickly to be effective. The public voice and image of companies, media outlets, public figures, and institutions are in their hands at a very delicate time. Yet their job is still often seen as something anyone could do, or left to those who are just getting started in their careers.

“It’s like putting an intern to be your press secretary,” says Alan Rosenblatt, a social media consultant for political campaigns who teaches digital and social media strategy at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

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November 11, 2020
Categories: Business & Tech, Editor's Pick, Featured, Highlight, Quotes, Technology
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‘You Just Have to Have a Strong Mind’: Shantonia Jackson on Working in a Nursing Home During the Pandemic

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Photo by Matthias Zomer / Pexels

This summer, Gabriel Winant, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, interviewed Shantonia Jackson, a certified nursing assistant (CNA) who works at City View Multicare Center in Cicero, Illinois. CNAs like Jackson provide general care (making sure patients eat and shower) and are often the only people that offer support and companionship when residents need someone to talk to.

City View experienced a major COVID-19 outbreak: 253 residents out of 315 contracted the virus, and many of them died. Jackson’s colleague, a 64-year-old woman named Camelia Kirkwood who was supposed to retire in June, was among those who contracted COVID-19 and died. Before coronavirus, the two oversaw 35 residents apiece. Now on her own, Jackson provides care for 70 men in an all-men’s unit.

Winant and Jackson’s conversation in Dissent reveals what it’s like to work in a nursing home, and the challenges and exploitative conditions hardworking healthcare workers like Jackson face, especially during the pandemic.

She describes how she felt after her colleague, Camelia, died from the virus, and the lack of support from the nursing home’s management:

It just devastated me when she passed away. I really, really took that very hard. But I had to come back and explain it to the residents, because they wanted to know where she was. They were hearing that she was sick or she died, but one by one I would talk to them and let them know she was in a better place. And you have to do that with psych and behavioral patients, because they can kill you. They could take the fire extinguisher off the wall and just bash it up the side my head, you know what I’m saying? So I develop a rapport with them.

Management never came upstairs on the floor with me to see what I was dealing with. They would come upstairs and yell at me, “Well, you need to give a shower.” I already gave thirty showers out of seventy people. I can’t make sure seventy take a shower. Because I’ve got to still pass trays. I’ve got to still make beds. It’s hard.

Even with the kitchen. Even with laundry. Who wants to have bugs? It’s supposed to be clean, but the nursing home industry is so cheap. We sometimes don’t have a housekeeper on our floor. It’s like, really? Call somebody in. But you don’t want to, because you don’t want to pay them. That’s crazy.

It’s common for nursing home workers like Jackson to juggle more than one job, often at other care facilities or in people’s homes, which is one of the ways the virus spreads.

I took a leave, because I felt like I didn’t want to take the virus from City View, with 253 infections, to Berkeley, which didn’t have one case. So I took it upon myself. And the nursing home industry is so fickle, and selfish, and disrespectful, because they were actually angry at me for leaving. I thought my director of nursing would be appreciative, because what if I came over here and I transmitted to all these elderly people? They all would have died. And they have the nerve to be mad at me, and calling me, saying, “You’re not going to come back?” No! I’m dealing with 253 cases over here. I want to be careful for the grandmas and the grandpas.

Later in the interview, Winant asks: “If you could make nursing homes change in any way, what would be your vision?” Jackson describes:

My vision would be to make sure that every CNA had at most only five residents. I would make sure it would be properly staffed. And that way we can comb their hair, brush their teeth, lotion their body, change them every two hours, make sure they get their needs, so we can do what we were put there to do, when their family members couldn’t do it. The residents would get proper food. You should see some of the food that they feed them. I wouldn’t feed that to my kid. Why would you feed them this? In America, we don’t care about the elderly; they’re about to die anyway, we don’t care. We should have respect, because they have wisdom.

When Winant asks how Jackson manages to care for all her patients, she responds, “I’ve got a strong mind. You just have to have a strong mind. It’s all I can do.”

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November 10, 2020
Categories: Editor's Pick, Featured, Highlight, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
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The Mysterious Case of a Nameless Hiker

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Big Cypress National Preserve, Naples, Florida. (Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

He was known on the trail as “Mostly Harmless.” He started his journey in a state park north of New York City and simply went south — down to Virginia, then to northern Georgia, and finally to Florida — his route pieced together through accounts from fellow hikers and others he encountered. At Wired, Nicholas Thompson recounts the story of this friendly nameless hiker, eventually found dead in a tent at Nobles Camp in Big Cypress National Preserve on July 2018, 600 miles south of where he started.

Since the discovery of this man’s body, no one has been able to figure out who he is. But now, with advanced DNA testing technology and cutting-edge genomics from a company called Othram, the mystery may soon be solved.

She told him everything she knew. And she shared the original post, and her photo, all over Facebook. Soon there were dozens of people jumping in. They had seen the hiker too. They had journeyed with him for a few hours or a few days. They had sat at a campfire with him. There was a GoPro video in which he appeared. People remembered him talking about a sister in either Sarasota or Saratoga. They thought he had said he was from near Baton Rouge. One person remembered that he ate a lot of sticky buns; another said that he loved ketchup. But no one knew his name. When the body of Chris McCandless was found in the wilds of Alaska in the summer of 1992 without any identification, it took authorities only two weeks to figure out his identity. A friend in South Dakota, who’d known McCandless as “Alex,” heard a discussion of the story on AM radio and called the authorities. Clues followed quickly, and McCandless’ family was soon found.

Now it’s 2020, and we have the internet. Facebook knows you’re pregnant almost before you do. Amazon knows your light bulb is going to go out right before it does. Put details on Twitter about a stolen laptop and people will track down the thief in a Manhattan bar. The internet can decode family mysteries, identify long-forgotten songs, solve murders, and, as this magazine showed a decade ago, track down almost anyone who tries to shed their digital skin. This case seemed easy.

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November 6, 2020
Categories: Editor's Pick, Featured, Highlight, Nonfiction, Quotes
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‘These Were His Mountains, After All’: Remembering One’s Father While Cycling in the Swiss Alps

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Susten Pass, Canton Uri, Switzerland. (Photo by Marka/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

James Jung describes riding through Switzerland, his childhood, and his relationship to both cycling and his father in a recent essay at Bicycling Magazine:

Ever since I first thought about this alpine mission, I knew I’d want to write about it, and I’d been trying to fuse my father to these rides. I’d pick a mountain peak in the distance and imagine I was looking at the gravestone he didn’t allow us to give him. I’d see a piece of farm equipment in a field and daydream that if I waited there long enough, maybe Dad would reappear to fetch it. I swatted flies from my face on the Pragelpass and saw my hand as his hand, the one that, three days before he died, moved back and forth for 16 straight hours as if he were conducting some hallucinogenic symphony from his deathbed. I remembered, too, the rough way I put his arm into a sling the night he broke it and the sad look he gave me when I did so, or how I sometimes avoided sitting beside him because I couldn’t stomach the smell of his dying body. I thought that maybe these rides were punishment for having betrayed him like that, as if my suffering on climbs could somehow be commensurate to the ways he’d suffered. But those are bullshit, half-baked ideas meant to convey some poetic vision of life; the type of self-indulgent writing that should be struck from any story before it goes to print. To be more truthful, those are simply ideas and emotions I don’t trust. The fact of the matter is my father wasn’t on those rides with me. He is dead now, and much of the missing I have done of him is missing I have done for myself, a mourning for who I was when I was his boy, for all the time I can’t get back. So, in answer to my wife’s question, I had done these rides for myself.

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November 3, 2020
Categories: Essays & Criticism, Featured, Highlight
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‘It’s An iPad, Not An usPad’: Douglas Rushkoff on Digital Isolation

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At OneZero, author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff asks: how much are the privileged allowed to use their wealth, fancy devices, and fully wired houses to insulate themselves from the troubles of today’s world?

The pool for my daughter wouldn’t have gotten here were it not for legions of Amazon workers behind the scenes, getting infected in warehouses or risking their health driving delivery trucks all summer. As with FreshDirect or Instacart, the externalized harm to people and places is kept out of sight. These apps are designed to be addictively fast and self-contained — push-button access to stuff that can be left at the front door without any human contact. The delivery people don’t even ring the bell; a photo of the package on the stoop automagically arrives in the inbox. Like with Thomas Jefferson’s ingenious dumbwaiter, there are no signs of the human labor that brought it.

Many of us once swore off Amazon after learning of the way it evades taxes, engages in anti-competitive practices, or abuses labor. But here we are, reluctantly re-upping our Prime delivery memberships to get the cables, webcams, and Bluetooth headsets we need to attend the Zoom meetings that now constitute our own work. Others are reactivating their long-forgotten Facebook accounts to connect with friends, all sharing highly curated depictions of their newfound appreciation for nature, sunsets, and family. And as we do, many of us are lulled further into digital isolation — being rewarded the more we accept the logic of the fully wired home, cut off from the rest of the world.

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September 2, 2020
Categories: Featured, Highlight, Nonfiction, Quotes, Technology
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The Seattle Police Shooting of Native Woodcarver John T. Williams, 10 Years Later

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Photo by Chait Goli

A decade ago, Seattle police officer Ian Birk shot and killed John T. Williams, a well-known Ditidaht woodcarver in the community — because he carried a pocketknife. For Seattle Met, James Ross Gardner shares the story of John through the eyes of his older brother turned family spokesperson, Rick Williams.

WALK ACROSS IT NOW. Follow John T. Williams’s steps. Go west on Howell, until you reach Boren. Where 10 years ago on that August day everything was bright, the colors and contours practically bleached out by the sun, now a canyon of shiny new skyscrapers casts long shadows—testaments to the speed at which this city erases its past.

On one side, before you reach the crosswalk, towers an apartment complex. Next to it, an Amazon office. On the other side of Boren, the side upon which the woodcarver took his last breath, stands a Hilton. Below your feet the old crosswalk is gone. In its place are painted three white deer. A small plaque affixed to the new hotel, feet away from where he died, reads “This crosswalk dedicated as: The White Deer Crossing…to honor John T. Williams, Native Carver.”

His life and death reverberate in other, less visible ways. The shooting triggered a Department of Justice investigation, resulting in the consent decree that placed SPD under federal monitoring. And in June 2020, when a police standoff with protestors for Black lives resulted in a 23-day occupation known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP, leaders invited Rick Williams to participate. He carved there with one of his sons—and told protestors he was proud of them and that they should remain peaceful.

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August 28, 2020
Categories: Editor's Pick, Featured, Highlight, Nonfiction
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‘I Mostly Feel Like My Voice Matters’: A Portland Journalist on Protests, Police Violence, and Enduring Trauma

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Two protesters flee through tear gas after federal officers dispersed a crowd of about a thousand at the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse on July 21, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Karina Brown, a reporter for Courthouse News Service, has covered protests since Donald Trump was elected. In this personal essay, she describes “the hours of cat-and-mouse” between protesters and local and federal police on a recent Friday night in the streets in Portland, Oregon. Taunted and chased by cops, she was ultimately unhurt, but still shaking days later. The fear she felt reminded her of a night 26 years ago that she will never forget.

I’ve done a lot in my life to be okay with having that happen to me. I’ve had long bouts of feeling like everything I do is beyond pointless and I should just give up and never get out of bed ever again. Sometimes it feels like the destructive will of the world will never be overcome. But I battle that feeling with an aggressive pursuit of beauty and connection. And I mostly feel like my voice matters — that’s why I’m a journalist. So it was weird to feel that pointlessness so strongly again over the last few days. And I think the reason it came back was the reason it was there in the first place, decades ago. I’ve never been able to understand one thing: how could he have done that to me? To ME? As if I don’t matter at all. As if his whim, or compulsion was all that mattered and I was worthless.

The cops who taunted me as I ran from them were an echo of that trauma. Over the weekend, as I grew angrier, I kept circling back to one thought: don’t those fuckers know I’m sacred? That every one of us out there is?

* * *

I know. I’m supposed to be objective. I’m not supposed to say my personal feelings about what I’m covering in public — ideally in the minds of some, I wouldn’t even have feelings about what I cover. But to me, objectivity in journalism creates a disembodied voice. It fails to come from both everywhere and nowhere and instead encapsulates the perspective of the powerful rather than afflicting it. I come from somewhere. I come from right here.

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July 23, 2020
Categories: Current Events, Editor's Pick, Featured, Highlight, Quotes
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‘Their Bodies Are Not Considered Their Own’: White Privilege in the Emergency Room

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In her memoir, The Beauty in Breaking, Michele Harper writes about her experience as a Black doctor in the ER, exploring race, gender, justice, and healing in stories about her patients and her own life. In this excerpt at Zora, Harper recounts a time when police officers brought a young Black man in handcuffs into the triage area of the hospital and demanded that she examine him for drugs that they believed he had swallowed.

But for Dominic, it seemed somehow warranted, somehow a commonplace, that his rights as a patient should be tossed aside. I looked at him; his autonomy was so provisional. But then, had he ever had self-determination? Had he even been considered to have ownership of his Black body? There was no medico-legal reason for a doctor or a hospital to usurp his decision-making capacity, and yet, for some people, it was expected. In the face of these truths, we are reminded that for many people, their bodies are not considered their own. For those whose bodies are viewed as suspect and threatening, those bodies, at the preference of a more privileged body, could be manipulated, even assaulted.

But Harper refuses — stating that it’s illegal to force a medical examination on a competent adult — and the man is discharged and free to go. She also holds her ground despite her antagonistic resident, who tries to defy her.

I sat still at my computer, attempting to breathe in for a count of three and out for a count of six (or something like it), to dampen the disgust as my anger mounted — anger that my resident, my privileged, highly educated white female resident, had felt comfortable being so disrespectful as to dismiss my judgment on this matter; that she had felt she had the right to invoke what she deemed a higher authority: older white doctors who’d done the police’s bidding in the past or whatever voice happened to be on the other end of the line from Hospital Ethics.

I looked down at my hands on the keyboard, my slender, dark brown hands, dry from constant washing and dousing with alcohol-based sanitizer between patients. As I noted the contrast of my dark wrists extending from the cuffs of my stark white coat, I was reminded of which costumes in America, even in the twenty-first century, are seen as legitimate and which are not.

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July 22, 2020
Categories: Editor's Pick, Featured, Highlight, Nonfiction, Quotes
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‘Who’s Going to Take Care of Me?’: When the Coronavirus Takes Both Parents

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Photo by Rahul

At the Washington Post, writer John Woodrow Cox and photojournalist Salwan Georges share the story of the three Ismael siblings — Nash, 20; Nadeen, 18; and Nanssy, 13 — as they struggle with the loss of their mother, Nada Naisan, and their father, Nameer Ayram, who died 20 days apart from COVID-19.

For days, he and his sisters had lived off delivery orders through their mom’s DoorDash account, though they had no idea where the money came from to pay for it. None of them had bank accounts or credit cards, and Nash didn’t want to spend the $300 in cash he’d found in a drawer behind his parents’ bed.

Zeana opened a tab at Sahara to keep them fed, but she also worried about their bills. Nash retrieved his mother’s phone from the hospital after her intubation, and Zeana told him to search it for a banking app. When he discovered that the mortgage appeared to be past due, he tried to pay it. A moment later, he found his parents’ checking account, drained of all but $900. The mortgage payment bounced.

Nash tried to learn as much as he could as fast as he could, but he often felt overwhelmed, especially on the morning nine days after his dad’s death when he discovered a $188,629 hospital bill that he was terrified they might have to pay.

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July 21, 2020
Categories: Current Events, Editor's Pick, Featured, Highlight, Nonfiction, Quotes
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‘You Could Literally See Our Shit From Space’: The Broken Bowels of Beirut

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Photo of Ramlet el-Baida beach in Beirut, Lebanon, taken in February 2018 by Sasaki Makoto / Getty Images

Lina Mounzer‘s recent essay in The Baffler on Beirut’s crumbling sewage system, and the corrupt politics and rotting infrastructure that have the city’s residents swimming in their own collective waste, is a beautifully written piece on shit:

Beneath every city, its underground twin. Its dark heart; its churning guts. This is no metaphor: I’m talking about the sewer system. A network of pipes connecting to every shower drain, every kitchen sink, every toilet, disappearing a household’s dirt and grease and vomit and urine and feces down the gullets of small pipes that flow down into the ground, that then feed into bigger pipes, and ever bigger pipes, all our shit merging: the organic, fibrous roughage of the rich, the nutrient-deficient poop of the poor, and all the middle-class crap in between, all democratically flowing together in a single system, ideally powered by gravity, ideally leading to the great bowel of a treatment plant meant to deal with all this waste, turn it clear again, so that it can be safely dumped into rivers and seas.

She recounts a time with friends when they picnicked and drank on Ramlet el-Baida, the city’s only public beach, and later swam in its waters:

One night we took supplies of wine and beer down with us, as so many others did. Drunk, we ran into the waves stripped down to our underwear beneath the moonshine sky. I remember splashing around giddily, then leaping away, screaming nervous laughter when I imagined something might be brushing against my legs.

Sometime later an architect friend showed me a satellite image that had been taken of Beirut, in such high resolution you could zoom in on the dense patchwork of tightly packed blocks and see the individual rooftops of buildings, see who could afford satellite dishes and who still kept pigeons. The image had been taken from space, and so from space you could see the two dark lines on either side of the Ramlet el-Baida beach extending out beneath the deep blue of the sea. Outfalls of raw sewage flowing straight into the water; you could literally see our shit from space. When I swam there, I had been afraid of sea monsters lurking beneath the waves. I did not know that the things I should have feared were much, much smaller, measured in parts per million: monsters of our own making.

But raw sewage spewing into the sea isn’t the only problem. It now rains less and less in Beirut, but harder, and so violently that the city and landscape — the soil, the pipes, the streets, everything — cannot handle the deluge:

When it rains that hard the sea becomes invisible in the distance; the horizon is a single gray wall of water from earth to sky. It is not hard to imagine that the sea itself is falling upward, roused out of its bed to roar vengeance down upon us: the poison of our shit, our garbage, our waste, the collective punishment of our carelessness both innocent and deliberate having mutated it into a monstrous thing.

And so Beirut drowns in, swims in, and eats its excrement in an endless cycle:

When the border between this world and its underground twin collapses, we have no choice but to live with the monsters of our worst nightmares. All that shit we tried to hide, forget, reroute, ignore, is out now, flooding the streets for all to see.

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July 9, 2020
Categories: Essays & Criticism, Featured, Highlight, Nonfiction, Quotes
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