“It's a huge violation of trust that she shared internal union communications without permission,” one source said. The names were blurred, but two sources said it angered other staff to the point that the subject dominated a union meeting following the firing. “The narrative around this is really frustrating,” another source said, “because when we were prepared to strike over fair pay and diversity and inclusion, she didn't stand with us.” It did not help that in her most recent thread on the termination, Overbey included screenshots from private union chats. Overbey was one of only a few union members who did not participate in the effort. “It would have been great if she worked with us with the data she collected,” one staffer said, “but she basically told us to fuck off.”Īround the same time, the union was preparing to go on strike over inclusion and equality issues in their contract. Two sources recalled that she had been invited to work with a diversity inclusion committee, but said she was too busy. As such, Overbey was rightly cheered for calling attention to the ways the print product had buttressed a largely homogenous status quo for years.ĭespite Overbey’s public agitation in regard to diversity, members of the New Yorker union said that she had blown them off when they asked her to share the data she collected during contract negotiations last summer. But few disputed that the magazine still had far to go on equitable recruitment. One source noted that it also appeared to exclude two Black editors who had recently been promoted. Some staffers took issue with her characterization - the data largely focused on the print magazine rather than the website, where most new hiring has taken place and where a more diverse staff has been assembled. The data was quite damning: Overbey claimed that, in the past 15 years, less than 0.01 percent of print feature and critic pieces had been edited by a Black editor the print magazine, likewise, had published “only 4 book reviews by African-American women” in its 96-year existence (there were many more alarming statistics which you can read here). Overbey’s public criticism of the New Yorker dates back to September of 2021, when she posted a long thread detailing data that she had collected on the magazine’s diversity. “This is about a legacy white employee who was in danger of losing her job for performance reasons,” a source who works at the magazine told Gawker, “so she cynically appropriated the language of diversity and inclusion to try and hold onto that job - which if she lost it might have actually gone to a person of color.” All seven sources also noted that Overbey’s threads had consistently taken magazine staff by surprise, because she has almost everyone in the newsroom - including high-ranking writers, young women, staffers of color, and the majority of the union membership - blocked on Twitter.

Specifically, seven sources close to the New Yorker told Gawker that Overbey’s version of events excluded critical context - namely, that each of her threads occurred after internal issues related to her conduct with colleagues, and that Overbey’s relationship with the union, on which her grievance now relies, has been fraught for the past year over some of the same subjects she claimed to have spoken up about. But New Yorker staff - from all levels of the magazine, including writers and members of the magazine's union - paint a different picture of what happened behind the scenes. The fracas has pitted the staff of a magazine against a lone voice of disruption who has been hailed by industry outsiders as a whistleblower for calling attention to the magazine’s hiring practices. The explicit takeaway from this latest thread, which was published July 19, was that the magazine was punishing a whistleblower by attacking her performance: “I also hope that speaking out on this,” she wrote, “will make other publications think twice about going after or seeking to punish whistleblowers & institutional critics.” She also tweeted a bombshell allegation: that Remnick himself inserted an error into her newsletter on purpose. Spoken Up While Female” - a reference to a public thread that she wrote last fall, highlighting pay and hiring inequality within the magazine. Overbey saw the review as a response to her having “consistently & persistently SUWF - a.k.a.

As the thread told it, the magazine had put Overbey under a performance review, accusing her of being “disrespectful,” self-plagiarizing, and including factual inaccuracies in her newsletter. Two weeks ago, The New Yorker fired its archivist, Erin Overbey, after the longstanding staffer wrote an extensive thread blasting the magazine and top editor David Remnick.

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