The epic tantrum over at Bon Appetit is just the latest woe proving that Conde Nast is in crisis. The mass media giant, which is reportedly looking to bow out of its hard-earned One World Trade Center lease, is once again facing cries of racism, the reason cited vaguely by three of Bon Appetit’s video contributors, all nonwhite, who have quit.
Priya Krishna claimed that she didn’t receive fair pay and that “non-white members of the test kitchen were tokenized, carelessly framed as monolithic experts for their communities, used as props for white talent, and not given equal opportunities to be featured.” Rick Martinez similarly alleged that he would not get a “fair pay rate” or a “comparable number of appearances” to his colleagues. Sohla El-Waylly didn’t allege any particular conduct but said producing Bon Appetit videos was “just not the right thing” for her. All of this comes after Adam Rapoport was ousted in June over a photo of him in brownface from the Halloween of 2004.
But Conde Nast’s real crisis isn’t racism, real or perceived. It’s the fact that the internet has democratized culture content and reporting. Given the competition, Conde Nast simply can’t afford the bill for divas and their demands.
Conde Nast has been in free fall for some time now. The cancellation of the Met Gala revoked Anna Wintour’s cultural leverage just as Vogue came under fire for racism. Bon Appetit is just the latest collateral damage of the mob looking for something to be outraged about. But to be clear, the mob is an accelerant, not the prime mover. Bon Appetit was always going to become irrelevant because the internet means that anyone, with or without talent, can make themselves a celebrity. Legacy publications that used to cultivate elite talent can neither pay up nor keep up as they used to.
Bon Appetit has reigned supreme over the world of culinary content for more than half a century, and it has 6 million followers on YouTube. Its videos are fine in terms of content and above average in terms of production value. But to put that into perspective, Binging with Babish, a completely crowdsourced account run by one man who likes cooking meals from movies, has more than 7 million followers. Tasty, BuzzFeed’s cooking video account, has nearly 20 million followers even though its production value is virtually nil — it’s just a single, still camera over a pot.
And then there’s the matter of Bon Appetit’s supposed tokenism. If we take the complaint at face value, it means the outfit was racist for having nonwhite folks cook meals from their cultural backgrounds and then not paying them enough. Maybe that’s some nefarious sign of racial animus. But more likely, it’s because if you want to learn how to cook Indian food, there are already multiple Indian cooking vloggers with as many if not more followers than Bon Appetit.
Most of us stopped taking makeup tips from Allure and Glamour. Individual beauty bloggers and vloggers have earned massive followings through merit alone. And why does anyone need to take their tabloid reporting from Vanity Fair or couture pictorials from Vogue when we can follow our favorite blind item bloggers on Twitter and stylists and photographers on Instagram? Even if a select few still consider Bon Appetit to be the best, the supply of cultural content from elsewhere is continuing to increase even as audience sizes remain static.
Conde Nast and other legacy media publishers have simply failed to adjust to changes in consumer demand. The average urban affluent woman whom Conde Nast once considered its entry-level audience, to be targeted with magazines such as Lucky and Teen Vogue, wants to read interesting and in-depth interviews with preeminent cultural figures and find the sort of styling you can buy at Bloomingdale’s, not Bergdorf’s. Instead, Vogue bought into the ridiculous trend of celebrities sitting for softball interviews conducted by other celebrities, not journalists. With a strange cognitive dissonance, it started pushing weird, woke screeds supporting socialism at the exact same time it tells its audiences that the key to happiness is a $500 Maison Margiela tote bag and $215 granny panties.
Simply put, people want fashion that’s hot, but not woke. They want culinary content that’s quality, but not wildly complicated and time-consuming. They want lifestyle content that’s relatable but not lazy. Legacy media is failing on all of these counts.
Maybe the bosses at Bon Appetit really are so racist that they risked this massive public controversy just so they could screw nonwhite workers out of better pay. But the far better explanation is that it was just a matter of dollars and cents.
