Month: November 2021

In this edition of our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for honesty, a communications specialist of color talks about frustrations around stagnant diversity initiatives and a lack of intersectionality.

​​This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Why do you think the industry has yet to achieve true diversity, inclusion and equity?

My biggest thought, in terms of diversity and workplace culture, is that I am not an advocate of toxic positivity. That’s the one thing stunting companies. Everyone wants to say this company is so nice and everything’s good. But if you ever bring to light that things aren’t, now you’re the negative Nelly or that person of color who always has something to say. We’re always toeing the line between being candid and trying to hold companies accountable versus being the complainer.

What’s your definition of toxic positivity and how does it play into DE&I goals?

It’s the culture where there are always praise parties. We say everything good that we’ve done. We can say we have this initiative and that initiative. But if we stop there, and we don’t say what else we need to be doing, or here’s where we’re falling flat, that’s where it’s toxic. When the narrative is constantly skewed positive, we forget to stop and recognize that some of it’s neutral and some of it’s negative. That’s where it’s toxic.

For people of color, especially when we raise our hands, saying we need XYZ, I’m laying out my expectations here and what could be changed. People stunt that and say, “Well, what do you want done?” It’s okay to pose that question to people of color. But with toxic positivity comes weaponized incompetence, where it’s, “Oh, I’m white. I really don’t know what you want here and I’m doing what I can.” Go hire a third-party source that’s going to hold you accountable. Go make sure you have an advisory board mixed with people of color, LGBTQIA status and abilities.

Has any of this played out in your personal professional experience?

From the get go, I was a really big champion of diversity. I was helping the recruiting team get [diverse candidates] interested in talking to us. Given, we were understaffed, but they said we were too busy. We never revisited that. You told me you’re trying to network and get diverse candidates, but we couldn’t make time for that and we’re not circling back?

Sometimes there are a lot of doors being closed because no one knows how to put those resources into place. So, we just give up and that’s not the answer either. One of the most difficult conversations is where you spin your wheels, you’ve given all these ideas to executives like, “We still need change. These numbers are still flat or this is still happening in the workplace.” And they’re like, “Well, what do you think we should do?” It’s good that those doors are open. But the tone that people use, the way they ask and how receptive they are to input definitely changes whether it’s really a welcome suggestion, or like, “Well, we asked you. Why didn’t you say anything?”

What do you think the industry response should be?

As a person of color, I need to put skin in the game and hold myself accountable for showing up and giving feedback when we’re being welcomed to give feedback. It falls on the agencies themselves [too] because it can’t just be on one small group of people, especially considering that we are the minority. If all companies care about is hitting those diversity numbers so that they can post about it on LinkedIn, you’re not really doing anyone service. It’s gonna take a lot of moving parts for holistic change to keep going.

In his latest book, “Termination Shock,” Stephenson has left the metaverse for greener pastures — literally. The novel is a clarion wake-up call about climate change, anticipating a near-future in which the industrialized nations of the world have continued to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere unmitigated. (The narrative takes place somewhere in the 2030s, Stephenson said, “but I was deliberately vague about the exact timing of it.”) The protagonist of the book’s ensemble cast is the queen of the Netherlands, who becomes embroiled in a controversial and world-changing geoengineering project intended to reverse global warming.

Published by William Morrow, “Termination Shock” comes out on November 16. Digiday spoke to Stephenson to learn more about his upcoming novel — and his thoughts on Facebook’s metaverse push and the ongoing effort to build bona fide virtual worlds. 

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

I interpreted “Termination Shock” as a soft endorsement of geoengineering. Are you in favor of this practice?

Well, what I was trying to do was to bring it out and make it a topic of conversation, which currently it is not. People who are knowledgeable about climate and geophysics are all aware of this and might talk about it privately, but there’s a general reluctance to discuss it as a serious proposition because there’s a kind of taboo around it. And I don’t think that’s a healthy situation, because I do think it’s fairly likely that, eventually, someone will just do it. Unless somebody does just do it, then it needs to be something that we’ve talked about — something that people are aware of. People need to know what it can and cannot do, and they just need to have kind of a vocabulary and a frame of reference for the conversations that will have to happen.

My perception is that even people who consider themselves to be very environmentally aware and very conscious of climate change don’t fully understand, yet, just how far atmospheric CO2 has progressed. And the fact that we’re continuing to add huge amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere every year. We’re not even going to reach zero emissions probably for another four decades, at least, to say nothing of beginning to take CO2 out. I see a tendency on the part of even environmentally conscious people to look at programs for CO2 emission reduction as something that’s actually going to solve the problem, which I do not think is correct. So, if nothing else, talking about extreme measures like geoengineering might be a way to get people to more fully understand the seriousness of the problem.

How necessary was a near-future, proto-dystopian setting to make the geoengineering in “Termination Shock” seem politically viable?

That’s a key question. What we’re talking about here is a kind of rogue geoengineering event. And there’s kind of two ways that could happen: one would be a rogue state that just decides they’re going to do it, and the other is what I’m depicting here, a rogue individual who finds a way to do it. And in that scenario, there’s got to be some explanation for how he’s able to get away with it. You know — why don’t the local authorities step in and put a stop to it? I think something that kind of worked in my favor, as far as that goes, is just the general kind of centristical quality of everything that’s going on in the United States right now — the way that centralized authority is kind of evolving, and people are simply able to get away with completely outrageous violations of constitutional law, with no apparent consequences.

I noticed that the book doesn’t mention blockchain technology, which a lot of people view as a potential major driver of climate change. Was this omission unintentional on your part, or did you just not think it was relevant to the subject matter?

There are all kinds of human activities that are putting CO2 into the atmosphere, and I don’t have current stats in my head of how big a contributor blockchain is. But even without that, there would be a serious problem. So I don’t think we need blockchain to spin up a fictional scenario in which there’s too much CO2 in the atmosphere; I felt that it just wouldn’t contribute to the storytelling to try to break it down in detail like that and dole out blame to specific sources of pollution.

I do hope — I mean, I’ve seen some indications, although I haven’t studied this in a lot of detail, that people are working on other forms of cryptocurrency that might not be so carbon-intensive.

There’s also a very strong climate change aspect to the concept of a metaverse. As the physical world gets more inhospitable, it makes sense for people to move into virtual space. “Termination Shock” prominently features AR technology, but VR doesn’t come up. Was this an intentional choice? Why not explore the idea of virtual worlds as an escape from climate change?

I didn’t feel that I had a lot more to say on the topic of VR-based virtual environments; that wasn’t really the topic of this book. This book is about people running around outdoors, doing things in the physical world. 

My contact with the XR (extended reality) industry over the last few years has been more in the AR side of things than the VR side of things, which I personally find more interesting. So I guess the lack of VR, and sort of metaverse, content in “Termination Shock” is more just a choice I’m making as a writer.

Are you just sick of the idea of a VR metaverse at this point?

I mean, VR has got some inherent limitations around movement. And the fact that, in many scenarios, there’s going to be a mismatch between what your inner ear’s telling you and what your eyes are telling you, which leads to motion sickness. People have tried to find ways to ameliorate that, but basically, when you’re doing any kind of complicated VR experience, you need to come to grips with that problem somehow, or else all of your users are going to end up being sick. There’s different strategies that are used by VR developers to tackle that; it’s not an insurmountable problem. But I think it tends to lead towards applications in which the user is basically either sitting or standing still, or else moving about a little bit in a very, kind of small, physical envelopes.

So you can still do a lot with that. But, you know, the idea that we’re all going to be so freely moving about in a planet-sized environment, I think is still a long way from being realized.

What was your reaction to Facebook’s rebranding as Meta? Is this taking the thunder away from “Termination Shock”? When someone Googles your name nowadays, it’s all articles about the metaverse.

It wasn’t too much of a surprise, because Facebook’s been using the word very frequently for a long time, and other companies as well. There was a great moment during the Epic vs. Apple trial a few months ago, when [Epic Games CEO] Tim Sweeney had to explain to the judge and the court reporter what the metaverse was. So I don’t see it as having a damaging effect on the publication of the book, and it’s probably got a net positive effect.

You mentioned Epic Games. At the moment, it feels like the gaming and social media sectors are kind of competing to be “metaverse builders.” Do you think one side or the other might be better-positioned?

I’m less interested in the technological horse race, because the technological problems that are there, although they’re very significant, can be solved. I’m more focused on the business model that’s providing the money to pay those engineers. If you look at a typical gaming business model, there are different ways that games are capable of generating revenue. You can pay for the game upfront, some games are free to play, some games are freemium, what have you. So there’s no hidden revenue model, you just pay for stuff when you want stuff. 

In the case of a social media company, you are the product. Maybe you get to use the platform for free, but there’s a reason why it’s free. So I think the way it’s likely to play out is that, if there is a competition among these different platforms, that a company like Facebook is going to have a price advantage because they can subsidize hardware and so on with the revenue that they’re getting from advertisers. And companies that aren’t part of a giant social media empire won’t have that luxury, and will need to find other ways to pay for what they’re doing.

The effects of climate change will be felt first and foremost by the common people of the world, not necessarily the royalty or the wealthy. Why the decision to approach your book partially through the more rarefied perspective of the queen of the Netherlands?

This sounds odd, because we’re not all royalty, but somebody in her position can kind of be a stand-in for any sort of first-world person who’s looking at the ongoing climate disaster, which is the inadvertent result of things that we did over hundreds of years to increase our standard of living. You know, to live in warm houses and drive around and fly around in planes and stuff. And we didn’t intend for that to mess up the climate. But now we’re in a position where we understand that it has done so, and we have to try to figure out what to do with that situation. So, as funny as it sounds, I think she can be kind of a stand-in for that point of view.

One of the most fantastic elements of the book, which I later found out was real, was the phenomenon of melee combat on the Line of Actual Control, the contested border between India and China. How did this get on your radar?

I know, right? I had been vaguely aware of that whole situation for some time, because I did visit there a long time ago. It’s one of those things that is so surreal that I don’t think any speculative fiction writer would dare to come up with it. But once you’re aware that it is real and actually happening, then you can’t not use it.

As far as I know, what’s really going on there is all regular military, and there’s no element of volunteers going up. And so the science-fictional component here is me saying, well, with the combination of social media, YouTube, and climate change causing glaciers to recede and thereby creating new real estate right along that border — that that sounds like something that I could work with, in a fictional style.

Last month, the sales team ran its first campaign, which featured both pre-roll and mid-roll spots (how long are they?); the mid-roll ads had a completion rate of 75%, and the pre-rolls over 99%.

Though McClatchy’s sales team is still figuring out the optimal way to package and sell the spots — “We’re still figuring out that go-to market strategy,” said Rachel Malpeli, director of digital solutions at McClatchy — the hope is that the audio content can help add a new dimension of engagement for its readers and advertisers. “We want to really localize it,” Malpeli added.  

McClatchy already has some experience with distributing audio versions of its written output. Seven of its papers, including the Sacramento Bee and the Miami Herald, distribute daily flash briefings, both via smart speakers and as podcast episodes. And it has also dabbled in podcasts, having produced half a dozen shows on topics ranging from ACC basketball to LGBTQ experiences in the South. 

McClatchy sells and targets the spots contextually, using its titles’ sections: An advertiser looking to drive tune-ins for a television show might target the arts and entertainment sections of McClatchy’s sites, for example, or target the audio versions of its business news to reach a market’s professional class. 

To date, McClatchy hasn’t offered its main news coverage, given advertisers’ long-standing leeriness about the brand safety of news. “We’ve set it up in ways that allows people to stay away from some of the hard-hitting topics,” Malpeli said. 

Publishers ranging from Harvard Business Review to The Economist have been experimenting with adding audio versions of their stories to their sites for the past several years, largely by partnering with third-party providers such as Audm and Curio; McClatchy’s foray is being powered by Trinity Audio.

For the most part, publishers have pursued audio as a driver of loyalty and, by extension, consumer revenue; last year, Digiday broke the news of Apple’s plans to add audio versions of stories to Apple News+, the premium tier of its news aggregator app. That came after other attempts by platforms, such as Google and Amazon, to deliver ad-supported audio news started to lose publisher interest.

While McClatchy offers the story audio ads as a standalone product, it typically packages them with other digital products, such as paid social promotion, partly to overcome their limited scale, Malpeli said. Being able to break them out as an independent success may depend largely on how much scale they can accumulate, said Stephen Smyk, svp of podcast and influencer marketing at the agency Veritone One.

“If you are about awareness, [it’s a] good opportunity,” Smyk said. “I think pricing will reflect that as the format matures.”     

Key details:

• Red Ventures’ two brands Lonely Planet and Healthline Media teamed up to launch a Health Hub on Oct. 27, with information on the latest COVID-19 related travel information and news in 20 destinations around the world.
• On Nov. 1, Atlas Obscura debuted a mobile app with a database of guides to over 22,000 places in the U.S. and 185 other countries.
• TripSavvy published its annual Editors’ Choice Awards, but this year expanded it to include over 1,000 picks for the best in travel, tourism and hospitality.
• Culture Trip created 30 itineraries for small-group trips in September.
• In addition to articles about safely traveling for the holidays this year, Condé Nast Traveler will publish an interactive quiz to help readers decide where to go.

Lonely Planet and Healthline Media

Lonely Planet and Healthline Media’s new Health Hub has information including border restrictions, rules around testing and mask mandates on 20 places including in the U.S., Iceland and France. The hub also includes advice on travel health insurance, what to do if you get sick on a trip and recommendations for where to go and what to do, based on safety.

The COVID-19 hub is intended to be updated in real-time with stats and charts that speak to changing government warnings. While the landing page is updated daily, the destination pages are updated weekly.

“We were seeing across search and social a real uptick in questions and queries around health and safety logistics as a top of mind concern for our audience,” said Nitya Chambers, Lonely Planet svp of content and executive editor. The questions were mainly about what travelers needed to know about the rules and regulations of specific destinations “to get into a place and to return home again, and how to do that responsibly and sensitively,” Chambers said. She declined to provide specifics on how much these questions had increased recently.

“Travelers were showing continued interest and desire to travel, but showing real concerns with local policy regulations,” Chambers said.

The Health Hub will expand to cover more destinations and ultimately evolve to cover broader health and safety travel topics beyond COVID-19. “Our vision for this is a service that lives beyond this pandemic moment,” Chambers said.

Healthline Media’s travel health and wellness expert Dr. Jenny Yu is contributing a weekly column on topics like navigating large crowds and traveling to see friends and family and will answer readers’ questions about travel. All of the content on Health Hub — other than Dr. Yu’s column — is overseen by the Lonely Planet editorial team and created exclusively for the vertical. The team consists of four editorial staff from Lonely Planet, two editorial staff from Healthline as well as Dr. Yu. The destination pages and launch articles have been medically reviewed by Healthline.

Atlas Obscura 

Atlas Obscura’s new mobile app was created to help people ease back into travel responsibly, according to the company. Land Rover is the presenting sponsor of the app, and Atlas Obscura CEO Warren Webster says the seven-figure deal with Land Rover is the second biggest in Atlas Obscura’s 12-year history. The publisher declined to say exactly how much the deal was worth.

Atlas Obscura’s trip-planning business has sold more trips for 2022 than it sold for 2019, according to Webster (2020 would likely have been a bit of a wash when it comes to trip bookings). For the holidays this year, there has been a 100x increase in the number of trips sold compared to last year, he said. After seeing most people gravitate towards domestic and road trip travel since the start of the pandemic, Atlas Obscura’s most popular trip for this holiday season is a 10-day adventure in Egypt.

“People are booking trips more last-minute. It feels good to travel now, so people are wondering, ‘How do we get our trip in before the end of the year?’” Webster said. Travel is “even more of a challenge when dealing with very rapidly changing restrictions and guidelines” related to COVID-19, he added. But booking group trips that are pre-planned and organized, like the ones Atlas Obscura offers, means that responsibility is lifted from the traveler. Atlas Obscura has a trips programming team of six people based in the U.S., who keep track of changes to travel restrictions and guidelines.

TripSavvy

In the last two weeks, TripSavvy has gotten “way more questions and concerns” about travel tips for this holiday season, said Molly Fergus, gm of TripSavvy, who did not provide specific figures.

The publication pared down its annual Editors’ Choice Awards last year to feature just 70 businesses by only focusing on U.S. destinations. But this year’s awards, which were announced on Oct. 19, featured over 1,000 businesses around the world, up from over 600 in 2019. Fergus said the number increased so dramatically because a large number of businesses stood out this year. The awards are published around this time of year because it’s when people are thinking about holiday travel, Fergus said.

“We focused last year on writing helpful content about readers’ hometowns, with a specific emphasis on domestic destinations, because of international travel restrictions,” Fergus said. This year’s awards go to businesses that “not only survived but thrived during a really difficult time for the hospitality industry,” she added.

Culture Trip

In September, Culture Trip launched TRIPS by Culture Trip with 30 itineraries for small-group adventures around the world (group sizes are limited to no more than 18 travelers, though some trips have smaller maximum group sizes). The trips come with a “COVID Booking Guarantee”:  If COVID-19 regulations cause plans to change, Culture Trip will rebook a customer for free.

The small-group trips were created “because we know that exploring the world, discovering something new, and meeting people is now top of the agenda for so many,” said Darren Carbine, chief travel officer at Culture Trip. For a majority of Culture Trip’s U.S. audience (68% at the moment), international travel content is more popular than domestic travel and has grown over the last few months, he added.

As travel restrictions lift next week for international travelers coming to the U.S. this holiday season, Culture Trip plans to publish quick-turnaround content on how to navigate entering the US, as well as where to go and what to do, Carbine said.

Condé Nast Traveler

Condé Nast Traveler published an article on Nov. 4 about what the COVID-19 vaccine approval for children means for family travel. Next week, Condé Nast Traveler will come out with a story on what to expect from holiday travel this year, with information on how to deal with crowds at airports and pandemic-related safety precautions to take into consideration. The website will also soon publish an interactive quiz to help readers choose where to go for the holidays (and where Americans can visit), from last-minute getaways to international vacations.