paper trail

Vox Media to settle worker-exploitation lawsuits for $4 million; Ocean Vuong on writing for the future

Ocean Vuong. Photo: Tom Hines

Vox Media has agreed to pay a $4 million settlement in the cases of three collective-action lawsuits brought by former SB Nation “team site” workers, who were lowly paid if paid at all.

Vice is expanding its audio division, with a dozen new hires and promotions in addition to hiring Arielle Duhaime-Ross, of Vox Media’s Recode, to host their upcoming news podcast. According to Kate Osborn, the company’s vice president of audio, Vice has plans to launch three other shows: one focusing on the global climate crisis, another about authoritarianism, and a third “experimental” project involving user-generated content.

At Columbia Journalism Review, Wajahat S. Kahn examines how local and international reporting ecosystems in Afghanistan and Pakistan have withered and come under attack as the US begins its retreat.

Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong has agreed to contribute work to the Future Library, a project conceived by Scottish artist Katie Paterson. The undertaking, Vuong said, is “antithetical” to the YOLO approach; he and six other authors, including Han King and Karl Ove Knausgård, will write manuscripts to remain unread until 2114, at which point they will be printed on paper made from trees planted in 2014 for this very purpose.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s American Crisis, “a revealing, behind-the-scenes account of his experience leading New York State through the COVID-19 epidemic,” will be published October 13th by Crown. “The true fact that he probably will not write any of it himself may console you,” notes Emily Temple at Literary Hub, “or it may not.”