Reply All - A Message from the Staff of Reply All

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

An update on the future of The Test Kitchen series and PJ Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni's departure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, this is Alex Goldman. I'm one of the hosts of the show. And I'm talking to you today to give you an apology and an update from me and the entire staff of Replyall. In the last few weeks, Replyal has been airing a series of episodes called The Test Kitchen, which were reported by Shruthy Pinaminani about the structural racism and toxic work environment at the food magazine, Bon Appetit. Last week, days after the publication of the second episode in what was supposed to be a four-part series, former colleagues of ours at Gimlet publicly described multiple instances of troubling behavior from both Shruthi

and my longtime co-host PJ Vote. These accounts prompted a reckoning on our team about the work culture at Reply All, and they left us asking whether we could continue airing this story without interrogating ourselves and what has unfolded at Gimlet. We now understand that we should never have published

this series as reported, and the fact that we did was a systemic editorial. failure. We are not going to be continuing this series, and PJ and Shruthy have both decided to leave the Reply All team. I and the entire team know that making Reply All, getting to tell people's stories for a living, is a huge privilege. We also know that we've let a lot of people down and made a lot of mistakes. We're very sorry for our many failings. We're sorry to our colleagues and our former colleagues that we hurt. We're sorry to you, our listeners. And of course, we're sorry to the people who spoke to us for the Test Kitchen, who shared their extremely personal stories with us.

It is worth saying that we're going to keep the already published episodes on our feed for anyone to listen to. We had a lot of debate about it, but ultimately, we don't want to bury our failure, so we're adding a similar disclaimer to this one to the episodes themselves. We plan to find a way to get to the bottom of what went wrong here, both with the series and with our show. And once we fully understand it ourselves, we also want to tell you as best we can what happened. As we contend with everything, we're placing the show on pause. You'll hear more from us soon. In the meantime, take care of yourselves, and thank you for listening.