Moe Tkacik: 'Look at Me!'

Remember Moe Tkacik? The background's here and here.

Well, she's got an interesting piece at Columbia Journalism Review: "Look at Me! A writer’s search for journalism in the age of branding."

Get a cup of coffee and read the whole thing. Moe's a great writer, and actually has an extensive background in journalism, which I did not know. She was fired from the Wall Street Journal for getting too close to the facts on Abercrombie & Fitch's racist corporate practices:

I went to great lengths to corroborate the facts, which is where I fucked up; I e-mailed a draft of the piece (a decision inspired by a respected journalist I’d read about who said he did this all the time) to a trusted source, and he e-mailed it to someone else, and eventually it made its way to Abercrombie’s corporate offices and in turn to the company’s fearsome New York “crisis PR” firm. And because Wall Street Journal investigations are the sort of thing that affects the stock prices of companies, this was a fire-able offense. In retrospect, as much as I felt like a failure and a fuckup, I didn’t actually mind being liberated from the constant, insane pressure not to fuck up. All year I’d been variously accused of being “in the pocket” of one company or its rival by analysts, money managers, publicists, lawyers, etc., and I’d found it preposterous. What did I care who prevailed in the sneaker wars or the doll wars or the Japanese-hipster-credibility-halo-effect wars?

What I couldn’t understand, though, was why they killed the story. Sure, it wasn’t Blackwater, but this was a store that at least half our readers’ kids would have killed to work for, and it was being run by some racist, frat-boy cult, and the suburban teenagers it hired and fired so mercurially were going to grow into adults who thought this was . . . normal? That in the modern American workplace, this sort of Lord-of-the-Flies management strategy was just par for the fucking course?

I ended up handing over my notes to a civil-rights lawyer who was leading a class-action race-discrimination suit against Abercrombie. A few years later, more than ten thousand former brand representatives got checks in the mail as part of the $40 million settlement.

More here.