Last year, the property of Condé Nast Enjoy your meal was found hit with some sort of reckoning, after numerous employees of color – inclusive Priya Krishna, Sohla El-Waylly, Rick Martinez, Gaby Melian, Molly Baz and Carla Lalli Music – left Kitchen test a series of videos about the minor allegations pay compared to white colleagues, tokenization, stolen credit and more. The scandal revealed a lot about the inner workings and power differentials of a site that has often struggled to present its employees as a group of mutually respectful colleagues, all just sitting together in the kitchen and highlighting disparities in power and pay throughout the site’s organization.
Now another, but related, Kitchen Test is under similar control as well Vulture reports that Sruthi Pinnamaneni and PJ Vogt, senior reporter and host, respectively for Answer all podcast, moves away from the series after their reporting on Enjoy your meal they revealed similar issues to their own Spotify properties Gimlet Media. Specifically, Eric Eddings, a former Gimlet staff member and co-host of Node podcast, presented in a Twitter thread earlier this week, a series of ways in which Vogt and Pinnamaneni, who covered Enjoy your meal with their help Test kitchen Spotify miniseries, it would have obstructed Gimlet’s staff diversification efforts, especially at a time when company employees were pushing for unionization. Among other things, Eddings wrote that “The stories of BA employees are worth telling, but for me it is harmful that the reporting and storytelling come from two people who have worked actively and AGGRESSIVELY against the multiple efforts to diversify Gimlet staff and content. “He went on to detail a number of cases in which Vogt and Pinnamaneni pushed back against organizing and diversification efforts.
Both Vogt and Pinnamaneni apologized in light of Eddings’ statements; while Pinnamaneni was already planning to leave Answer all after Test kitchen miniseries, she left the show the middle of production. Meanwhile, Vogt, who co-hosts Answer all with Alex Goldman and Emmanuel Dzotsi said they would “move away” from the podcast, with Vulture reporting that his departure from the series will be “permanent”. Gimlet Media has not yet issued a statement on departures.