Read on Twitter
This is a thread about the New York Times and their failure to credit my business partner ( @alexhaagaard) and myself. It's not just about that though. It's about a pattern. And I'm curious to know if other disabled justice makers have experienced something similar. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1287369598443102208
Alex and I began consulting with the New York Times on an unnamed project back in February. It ultimately became their #ADA30 package, which rolled out over the weekend.
Our consultancy was primarily focused on design elements of the package, but we were focused on editorial decision making because the stories we tell inform the way we design.
On a call with the project team in late May, we were told that the New York Times wished to credit us as partners on this project. It was not something we were expecting, and we were touched. I told them as much.
I told them about the time Cooper Hewitt refused to credit me for my contributions on Access + Ability, a project that I initially became internally critical of, and ultimately came to detail on social media. That can be found in this thread: https://twitter.com/elizejackson/status/991082380571103243
On a call with NYT team a few weeks later, the person who was leading this project said to me that she couldn't stop thinking about what happened regarding Cooper Hewitt. But this was on a call that began raising alarm bells for both Alex and myself for other reasons.
After this call, on June 9th, we sent the NYT team an email labeled "Concerns and Alt-Text Guidelines" detailing concerns we had regarding their #ADA30.
Our concerns fit into three buckets:
- Who they were choosing to write for this project.
- Issues regarding accessibility.
- A lack of transparency.
- Who they were choosing to write for this project.
- Issues regarding accessibility.
- A lack of transparency.
Their response: "We would like to mention on social media and in press interviews that you were among our consultants on the project. If you would like to wait until the project is published before determining whether you’re comfortable with that attribution, please let us know."
We responded by saying "You have said to us on two occasions that we can leave our name on this project or take them off. We appreciate your recognition of the tension that our work seeks to navigate, between the complexity internal dynamics of the organizations we consult with,
... and the community we belong to and advocate about. At the same time, the question we keep hoping you will ask us (and yourselves) is what would it take to make us comfortable to have our names on this project."
I, personally, spent over a thousand dollars (note, I'm on unemployment at the moment) revamping our website, launching it prior to this package's rollout. Ultimately, they never once mentioned our names, even though we easily spent 100 hours working on this package.
Online, we began to respond critically to editorial decisions they made. Here is one such example: https://twitter.com/elizejackson/status/1287343728131223552
I wrote the person heading the project the night before the rollout saying "Will you please let me know how the NYT plans to credit Alex and myself, as you promised? Our hard work on this project may have been ignored and discarded, but I want to ensure that we are not erased."
She never responded. This was the first time she has not responded to an email either myself or Alex has sent.
Even though I was incredibly unhappy with much of the package that rolled out, it felt important to me that my name was on this. Not so I can say this is something I did, but so that I can say this was something that happened to me. https://twitter.com/elizejackson/status/1284562759691251713
Ultimately, we don't know why they brought us on as consultants. We can't find our work anywhere in this package (infuriating), and they didn't even use us as tokens to justify decisions they made (great).
And for me, this is the question. Why do they go silent when it's time to credit? Why did they promise to credit us in the first place? And what does it mean to have credit revoked?
One last point. This was a text I got from someone who cares for me and knew how hard I worked on this: "I get the NYT and when I saw the disability section, I opened it and looked to see who wrote all the articles. I didn’t see you." My family was looking for my name.
