Sewell Chan's post

My statement, part 1:

Yesterday I was fired by Columbia University after eight months as executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. This was the first time in a 25-year career that I’ve ever been subjected to discipline in a job — much less terminated from one.

I have immense respect for Jelani Cobb as a journalist and educator, but the decision to let me go was hasty, ill-considered and quite frankly baffling.

Jelani hired me last year to revive CJR, which had gone nearly a year without a permanent editor and is currently down to two full-time employees and three academic-year fellows. In my brief but eventful tenure — during which I wasn’t able to make a single hire — we broke stories about the cancellations of presidential endorsements by billionaire media owners, threats to press freedom at home and abroad, the ongoing economic and technological disruption the media industry faces, and much more. Just last week, CJR was a finalist in 3 of the 4 categories of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications Mirror Awards, which honor excellence in media industry reporting.

I was dismissed 74 hours after being told on Monday afternoon that staff had complained following pointed interactions in which I provided fair and critical feedback rooted in editorial rigor. While I disagreed with these complaints, I offered to meet with the staff members involved and requested a coach who could help me navigate a charged higher education environment. Instead I was fired.

Given that CJR’s mission is to shed light on the inner workings of journalism, here are the facts: I had three pointed conversations with staff members in recent weeks. One was with a fellow who is passionately devoted to the cause of the Gaza protests at Columbia and had covered the recent detention of a Palestinian graduate for an online publication he had just written about, positively, for CJR. I told him there was a significant ethical problem with writing for an outlet he had just covered. The second was with an editor who has been working for weeks on a sensitive MeToo investigation I launched about sexual harassment by a prominent investigative reporter. Following a legal review of that story, I urged her to share her draft to the dean so that we could move expeditiously toward publication. She asked for more time, to which I reluctantly acceded. The story remains unpublished. The final interaction was with a staffer who declined to come into the office (even though the school requires attendance four days a week) and to write at least one story a week. With the school’s approval this employee was given several months’ paid leave to look for a new job.

These are normal workplace interactions and I did exactly what I was hired to do, which was to provide rigorous, fair, careful editorial oversight and raise the metabolism and impact of a publication that’s supposed to monitor the media.