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 Reply all.
In the last few weeks, Reply all has been airing a series of episodes called the Test Kitchen, which were reported by Shruti Pinamaneini 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.
A 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 the series, and PJ and Shruthi have both decided to leave the reply all team I and the entire team know that making reply all getting to tell people stories for a living is a huge privilege.
We also know that weve led a lot of people down and made a lot of mistakes, were very sorry for our many failings, were sorry to our colleagues and our former colleagues that we hurt, were sorry to you, our listeners, and of course, were 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 were 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 dont want to bury our failure.
So were 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 this 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.