Hi, this is Alex Goldman.
I'm one of the hosts of the show.
I'm speaking to you on behalf of the entire reply all staff.
We wanted to give you an apology and a bit more context about the story you're about to hear.
This episode is part of a series called the Test Kitchen, which was reported by Shruti Pinamaneini and is about the structural racism and toxic work environment at the food magazine Bon appetit 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 trouble 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 also left us asking whether we could continue to air this story without interrogating ourselves and what has unfolded.
A gimlet we now understand that we should not 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 Truthy 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 we let a lot of people down and made a lot of mistakes.
We are very sorry for our many failings.
We're sorry to our colleagues and our former colleagues we hurt were sorry to you, our listeners, and of course, were sorry to the people who spoke to us for the Bon Appetit story.
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 are placing the show on pause.
Thank you for listening and heres the episode.
Welcome to chapter two of our series, the Test kitchen.
If you haven't heard the first episode, you should do that.
I said at the beginning that the reason I find Bon appetit worth talking about is not because it's unusual, but because I think so much of what went wrong there is fairly typical.
And that is especially true of chapter two, which begins in 2018.