Episode 7 - The Precarity Gauntlet with Marie Solis

Hello and welcome to episode 7 of Diversity Hire.

Today's guest is Marie Solis, a freelance reporter who writes about reproductive rights, politics, and literature. We talked to Marie about her life in the trenches of mercurial digital media startups like Mic., how precarity has come to define all media jobs, the tricky politics of allyship and who gets to identify as a POC in a workplace, why reproductive rights reporting doesn't get clicks, and much more. Also, Arjun and Kevin also talk about what music they’re listening to during the quarantine. 

• Marie discusses why she got into media (7:16)

• Marie talks about editing her college newspaper and the lessons she learned (9:16)

• Career timeline (13:20)

• We discuss the tropes of the digital media landscape, and the precarity of the media industry (23:00)

• Can Marie trust media again? (27:00)

• The hypocrisy of Lean-In feminism and how it mirrors the hypocrisy in media diversity initiatives (re: A Peek Inside Miki Agrawal's Feminist Void, Vice, 2019)(30:25)

• How media leaders will follow Agrawal’s move to flip her cancellation into a book deal (34:06)

• Marie speaks about her “identity as a White Latina and the space it takes up” (re: The Perils of “People of Color”, E. Tammy Kim, 2020) (40:50)

• Arjun talks about his identity and asks Marie if she feels any obligation, either internal or external, to talk about the experience of being Latinx (45:05)

• “I remember growing up and there wasn’t a White Hispanic option for a long time” (52:11)

• Marie talks about her current reporting, which includes a media criticism piece about why people don’t click on articles about reproductive rights (54:10)

• The Diversity Tribunal (1:03:49)

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