Lady Business: Instacart’s new CEO; Fictional journalist malpractice
Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 134th issue, published October 10, 2021.
CEO Challenges
This was an interesting week to have a profile of a former senior Facebook executive publish! I’ve spent the past couple of months working on this article about Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, the former head of Facebook’s app, who this summer left the scandal-plagued social-media giant to run the grocery-delivery startup.
Simo probably picked the right time to jump ship from Facebook. Over the decade she spent at the company, Facebook accumulated quite the track record of scandals and congressional hearings about how the company enables the spread of misinformation online; how it handles users’ privacy; and whether it effectively polices how authoritarian governments, violent extremists, and other bad actors use its platforms—including the products that Simo oversaw, such as Facebook Live and the app. In recent weeks, Simo chose her words very carefully when I asked her what responsibility she took for all the negative consequences of Facebook’s corporate decisions:
Once she became head of Facebook’s flagship app in 2019, reporting directly to Zuckerberg until June 2020, Simo publicly defended the company’s policies and process.
Today, when asked about her role in the scandals, Simo calls Facebook’s decisions—and their sometimes grotesque consequences—a result of poor planning rather than the willful ignorance shown in internal documents reported by the Wall Street Journal in September and alleged by whistleblower and former employee Frances Haugen.
“When you connect so many people, there are going to be abuses, and preventing that was just not a core skill set,” Simo says. “We could have done a better job predicting the ways in which things could go wrong.”
So can she do that better job in her new role? Instacart, which sends other people to buy and deliver your groceries, was a pandemic success story; with a $39 billion valuation, it’s now the third-biggest unicorn startup in the United States and is planning an IPO. But Simo took over the company while her predecessor was trying to sell it, casting doubt on the company’s ability to go public. And she’s inheriting plenty of other problems: Instacart’s growth is slowing, since Americans aren’t afraid of going to the grocery store and shopping for themselves anymore.
Meanwhile, the essential workers who did the shopping during the pandemic, and who make up Instacart’s gig-economy contract workforce, are increasingly unhappy with their pay and working conditions. (The company has more than 500,000 “shoppers” who earn a minimum of $7 to $10 per “batch” of groceries—up to three separate orders—plus tips. After a public outcry in 2019, Instacart stopped sometimes counting tips toward a shopper’s guaranteed base pay.)
Some of these workers aren’t very happy with Simo so far:
On Sept. 20, a group of Instacart shoppers called for a customer boycott of the company over dwindling pay and worsening working conditions; they now are urging workers to walk off the job starting Oct. 16. The grievances of the Gig Workers Collective, which represents contract workers at Instacart and other companies in the sector, predate Simo, but the group hasn’t seen “meaningful actions” from her so far, says Willy Solis of Texas, an Instacart shopper and a lead organizer with the collective. Even considering she is a newcomer, Simo’s answers “toe the line of what Instacart has been doing for years,” Solis says.
Last year, Instacart backed California’s successful Prop 22 ballot referendum that lets tech companies classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees with full benefits. Under Simo, the company has supported a similar ballot proposal in Massachusetts.
In an interview, Simo would not address the collective’s complaints directly but says, “There’s still a lot of progress to make” to improve the experience of Instacart’s contract workers. “This is a top priority for me.” (After the walk-off was announced, an Instacart spokesperson told Fortune that the company takes "shopper feedback very seriously," but argued that the collective's "claims do not reflect the current shopper experience.")
The whole article is here, as part of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women package, and in Fortune’s October/November 2021 issue.
No Comment
I admit to a little disappointment with the second season of Ted Lasso, the everywhere AppleTV+ comedy that took all of the storytelling goodwill it achieved in its first, Emmy-winning season and said, “But what if we went, like, really dark and sad?”
I kid, a little. I admire a lot of what the show’s writers tried to do in this “Everybody Hurts” season, turning their feel-good sports sitcom into a meditation on mental health, grief, and long-buried trauma. I just wish they hadn’t taken so many writing shortcuts to do it. (Spoilers.)
There was the abandoned storyline about one professional athlete’s on-field protest against his team’s main corporate sponsor, which somehow yielded no damaging repercussions for the player or his team. (Not exactly how the clashes of sports, money, and politics usually play out.) There was the weird romance between that same, 21-year-old athlete and his team’s fortysomething female owner—who briefly acknowledged the relationship’s terrible power dynamics. But when she decided to sleep with her employee anyway, she also faced no negative consequences. (Or even, like, mild criticism from any of her friends or colleagues!)
Most annoying to me personally, there was the spectacular journalistic malpractice by fictional sportswriter Trent Crimm of The Independent. Trent—a minor character who until this point had been portrayed as the most serious reporter in a press room full of tabloid hacks—writes an article about the mental health of the titular protagonist, Ted, reporting that a panic attack prevented Ted from doing his job of coaching a professional soccer team. However: Trent’s expose somehow gets published based on a single, anonymous source (nope). Then Trent texts Ted to reveal his source’s identity (really, no). Worst of all, Trent only alerts Ted about the source’s allegations, and asks for a comment, after the article publishes. Cue me actually yelling at my TV: “THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!”
Look, I understand that explaining basic journalistic ethics may not make for very compelling television. But asking someone for a pre-publication comment on an article specifically about them is pretty much the trade’s prime directive, and it was incredibly—and unnecessarily—lazy writing to pretend that any halfway decent journalist wouldn’t do that.
(I could also do a whole rant about how legitimate news outlets don’t tend to publish allegations against public figures based on single, anonymous sources! This was partly how serial predators like Harvey Weinstein were able to kill the rumors of their abusive behavior for decades—because their victims were afraid of going on the record, and most news outlets wouldn’t publish these allegations based only on anonymous sources. The reporters who did eventually break the Weinstein story, in part by convincing enough people to go on the record, now have best-selling books and a forthcoming movie about how they did it—meaning that this part of the journalistic process is pretty public knowledge for anyone who cares to do even surface-level research! But I will confine my rant to this parenthetical.)
Anyway, the season ended with Trent getting fired for the sin of revealing his source, rather than for not knowing how to do his job in the first place. Sigh. I’m just grateful that, at least this time, it’s not a Slutty Lady Journalist being bad at my job on-screen.
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