failing to change the world

[kindkit]

Yesterday on Medium, Newton Schottelkotte (with editing by Tal Minear and Wil Williams) published Who's Afraid of Alex J. Newall?: The Layoffs, Lapses, and Lessons of Rusty Quill.

It's a disheartening and important read for fans of The Magnus Archives and other RQ shows.

RQ has always presented itself as a company dedicated to making podcasting, and the world, a bit better. In particular, RQ said it wanted to foster opportunities for new talent, for people with ideas but without experience and connections.

That doesn't seem to be what they've done. Schottelkotte's piece, based on interviews with present and former RQ staff and creators from RQ's network shows, plausibly shows RQ's business practices as a mix of incompetence and greed. Predatory contracts, misuse of NDAs and non-disparagement clauses, ridiculously bad accounting, communication so poor it seems actively hostile: it's all here. Far from creating opportunities for podcast creators, RQ has shut them out of interaction with other distributors and platforms, locked them into bad contracts, and skimmed outrageous percentages of their income.

I've been uncomfortable with what I've heard of RQ's business practices for a long time, and the recent layoffs made it worse. Even before that, I couldn't help wondering why so many people who'd been with RQ for a very long time didn't seem to want to keep working with them once their shows ended.

I didn't pledge to the Magnus Protocols Kickstarter because I had so many doubts. And now, I think I need to end my Patron support of RQ as well. (I almost did that a few months ago when the layoffs were first announced, but I waited because I didn't want to believe RQ could actually be that unethical.) It makes me really sad.

I'll probably still listen to the Magnus Protocols. I mean, I'm also still on Twitter. But, just as I'm trying to make my Twitter presence unprofitable for Elon Musk, I don't want to contribute financially to RQ any more than I can help.

I'm still hoping they can get their shit under control and do better. But they don't get more of my money until they do.


ETA: Rusty Quill's public response is here. Thanks to rydra_wong for the link!

At this point I don't know what to believe. I've seen companies lie through their teeth against whistleblowers; I've also seen people and organizations (for instance, every trans person who's at all a public figure, and every organization that supports us) smeared via selective quoting, misinterpretation, anonymous sources, and bad-faith, willful misinterpretation. I hate to think someone would smear RQ just for profit or a grudge, but I know it happens. I also hate to think I would be one of those fans who denies accusations of wrongdoing by their beloved content-maker regardless of the evidence.

I guess what I would like to see is some genuine disclosure and transparency. Right now it's Schottelkotte's unsupported word (the sources are unverifiable because anonymous) vs. RQ's unsupported word (the actual policies and documents are undisclosed). What a fucking mess.

If the accusations of exploitation and predatory contracts turns out to be untrue, RQ really needs to learn some lessons from this about how to communicate, both internally and with fans.

Comments

[rydra_wong]

Yeah. *sighs* There's a potential bias issue (the writer is marketing director for a rival podcast network, which they did not initially disclose), but if even half of it's true, there's shit RQ really need to account for and clean up.

There's a lot of stuff which I suspect is attributable to RQ's fandom suddenly exploding in size, for example the stuff with the Discord. If you're making podcasts in a blanket tent and have a tiny community of fans, it doesn't seem weird to have a few fans help out with modding. But then the whole thing explodes in size and you end up with a situation where the Discord depends on multiple people doing large amounts of gruelling work for free, and collapses when they (very reasonably) say "hey, we should be getting paid for this".

And you've also had the explosion in size (and presumably income) being followed by a cliff-edge drop after the end of Magnus, with none of their other potential candidate podcasts successfully picking up the slack. With that and the UK economy cratering, does not surprise me if they overextended themselves and landed in a financial hole, thus ending up laying people off.

However, none of this excuses the fact that they've handled shit BADLY.

And then stuff like predatory contracts just seems unconscionable.

[kindkit]

the writer is marketing director for a rival podcast network, which they did not initially disclose

I do think they should have disclosed, but given that it's public information and not something Schottelkotte was trying to hide (as opposed to, say, TERF groups getting their funding from right-wing foundations, which they make every effort to conceal so they can pretend to be feminists), it doesn't raise huge red flags for me.

There's a lot of stuff which I suspect is attributable to RQ's fandom suddenly exploding in size

Yeah. I think a lot more of the problem is likely down to inexperience/incompetence/surprise than to malice. (Apart from the level of malice that's built into capitalism.) There doesn't seem to be anybody in RQ who actually knows how to run a business--and, as someone who works in a non-profit retail co-op and has seen some shit, I think the first step in knowing how to run an ethical business is knowing how to run a business at all.

On the other hand, RQ started getting big around, oh, S2 of Magnus? Even before the absolute explosion post-S4. So they've had a lot of time to work on solutions, especially since they supposedly have a COO and a CMO who aren't involved in the creative side and just run the organization.

being followed by a cliff-edge drop after the end of Magnus, with none of their other potential candidate podcasts successfully picking up the slack

I would love to know the inside story of what the hell happened there. How did RQ get to the end of an astoundingly successful show and not have anything new lined up? How did it take over a year before they even announced any new programs, and most of another year to start releasing them? Magnus would have been a hard act to follow in any case, but--as a complete ignorant outsider to this world--it seems to me that the minute Magnus started becoming a hit, someone should have been hired to be RQ's creative director, and their only job would have been finding new material. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that Alex just didn't want to hand that over to someone else, even though he was already basically co-writing Magnus, producing and directing Magnus, acting in Magnus, editing Magnus, GM-ing and doing various other things for RQG, etc.

the fact that they've handled shit BADLY

They have such a knack for turning problems into disasters. Not on the creative side (though I haven't listened to any of the new programs, so I don't know how good they are) but on the business and marketing side, without fail.

And I grumpily note that they didn't do a charity livestream this year. They failed to meet their goal last year, which must have been depressing, but I think it would have been good in all kinds of ways if they had done a scaled-back version this year with a more reasonable goal. A back to their roots kind of thing. I wonder how much of the decision not to was the awareness that most of the people fans wanted to see, wouldn't participate.

[rydra_wong]

How did RQ get to the end of an astoundingly successful show and not have anything new lined up? How did it take over a year before they even announced any new programs, and most of another year to start releasing them?

Yeah. Did they try to get new originals lined up and have things fall through/not work out, or just not do anything, or what? Because they knew the potential cliff-edge was coming; Alex mentions it in one of the Q&As, I think.

[cyprinella]

With regards to Gaming & Giving, that was always Mike's baby and he's been out of RQ since July. He's got a new day job in a completely different industry.

[kindkit]

Was that ever actually announced? I assumed he was gone because he just kind of disappeared from all RQ stuff, but I wasn't sure. It's possible that I missed an announcement, because I haven't been following RQ as closely.

It feels like RQ wants to pretend that all the layoffs and so on are back of the house stuff that doesn't affect the fans. But RQ has always blurred back and front of house, it's always both brought in its editing and production staff as performers AND fostered a parasocial fan relationship via things like the Twitch streams. So it can't assume that fans won't care when the head of video leaves, not when the head of video also was the face of RQ on Twitch, 4 hours a week, for a year and a half.

[cyprinella]

Not from their end. I think he tweeted about it and said some stuff in streams that made it sound like it was a lot of creative differences problems. I am assuming due to the switch from live streams to the prerecorded stuff on YT after the mod exodus. And soon after he managed to get locked out of his twitch account and twitch hasn't let him back in so far as I know. I just know because I'm on LinkedIn all day for work and because of a WorldCon work friend, he's like a 3rd degree contact and I can see his page.

[kindkit]

Well, this doesn't improve my opinion of RQs communication and PR, but I'm glad to know Mike's doing okay. I liked what I saw of him, despite his occasional minor fuckups and one colossal one. (And that's the thing. I don't even have a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" sort of connection with him. But if you've seen someone on stream talking about their mental health, their breakup, their stuffed toys and ridiculous booty shorts, you do start to feel you know them. At least an aspect of them.)

[rydra_wong]

Well, this doesn't improve my opinion of RQs communication and PR

Yeah, it just seems dumb. Have a nice little announcement saying "Mike's moving on, we wish him well with [new job], here's what's going to be happening with RQ Streams". Not saying anything makes it look shady regardless of what actually happened.

ETA: I think it's fair to say that if their intra-company communication is as bad as their outwards-facing communication, that's certainly a problem.

[rydra_wong]

There doesn't seem to be anybody in RQ who actually knows how to run a business--and, as someone who works in a non-profit retail co-op and has seen some shit, I think the first step in knowing how to run an ethical business is knowing how to run a business at all.

Or, speculating randomly: I wonder if it's "great at running a business when it's 5 people, don't realize the same things won't work when it's 100 people".

[rydra_wong]

Side-note:

An observation has been made to me that there’s a very good chance that the list on Kickstarter of stretch goal guest writers may be the totality of the people in the audio fiction indie world that have still not had an experience with Rusty Quill.

Wait, what?

Because they're all writers on shows ON THE RQ NETWORK (with the partial exception of Sasha Sienna, and he did write the What The Ghost eps). Like. They have by definition had experience with Rusty Quill.

https://twitter.com/TheRustyQuill/status/1597983496085151745

My head is tilted very sideways. That is just a weirdly nonsensical quote.

[kindkit]

The article is a core of important stuff bookended by nonsense, and it doesn't help the author's credibility. Nevertheless I find more of it credible than I'd like to.