We’ve got quite the rundown today. First, before we get to the newsletter, rest in peace to the greatest, Gloria Steinem. If there’s anything you read about her legacy today, it should be this 1963 exposé she did, where she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny at the Playboy Club.

In today’s newsletter, I caught up with Alma Avalle, one of Condé Nast’s ‘Fired Four,’ about how she’s doing now. And, of course, our usual roundup of interesting media jobs to have on your radar.

Also, speaking of Condé, I have a scoop for paid members on a new lawsuit filed against the company over a WIRED story. If you're not one yet, a friendly note that your subscription goes right back into our small newsroom and reporting like this (you can upgrade here if you’re ready to make the leap). Plus, more intel in Seen and Heard.

xoxo,

Stephanie

Alma Avalle’s story is an unsettling reminder of how one moment can completely change your life.

In November of last year, Alma and about 20 other Condé Nast staff members confronted the company's head of HR, Stan Duncan, outside his office over layoffs at Teen Vogue. Standing in the hallway, the group asked to speak with him about the layoffs, while he declined and asked them to leave the area, eventually walking down the hall. The moment was caught on video and was viewed millions of times. Condé Nast initially fired four staffers involved in the exchange, saying they had violated the company’s employee conduct code because of how they questioned Duncan. The four included Alma, who was Bon Appétit's editorial operations associate and web producer at the time; Jasper Lo, a senior fact checker at The New Yorker; Ben Dewey, a video staffer with Condé Nast Entertainment; and Jake Lahut, a senior writer for WIRED. They became known externally as the Condé Nast “Fired Four."

Nearly a year later, Alma can say that she’s in a much better place now. Back in May, Condé reached a settlement with three of the ‘Fired Four’ members, including Alma, for more than $400,000. The journalists were allowed to resign on their own terms and given positive letters of recommendation. For this week’s Maxed Out, I talked to Alma about the aftermath of the situation, how the whole ordeal changed her life and outlook on the state of journalism jobs, what she’s up to now and advice for trans journalists. 

How are you doing now? 

I'm doing well. I live in beautiful Ridgewood, Queens, with my girlfriend. We just moved in together, which is really exciting.

I obviously no longer work at Bon Appétit, but a few months ago, I started as a labor representative at the NewsGuild-CWA. So I am negotiating contracts for a few local newsrooms in the Midwest and the South, which has been really, really empowering. The thing that I keep telling people is, when you're in New York media spaces, people get so cynical and everyone's burnt out—and understandably so, don't get me wrong. But it gets really frustrating. But working with local journalists has been so empowering in this way. They care about the work so much, and they're being screwed in ways that are hard for a lot of New York people to really wrap their heads around. Yet these are people who have been in the industry for 20, 30 years, people who care about their communities and the coverage that they're working on so much, and the amount that they're willing to put up with in order to do work that is so vital, and then the positivity that they generally bring to the process as well, it has really been reminding me, like, ‘oh right, this is why I started caring about journalism when I was a 15-year-old.’

I'm not trying to make it sound like a Hallmark movie. These are working people with very serious concerns, but at the same time, the amount of care and personality and… the spirit of community that they bring to the project, I think is so inspiring. There's still something really important to fight for inside of journalism, and that's always been true in New York City. But it's especially true, I think, the further and further you get from here.

Touching on the incident last year with Stan and the video that went viral afterward, how did that video change both your life and how you felt about your next moves after Condé?

It was funny. [That’s a] weird word for it, but it was funny. There was a period for three or four months after all that happened where I'd go to parties, people would say, “what do you do for a living?”  And [from my answer] it would kind of slowly click to them over the course of the conversation, and eventually they'd say, "I saw the video of you getting fired."

There was a period where I felt like I was the most fired woman in Brooklyn, but it was very strange. In a lot of ways, it was kind of humiliating, embarrassing to be brought out on the national stage like that. It got picked up in the right-wing media, which obviously latched on to me being trans in a way that was, at times, very disheartening, and at times, frankly, scary. It was also very silly. There was a Daily Mail headline where none of the words in that headline exist in the Bible, they're just kind of stringing stuff together.

I think there's a lot of shame that people attach to being fired or laid off, especially in media, when people's identities are so tied up in their careers. It's strange to have it play out so publicly and then also so antagonistically. But also, from the start, I was one of the people who bargained the Condé Nast contract. I had a pretty firm understanding of how the discipline procedure inside of that contract is meant to work. There was a little bit of disbelief, like, well, wait, I thought they couldn't do this, I thought the whole point of everything that we did is that they wouldn't be able to fire me like this. I think the important lesson that I learned then was that yeah, there is protection, however, it just takes time. Having to wait through the lengthy process of arbitration, it was almost six months before we even got to the table to talk through what settlement would look like, what a remedy could be in the end. So the waiting period, I think, was one of the stranger pieces, kind of floating around in limbo.

As for a career in media, I did a little bit of freelancing in that time, but I think I walked away from the entire experience feeling kind of burnt. And I know that this is an experience that I'm certainly not alone in. Harron Walker had a book come out a couple years ago called ‘Aggregated Discontent,’ a great essay collection, a lot of it about being a woman in media, and a trans woman in media specifically. Reading that book was so funny because there are these stories about her being picked up as this figure of trans visibility in the workplace. Then the ways that those companies will chew you up and dispose of you the second it becomes less advantageous, or the second you start to ask for things like coverage for healthcare, or when you start taking advantage of [healthcare] coverage for surgery or things like that. It was funny reading that book because page after page, I'd be like, that's just me. You're just describing the thing that happened to me, but you're saying it happened five years ago. But actually, it's happening now. The cyclical nature of the whole thing.

I spent a while wondering, do I want another staff job? Do I want to remain a capital-J journalist? And it felt kind of unsure. When you look at who's hiring and …frankly, where are there trans people on the masthead, the number is getting smaller and smaller. A few months after I got fired from Condé, they sold their queer publication off to EqualPride Media. At that point, I believe there were just no trans people on editorial at Condé Nast anymore, which went from having five or six of us to zero in the course of five, six months. It's concerning.

Condé also reached an agreement with three of you. How did you feel about how they handled that process?

We could have gone through arbitration, which would have had an official outcome on the record, versus ‘the union says this and the company says this.’ Instead, an arbitrator would have ruled, which comes out a little more definitive. On one level, would it be nice to have Stan Duncan get up and say Alma did nothing wrong, the Fired Four did nothing wrong? Sure. But at the same time, what does an apology from Condé Nast actually give me that I don't already have? I watched the video from that day many times. I've had the video shown to me many times. I stand by what I did. I stand by the questions I was asking. I think being able to go to your boss and say, why are you running the company this way, why, especially when it comes to matters like political censorship, being able to stick up and ask those questions, I think is a quintessential part of journalism and functioning inside of a journalistic institution. And so, if I know what I did was right, and I stand by it, and at the end of the day, we settled in a way that I feel quite happy with, that I feel made me whole, I don't see much that an apology from the company is actually going to give me at this point.

How did you find that peace? How were you able to move on in a way where you didn't have to keep replaying that experience over and over?

I think it was in the run-up to arbitration, actually, long before the decision was even on the horizon. I was talking to our lawyer at the guild and my representation there, and the kind of headline that everybody would always say, from our local rep to the local president to the international president, was, this is about as good of a case as you can have for wrongful termination. So there was this hope of restitution, reinstatement, or some kind of settlement that again made me feel like I'd been made whole. But at the end of the day, there was no promise that would be coming, and meanwhile, there were six months of waiting around to figure out how things were going to end up.

In that time, I think I had to come to terms with the fact that I'd lost my job. I'd lost a job that I had worked really hard to get, and that I thought I was quite good at. And whatever happened next was going to be on me, no matter what. Whether that was going back to Condé Nast after all of that, that would have to be on me. Or if it was walking away, that was also going to have to be on me. I wish there was a specific moment I could point to, but instead it was this ongoing realization that the things I did that day, I could turn into some perpetual shame, let the people on Twitter who were coming after me quite relentlessly get to decide what my truth would be, or I could decide for myself. I'm luckily surrounded by enough people who were reminding me of the things I already knew, and I think that was a huge piece of it as well. Having a partner who supported me, having close friends, both in the labor movement and outside of the labor movement, who could say, I saw that video, I understand the legal situation, and you did nothing wrong. And people who could see that video and say, I don't understand anything about what's going on here, but I don't see what you did wrong. Both of those were, I think, really, really helpful.

I know there was the option of coming back to Condé. Did you just think ‘hell no,’ after all that, or did you ponder it for a minute?

We were coming into arbitration at the end, and there were two options. Do we go to the hearing, where almost certainly the remedy, if we went through the whole process, would have been reinstatement, or do we pursue a settlement and leave? This was a settlement not just for me but for all of the fired four—or three of us, Jake still has to go through the National Labor Relations Board for boring legal reasons, but his fight's still ongoing and is still worth watching. But for the three of us, Ben had moved on in his career; he'd started nursing school and was not all that interested in becoming a cameraman again. Jasper had been freelancing as a fact checker for documentaries and for other news organizations, and was enjoying the freedom that came along with that. And then again, I've had all of these feelings about, where do I fit in media?

I definitely considered it in the symbolic meaning, like what it would mean to walk back into that building, specifically for the Condé Nast union, which I spent so long trying to help form and fighting for the contract. But the big thing I kept coming back to is that walking back into that building, I knew I would immediately have a target on my back, and they got rid of me illegally the first time, I don't think they would mess up the second time. I'd be back on my ass again, and that time probably without the opportunity to sign some kind of settlement that set me up a little bit while I figured out what came next.

The other thing is it had been six months, and the idea of going back to that job again, I think the last story I worked on at Bon Appétit was a kind of SEO-geared "how do you clean and store grapes," and I didn't really remember all that much about grapes. It had been a while since I did my research. If I picked that draft back up, it would have been a hard task. A little fuzzy.

There is a lot of consolidation happening now when it comes to queer media. Plus, persistent attacks from the Trump administration and DEI rollbacks happening across companies. What advice would you give to trans journalists who are still doing the work but might feel alone or disheartened with what's happening right now?

I think two pieces. Having coworkers that you know well and who you trust to stick up for you and who understand what your main issues in the workplace are, I think, is always going to be the thing that makes you feel more safe and secure in your career. Without the Condé union, the odds that me and Lex McMenamin and Quispe López and James Factora and the other trans people at that company would have been allowed to stay for as long as we did feel significantly, significantly lower. So that baseline protection, I think, is huge. Either get involved in your union if there already is one, or reach out to the News Guild and we'll help you start one. 

This one is a more bummer piece of advice in a way, but I think it's also a thing that was very inspiring for me, and also one of the big things that made me so sure that I did not want to go back to Condé Nast was, I started my own magazine with my friend Joyce [Laurie] a couple years ago called Picnic, and getting to do publishing with exclusively other trans people, getting to edit work that's only by other trans people, commission trans people to make the art and make my own thing on my own terms with people that I like and care about has been one of the most moving and inspiring things I've ever been a part of. The work that we do at Picnic, I think, is amazing, and I'm so proud to get to put it out in the world. But also, when you work at these big conglomerates, there are all of these kind of ingrained processes and ways of doing things, and you have the institutional money and backing that comes along with that, which is great, but at the same time, saving a few thousand dollars with a friend of mine, and then doing a print run of two or three hundred magazines and selling those to our friends, and having it slowly gain traction on the internet and getting to do it all from scratch and figure out how to do it our own way has been the best experience. It's got me writing fiction again, it's got me editing fiction again, and it's gotten me connected to this entire world of trans writers, both people I knew about before and looked up to, and then people who I'm hearing about for the first time, who I'm giving their first byline to. The fact that you can just go and start a magazine is one of the coolest lessons I've learned in the past couple of years. You can just do it, and I think the fact that you can just do it and that people keep doing it is the thing that's always going to keep journalism around.

Tell me a little bit more about what stories you're writing for Picnic, and the frequency, and how it all comes together.

Picnic comes out twice a year. We do a spring issue, and then we have a fall issue coming out later this year. It's blended fiction, poetry, criticism. We have a games section now, so we're coming for you, New York Times, with a crossword section, and then hopefully in this next issue, we're going to have a kind of Teen Vogue-style quiz. The goal is to keep the work very fun and approachable. We named it Picnic because we wanted to be a kind of shareable-type magazine that you can enjoy with the community and with your friends. But also our main ethos is, it's work by trans people specifically for a trans audience that doesn't need to explain itself. I think a piece in Picnic will never tell you what T for T stands for or what HRT is or anything along those lines. If cis people want to read it and give us their money, I'm a huge fan of that. I'm a huge fan of cis people's money. But at the end of the day, that's the audience we want to be catering towards, and it's an audience that I think is too small and too at the margins for corporate media to really focus all that specifically on. So it's cool to be able to fill that gap.

We put out our first issue in summer 2025, and then we had our second one just come out at the beginning of the summer. The print runs are small, but it is a print-first magazine. We sold out quickly on both print runs, which was really, really cool and inspiring. 

It's been fun getting to play around with weirder fiction, fiction that I think wouldn't have as many homes in other places. When I was first getting into writing, fiction was always kind of the thing for me, and then journalism became this kind of, well, you can't really have a career in fiction, but you can have a career in journalism, so if I focus on journalism, I can be a writer and pay the bills. Turns out being a journalist and being a writer and paying the bills is pretty hard. But getting to come back and do the kind of writing that I became a writer to do has done a nice realignment of priorities.

What else are you reading, watching, or listening to that's good on the internet right now?

Huge fan of the folks at Ravenous, which is a recently launched worker co-op in the food media world. It's been doing really, really great coverage for the past few months. There have been all of these conversations for ages about what does a food [version of] Defector look like, what does a food worker co-op look like and mean, and seeing both Ravenous and then formerly Gourmet Magazine, now [Buffet] magazine, while they figure out the legalities of borrowing Condé's abandoned brand, crop up in the same year was really, really cool, and both of them have been doing amazing work.

I have been loving the podcast No Gods No Mayors, hosted by Mattie Lubchansky, November Kelly, and Riley Quinn. Every episode is just a different dissection of another insane mayor, international mayors from all over the globe. They actually do a lot of episodes on Portuguese and Brazilian mayors, which are many of the best.

I read Harron Walker's book ‘Veronica Place’ recently. That was hilarious. It's a 75-ish-page novella, you can get through it in the afternoon. I was sitting across from my girlfriend, laughing to myself the entire time, looking like an insane person.

And a specific internet thing, there's a website called J! Archive that has basically every game of ‘Jeopardy’ ever run on television. Every single question, every final Jeopardy. I love ‘Jeopardy.’ I’ve loved ‘Jeopardy’ since I was a kid. I’m studying to take the test. My partner and I will just kind of quiz each other on J! Archive tables around the apartment.

What's your daily average screen time?

I checked before this. It's three hours, which, I've read some of the other columns in this series, and I'm proud of three. Three feels like a good number. I wish I had a good explanation for how I did it, because it definitely used to be in the five or six range. Props go out to Anna Wintour for letting them fire me, because not having a daily media job definitely brings the number way down.

Anything else you wanted to mention, either about Condé, your career, or any other Maxed Out internet findings you want to shout out?

I think on Condé and career stuff, when I graduated college, being able to call myself a writer mattered a lot to me. Having the validation that came with having a staff job of any sort felt like the most important thing and the objective for probably the back half of my time in academia, and then I got there as an assistant at Bon Appétit, and then an associate editor or associate producer at Bon Appétit, and I kind of felt the same. And if anything, I was enjoying writing less and less and less. Sure, I could go to a glitzy media party and say I'm a writer at a national magazine, and that feels cool and good. But then when I look at the output that I cared about at the time, it just kept getting smaller and smaller. Meanwhile, in the time since I have lost the ability to say I'm a writer by trade, I've written things that I'm so much prouder of, things that I think are so much more fun and interesting and funny, and I've gotten to connect with writers who I think are doing significantly more interesting work.

So I think there can be a lot of hurt and shame about not being able to get into those spaces in the first place, but I think it's becoming clearer and clearer that the legitimacy that those spaces give you is kind of made of paper and is extremely flimsy. Finding the ability to identify as a creative, an artist, a writer, whatever it is, on your own terms, I think is the only way to go, and the only way that it's going to mean anything.

What we’re seeing and hearing around the industry.

Dianna Russini’s comeback? Former Athletic NFL reporter Dianna Russini’s “undisclosed relationship” with Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel violated The Athletic’s conflict of interest standards, according to the outlet’s internal report released Thursday morning. The real sticking point is that she failed to disclose her relationship to the Powers That Be at The Athletic and New York Times, versus that relationship influencing her coverage. The Athletic’s editorial director for standards and editorial quality Mike Semel wrote in the report that there wasn’t any evidence of coverage bias or reporting inaccuracies. 

While the investigation might be over now, it’s not the last that we’ll hear of Dianna Russini it seems. Front Office Sports, which, credit when credit’s due, has been killing it lately on the sports scoops, reports that she’s already in talks for some possible jobs. 

Have a tip for me? Send it to stephanie@la-fronde.com or my Signal if you want to keep things confidential (itsstephwill.94).

Can't say I'm all that surprised. Amelia Dimoldenberg made an announcement Thursday on her Instagram account that she's ending her 'Chicken Shop Date' show after 12 years. "I never thought I'd stop Chicken Shop Date, I thought maybe it would be a part of me forever, and in some way it always will, but I feel like it's now time to move on from this adventure and onto a new one," she wrote.

The news isn't all that surprising. Over the last year it seems like she's been trying to pivot herself into a media mogul in her own right, with the recent announcement of developing a 'Skins'-like show with BBC and securing a deal with Amazon MGM Studios' Orion Pictures to develop a romantic comedy film that's loosely based on her life. At this point, her influence goes well beyond the 'Chicken Shop' name. The last episode of the series has yet to be formally announced. I think it's admirable when someone knows how to walk away from a personal project at the right time. I'll miss the show, though!

More than meets the eye. Fox News made the abrupt announcement on Thursday that business journalist Maria Bartiromo was no longer at the network, but didn’t give a reason why. Now, Status reports that she was fired for an incident that took place back in July.