Remember: We’re hiring! Click here to learn about our Junior Editor and Social Media Coordinator roles. We’re looking for driven people to build our social media presence and help us commission and edit the articles you love to read.
As senior editor of a medical science journal, my job was to improve the readability of articles, liaise with authors, resolve content questions, and coordinate with production staff to publish the monthly issue. It was the sort of labor that Francis Fukuyama characterized as “white-collar work that involves symbolic manipulation.” But it also involved human skills, such as interpersonal communication, native linguistic ability, imaginative problem-solving and, as Samuel Johnson put it, “integrity of understanding and nicety of discernment.”
During my twenty-year tenure, the executive director and I elevated the production quality of the publication using the New England Journal of Medicine as a model. Our efforts took a while but proved successful. The journal grew in size, circulation, reputation, and relevance to clinicians. It gave me a sense of accomplishment to deliver a high-quality publication to an appreciative readership. And it felt good to make a living in a useful trade, specifically by bringing the latest musculoskeletal science to clinical practice.
Then, in 2021, the journal’s Board of Directors hired a new executive director, a tech enthusiast. In one of our first meetings with him, he requested that we get a bid from a Singapore-based AI-driven publishing platform, Straive. It didn’t set off any alarms at the time, because the journal’s Board of Directors reassured us when they hired him that they had no intention of outsourcing the journal’s production capacity, which had taken fifteen years to develop and had significantly driven its growth.
However, two weeks after the bid came in, and a day after we closed the March 2022 issue, each member of the production staff was called into a Zoom meeting and told that their services would no longer be needed. I’d been there for twenty years, the production manager for fifteen, the copy editor for ten, and the layout and graphics artist for five. We were each offered a measly $1,000 in severance, conditional on our signing a confidentiality agreement and staying another month to assist with training the AI. We all forfeited the $1,000, refused to sign the confidentiality agreement, and declined their request to help train the AI.
The Board’s rationale for laying us off was straightforward: machines are less expensive and time-consuming than human beings. At our parting, my colleagues and I were given the trite reassurance that the decision was strictly about finances and not our performance. Later, we learned that a critical factor was a cost-cutting bonus in the contract of the new executive director, which incentivized the swapping of higher quality for lower expenses.
My co-workers scrambled to get jobs with other academic publishers. The copyeditor was the only one who landed a better job as senior editor at a psychiatry journal. The graphic artist landed a lower-paying job at a scholastic textbook publisher where she did “a bit of everything,” as opposed to what she did best. The production manager got a job that she “did not love” and was eventually laid off again. She has since been doing temp and contract work.