Whatever it is, it’s not great.
Before the Houston Landing even had a name, it was already powered by one of the biggest investments in any single nonprofit local news startup. A full year before launch, the project had secured $20 million in pledged funding from a coalition of local and national backers.
This week, newsroom staffers were shocked when Mizanur Rahman, the Landing’s widely popular editor-in-chief, and Alex Stuckey, an early hire and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, were abruptly fired on Monday morning as part of what CEO Peter Bhatia described as a company “reset.” Rahman and Stuckey had hired and mentored most other members of the newsroom.
Their losses, six months after the news site’s full launch last June, prompted the Landing’s journalists to send a letter appealing to the nonprofit’s six-member board of directors to reverse the decision. But Bhatia told me that the board of directors and funders were “not at all” involved in the company reset decision — he said these calls were his alone.
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After managing editor John Tedesco was named interim editor-in-chief in another one-on-one meeting, Stuckey told me she was fired in a five-minute 9:30 a.m. meeting with Bhatia, where she was asked to sign a severance agreement binding her to confidentiality, which was reviewed by Nieman Lab. (She refused to sign it.)
“I was not given a reason beyond ‘the company needs a reset, and you’re not part of it,’” Stuckey told me. She was especially blindsided because recently, in December, she had received a 3% raise based on what she described as a “stellar” performance review.
Stuckey also told me Bhatia had asked her to begin publishing stories more frequently (“once a month”) in December, “because he felt we needed more enterprise.” Publishing that often as an investigative reporter, she said, would have been a “demotion.” At the time, Rahman had “headed him off” and Stuckey had thought the dispute was resolved. (Stuckey published at least one story every month last year starting in February except for April and November, when she took a three-week vacation.)
Stuckey thought her loyalty to Rahman might have contributed to her being fired, telling me, “I tell all our job candidates, ‘if Mizanur said, we have to move to Antarctica, we’re going to do incredible journalism,’ I would call my husband and say we have to sell the house.” (Another reporter who requested anonymity out of concern for their job said “I think that she was essentially collateral damage” and described Stuckey as “among the more vocal people in the newsroom.”)
I’ve been a fan of Houston Landing since its launch – you’ve certainly seen how often I use their stories as a basis for my posts. I don’t know what this Peter Bhatia guy has in mind – really, read the story and see if you can figure it out – but I didn’t see anything they needed to fix. I hope this doesn’t screw them up from this point on. Go read the rest of this story, and the Texas Monthly story and see what you think. Poynter has more.
Bhatia will quit within 18 months and get another friend (like Cohen) to hire him for a cushy job. He clearly has no understanding of Houston or running a business (which he has never done). Look at their website they are overstaffed with so many people not involved in the reporting process. Kuff (as a one man gang) produces 20x the value of the Landing without burning through $20 million of rich people’s money.