Reply All’s PJ Vogt leaves The Test Kitchen controversy

Last year, the Condé Nast had Enjoy your meal found himself hit with some sort of calculation, after many employees of color, including Priya Krishna, Sohla El-Waylly, Rick Martinez, Gaby Melian, Molly Baz and Carla Lalli Music – have left her popular Test kitchen series of videos on accusations of pay versus white colleagues, tokenization, stolen credit, and more. The scandal revealed a lot about the inner workings and power differentials a site that often struggled to portray its employees as a group of respectful coworkers all hanging out in the kitchen together, and highlighted the power and pay disparities across the site’s organization.

Now a different, But Related, Test kitchen is subject to a similar review, as Vulture reports that Sruthi Pinnamaneni and PJ Vogt, a senior reporter and host, respectively, for the Reply to all Podcast, move away from the series after their reports on Enjoy your meal brought to light similar issues in their own Spotify business Gimlet Media. Specifically, Eric Eddings, former Gimlet staff member and co-host of The Nod podcast, described in a Twitter thread earlier this week in several ways Vogt and Pinnamaneni, who covered Enjoy your meal thanks to their The test kitchen Spotify Miniseries, reportedly hampered Gimlet’s workforce diversification efforts, especially during a period when company employees were pushing to unionize. Among other things, Eddings wrote that “The stories of BA staff members are worth telling, but to me it is detrimental that the reporting and narratives come from two people who have actively and AGGRESSIVELY worked against multiple efforts to diversify the staff and content of Gimlet . He went on to detail a number of examples in which Vogt and Pinnamaneni opposed efforts to organize and diversify.

Both Vogt and Pinnamaneni apologized in light of Eddings’ statements; while Pinnamaneni was already planning to leave Reply to all after The test kitchen miniseries, she has now left the show mid-production. Meanwhile, Vogt, who co-hosts Reply to all with Alex Goldman and Emmanuel Dzotsi said he was going to “step away” from the podcast, with Vulture indicating that his departure from the series will be “permanent”. Gimlet Media has yet to release a departure statement.