Where to start: The most obvious was departmental management that was in over its head and was neither aware of its weaknesses nor that its processes that were supposed to catch problems actually routinely failed to do so. The culture in the editorial department was one that not only accepted mediocrity but fought efforts at improving quality, resulting in glaring errors and bad advice going live online. Not only did no one seem to care, they pushed back against those who did.
Companywide:
1. The company was run like a boys club when I first arrived, with the young management team dating employees and hosting parties that got out of hand.
2. Don't expect much diversity on staff. Its a bro-world with almost zero racial diversity, diversity of age, and a culture of getting out the door before 4 p.m.
3. Outright homophobia in one area of the editorial dept. despite constant complaints to HR, which failed to root out the problems.
4. No feedback loop to HR of problem managers despite promises.
5. Decision-making confined to small, inexperienced leadership team that has resulted in zig-zag direction of one poorly thought out direction after another. Who thinks out bad ideas like Nourish + Bloom, or running the editorial team as an ad agency? Complete failures!
Editor-in-chief lacked basic understanding of not only the subject he was charged in covering but how to implement routine processes to catch mistakes. In fact I found that despite being empowered to fix mistakes I had encountered, it was met by a back-stabbing group that simply didn't care and fought back. Who, for example, thinks "I don't care if the information is wrong because that's what the writer wanted," is an appropriate response when an editor is trying to fix dozens of mistakes in a piece, and then the EIC throws up roadblocks to ensure it doesn't get fixed?
Poorly managed editorial team from the top, led by an editor-in-chief who found it uncomfortable to his personality style to deal with conflict and would rather lock himself in a room down the hall and read manuscripts all day long. Nobody was on the same page as to a commitment to excellence, and the result is what you see today: Glaring training errors and bad advice abound, sometimes dozens in a single article! The blind are leading the blind here.
