Hi, this is Alex Goldman, I’m one of the hosts of the show. 

I’m talking to you today to give you an apology and an update from me and the entire staff of Reply All. 

In the last few weeks, Reply All has been airing a series of episodes called The Test Kitchen, which were reported by Sruthi Pinnamaneni, about the structural racism and toxic work environment at the food magazine Bon Appetit. 

Last week, days after the publication of the second episode in what was supposed to be a 4-part series, former colleagues of ours at Gimlet, publicly described multiple instances of 

troubling behaviour from both Sruthi, and my long-time co-host PJ Vogt. These accounts prompted a reckoning on our team about the work culture at Reply All. They also left us asking whether we could continue to air this story without interrogating ourselves and what has unfolded at Gimlet. We now understand that we should not have published this series as reported, and the fact that we did was a systemic editorial failure. We’re not going to be continuing the series and PJ and Sruthi have both decided to leave the Reply All team. 

I, and the entire team, know that making Reply All, getting to tell peoples’ stories for a living, is a huge privilege. We also know that we have let a lot of people down and made a lot of mistakes. We’re very sorry for our many failings. We’re sorry to our colleagues and former colleagues we hurt, we’re sorry to you, our listeners. And of course, we’re sorry to the people who spoke to us for the Test Kitchen, who shared their extremely personal stories with us

It is worth saying: We are going to keep the already published episodes on our feed for anyone to listen to. We had a lot of debate about this, but ultimately, we don’t want to bury our failure.  

We plan to find a way to get to the bottom of what went wrong here both with this series and our show. Once we fully understand it ourselves, we also want to tell you as best as we can what happened. As we contend with everything, we are placing the show on pause. 

You’ll hear more from us soon. In the meantime, take care of yourselves. And thank you for listening.