Former Ebony Staffer Pens Tell-All About “The Plantation”

While Magic Johnson may be looking to save the beleaguered Ebony and Jet, former Ebony staffer Zondra Hughes is calling out the pub in her latest book, Living the Ebony Life: E-mails from the Plantation.

According to the book’s Web site, “The moniker ‘The Plantation,’ commonly used by current and former Ebony employees, refers to the heavy-handed, often quirky, policies of those in charge and definitely not the magnificent edifice.”

What kind of quirks, you ask? How about eight-track cassette players to share but, get this, no Internet usage. Of course, such policies might have made sense back in, oh, 1975. Hughes, however, was associate editor from ’99 to ’06 and says in a press release that Johnson Publications has no one to blame for its current woes but itself: “New media didn’t derail Ebony magazine, bad management did.”

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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