Polygon Exit Interview: Chelsea Stark, Executive Editor

“From this horrible fire, many trees will grow”

Welcome to Polygon Exit Interviews, a series of chats with my excellent former Polygon employees who were laid off (along with me) when Valnet purchased the website from Vox Media May 1. We’re talking about how these talented people got to Polygon, what they did in their time there, and what they hope is next. I’ll publish most of these in the next few weeks, which will likely result in a higher-than-usual cadence for this newsletter this month.

Next up: Chelsea Stark, who was a key part of Polygon’s leadership team as an executive editor. Chelsea mentored many, many Polygon employees, and helped professionalize the workplace with a lot of invisible work behind the scenes. A graduate of the Poynter Women in Media Leadership Academy and an adjunct instructor at NYU’s journalism school, Chelsea is a tireless advocate for marginalized people in the workplace and for journalists in general.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your pre-Polygon background.

I grew up in Austin. I went to the University of Texas for my first journalism degree. I have two, I am a sicko. I really wanted to stay in Austin at the time. And so I worked wherever would have me, which was the local TV stations. So I edited video, I worked on their websites. I worked at three different stations for the first four years of my career, essentially, and it was kind of a miserable experience to see them being dragged into the digital age. It was kind of funny, because I basically taught one station how to use Twitter in 2008, that was a big scope of my job.

When I was coming up, so many media outlets just failed to understand youth culture and video games in particular, when Jack Thompson was a guy that people continuously platformed. He was a lawyer who basically said that video games were leading to all violent crime. He was always a guest on CNN. It was terrible. I especially liked working in local news and seeing how youth subcultures of any kind were covered, but especially video games. That really stoked my passion to do the work.

I reached a point where I felt like there were no other jobs in Austin. So I moved to New York to get my second journalism degree at NYU, at a program that was way more focused on the problems of modern newsrooms. It was a great, a much better experience.

I managed to work at Mashable right after graduating, which was a really fun time to be in that era of digital media startups. It was really young, and everyone wanted to try new things. Everybody was very smart and kind. I got hired for a job that was not video games, but I realized video game reporting was always something I wanted to do. I saw that at Mashable, which was focusing itself as everything digital, everything online spaces, video games would be a great way for me to do what I want. I built that beat for myself, and ended up doing that for four years until I came to Polygon in 2016.

What do you remember about first joining?

It felt incredible, because by the time I left Mashable, it had gone through a big transformation. It had just gotten a bunch of Turner investment, and that was kind of the beginning of the end for it being a fun workplace, and a lot of people started leaving. I was ready to get out.

I feel like a lot of people, especially in that era, had conversations with Chris Grant that were just like, Hey, you want to get on Skype? Let's chat, which was basically my experience. I actually was hired as a news editor, and he was like, Can you tell me what we're doing wrong? What can we do better? I presented him with all of my thoughts. That was my interview process, which was very informal.

When I got to Polygon, I was thrown in the deep end a little bit because I was given six people to manage, and it was some of Polygon’s great talent. I had only managed like two people before. Julia Alexander, Allegra Frank, lovely people, but I was thrown into the fire very quickly. Six is a lot of people to manage. I quickly realized that I really wanted to focus more on operational things at that point, and realized that Polygon needed the help. That’s something I like doing, putting my brain towards different challenges.

It felt like a very creative time though. Yeah, there were a lot of operational problems to solve. I think that was actually when they were trying to bring the esports websites in-house and move them over from SB Nation. Part of my first six months was trying to help Grant figure that out. That was very tactical work. That’s where my focus and interests lied, because I wanted to solve those problems, but also because I felt like I was getting a little burnt out on just writing.

Can you run me through your history at Polygon – what roles you had, and what each entailed?

I moved to managing editor about 10 months in. Mike McWhertor and I actually just switched jobs very amicably. Mike has always had such a talent and passion for news. It was very clear that he really wanted to do that work, excelled at that work. I think news is going to always be in my blood, especially from working in local TV. I just was like, Oh, well, what else can I do? I haven't done this kind of work before. This is really appealing. So I was managing editor. I helped organize the last in-person get together Polygon did, in 2017.

I did that job for a long time. It ended up being so many different jobs: organizational work, budget management, the onboarding processes, redoing our Slack channels, people management. I managed many of the section editors for a while, trying to help them think about their editorial processes and what could be done better. I worked very hands-on with a lot of people, and that's when I started creating very strong relationships at Polygon across the team.

Then I moved to executive editor. It always takes you a while, I think, to grow into a job. But for me, it helped me to know I was allowed to narrow my focus. It really helped to know Samit [Sarkar] had just been promoted to Deputy Managing Editor, and I knew we were going to hire someone to help with Audience Insights.

What was important to me is if people aren’t struggling with operational problems, they can work better. If everyone understands where to go for things, it makes their lives easier. I've certainly worked at places with confusing or frustrating operational systems. And overall, having worked at good and bad workplaces, I really wanted to make sure we had a place where people felt supported and like we were creating a good culture. Sometimes, it feels like you're climbing a mountain, because the work never stops, and it is hard, and at the end of the day it’s largely vibes. And sometimes, some stuff is not your fault, or people will be upset at you for things outside of your control, and you just kind of have to eat that. That’s what it is. That’s a lesson I had to learn. I can’t fix everybody’s problems directly, because I’m one person and I will melt into dust, but also sometimes it’s just beyond my control. So a lot of it was what can I change? What can I do to make Polygon a place where we all can collaborate? I just wanted to make sure we had a place where no one is yelled at at work or made to feel uncomfortable. That’s the worst, when you have to come to a job every day and you don't feel good about it.

Brag about yourself: what’s one thing you’re proud of from your time at Polygon?

I'm proud of the fact that so many people inside of Polygon knew the work I did. I feel like the staff understood my value. Maybe I didn't necessarily work on a tangible story, but at least I have done things that clearly helped other people get work done. A lot of times I feel like being a good leader is just being like, Okay, what isn't being done right now? Let me do it.

Like, I filled out so many alt text descriptions for [guides producer] Julia [Lee] during the Tears of the Kingdom guides time because I was like, You're too busy. Let me just do this work. I think that's the really important stuff, filling every kind of gap, because sometimes it's nobody's job. That's so easy for me to do, helping her maximize her time and not be a stressed out person, because we're all super stressed.

We had decided, due to the necessity of only getting three game codes from Nintendo before launch, that we were going to do a first for Polygon guides: have some writers work from recorded footage uploaded by people with copies of the game. (This is fairly standard at other outlets, btw, but was new for us.) So that required creating all new workflows, and also figuring out how to commandeer things from Vox Media like the servers for writers with code to upload hundreds of gigs of footage, then getting everyone access to what they needed. I edited the best practices guides written by Jeff and Julia for other writers (many less familiar writing guides) to follow as they wrote from footage. I had to get additional equipment for other writers down the line who also ended up capturing footage. Lots of logistics, and then also responding as problems arose.

I actually feel tremendously proud, because Tears of the Kingdom was a huge, Herculean project, but also I felt like my work and Sadie's work created this really strong backbone to make the most incredible guides project ever. It was definitely hard, and it definitely stressed everyone out, but we did it without anyone totally crashing out, and put out some really good work helping a lot of people play a weird, challenging game.

I'm so proud of the work I did. I did it for so long, almost nine years. That's a long time. I'm gonna miss everybody so much, because it's all about the people. Honestly, my wish for everyone is to go somewhere and do something amazing, because all of us are very talented, and from this horrible fire, many trees will grow.

Everyone pitched in across sections at Polygon. What’s a time where you did something outside of your core job responsibilities that you enjoyed?

It turns out it's actually really fun to write guides. Huge respect to the guides team. I'm not as good as them, but it's really fun to do. I wrote guides for Animal Crossing and Tears of the Kingdom and a bunch of things like that. I wrote movie reviews, like I reviewed the Monster Hunter movie because it was just in my zone.

I did have quite a few game reviews. The first time I did a review for Polygon, I was really anxious. I was reviewing Yooka-Laylee, which is a beloved Kickstarter redo of Banjo-Kazooie. I just really did not like that game. The whole experience of playing it was miserable and it was buggy and bad. That was when we still scored reviews and I was like, I'm gonna about to give this game a 5.5, I'm terrified.

The Polygon Show podcast was something incredibly special. I feel very sad that we couldn't get the support to keep it going. The pandemic basically kind of killed it. We had so many amazing fans, people who made fan art and really resonated with the show. Our fans were so unique. I'd been to other podcast recordings for gaming podcasts, and the audience is all very different, very masculine. When we had a fan meet-up, one of our fans brought us all Lush bath bombs. The vibes were very different, and everybody was so nice. Many people told us they were thankful for saying that we're bad at a video game. It's okay for people to be bad at video games! The traditional games press is so strident about being excellent at every game, when sometimes it's fun to be bad. I'm not good at every game. I certainly have my genres I'm terrible at. It was nice to connect with an audience that I don't think is being served by most podcasts and still isn't being served.,

Any particularly fond Polygon Show memories?

We did an actual play podcast, Ross Miller DM’d it. We were all Pokémon. That's one of my favorite memories. I was a Bulbasaur that owned a bar.

Do you remember the name of your bar? Was it Barbasaur?

Oh, my God, it should have been Barbasaur. It was definitely related to plants, I definitely made a pun. I was always torturing Allegra with puns constantly.

We also had a live show where we just made a bracket of who you wanted to romance in games. And at some point it came down to thick Yoshi and 2B from Nier: Automata. That was the most fun we got to have at work.

Do you have a favorite Polygon story or video by someone else?

There's so many. There are so many wonderful things that I know people have mentioned in this interview series, and they're all amazing, like Nicole Carpenter's fantastic Barbie story or the union zine. For some reason right now, I’m thinking about the time that Simone published a bunch of weird poetry. I think about Mike McWhertor’s investigative journalism about if Toad’s head is a hat or his head. Still relevant to this day.

I loved all of our packages, where everyone came together, like Wariogon, or Cool Sword Day, or Barbie Week. Anything where it felt like a lot of the staff contributed. Like Polygon Draws, I did have a little bit of a hand in this. We were goofing in Slack, and Julia flexed that she could draw Sonic from memory, because she'd done it so many times. And I was like, Who else can do that? That's how Polygon Draws was born. I was like, Okay, guys, try to draw Sonic from memory. You have 15 minutes. Let's go. And then we had a thing where we guessed who did what. That was the ultimate collaborative project.

There's so much good, important work. I still think about Tracey Lien and No Girls Allowed. I wasn't even there for that. I wanted to work at Polygon when I saw that, and I saw the dual console reviews, when the Xbox 360 and PS3 came out. To me, it signified that this place took video games seriously, but could also elevate the work and craft. I also think of Chris Plante’s Ken Levine feature. Incredibly written.

What do you think is the biggest misconception that people outside the industry have about games journalism?

I really think people think that we should know everything about every single video game that has ever been published in the whole word. I think that shows a lack in extending grace and humanity to people. Sometimes people are specialists, and sometimes they're generalists. When I wanted to be a games reporter, there's so much stuff I didn't know. I didn't have every freaking games console. I’m mostly a Nintendo person, and I play some PC games.

Sometimes what brings you to the work is curiosity. Obviously online spaces are online spaces, and you have to discount the voices of the crowd. But it's still very frustrating to me, because it's like, please think about the authors as people.

I wasn't into Monster Hunter or Persona until I joined Polygon. I was assigned to those games, and now I like both of those series so much.

What’s your wish for the future of games journalism or digital media?

Obviously I hope the independent journalism creator economy grows. But what I think is really missing from that, and what is really important about games websites like Polygon, is that they were able to bring in people that may not have gotten a shot at all. And those creators, those websites all kind of exist because those people have followings already. This is not a knock against them, because I've had those conversations with them too, and everybody tends to agree this is a problem. How are we going to be able to bring in people that might not immediately be someone the audience follows, take chances on people, and let different kinds of people do this work. Without the kind of umbrella and protection a larger site has, you can't really do that as much. And so my wish is for some kind of solution to that, being able to make this sustainable for more people, and especially younger people.

What’s next for you?

I have taken some time to think about that, because I still kind of don't know. I'll just say that I think I'm a really talented leader. I would love to go work in another organization who values my skills, but also wants an empathetic leader. I would love to go work at a place where I feel like my input will be valued. I think the one of the most important things for me about Polygon was there's a gender dynamic everywhere, and I had two male bosses, and they always listened to everything I had to say and invited me to speak. I don't know if I'll get that anywhere else.

I want to find a place where I can continue to solve problems, because I also think that I’m good at that, too.

Where can people follow you and your work?

You can follow me on Bluesky.