Polygon Exit Interview: Samit Sarkar, Deputy Managing Editor

Talking to one of Polygon's longest-tenured former employees about the early days, unionizing, and more

Image: Sony Pictures Television

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 going to talk about how these talented people got to Polygon, what they did in their time there, and what they hope is next. I’m going to be publishing quite a few of these in the next few weeks, which will likely result in a higher-than-usual cadence for this newsletter moving forward.

Next up: Samit Sarkar, one of the longest-tenured employees at Polygon who wore many hats at his time with the company, starting as a reporter and working his way up into a deputy managing editor position. Samit and I are old friends – a bond forged from going through the trenches of union organizing and bargaining together, which was enough to overcome our bitter struggles on opposite sides of the Yankees (him) and Dodgers (me) rivalry. A former Jeopardy contestant, Samit was well-known at Polygon for his equal love for puns and copy corrections (staying on brand, he recently sent me a copy edit about a prior Polygon Exit Interview).

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your pre-Polygon background.

I had been freelancing for a video game blog called Destructoid, that is now owned by a non-Valnet but similarly situated content mill sort of company. I was there for about four years, and had made something of a name for myself, I think, in the games journalism field. When Polygon launched, they put out an open call for reporters, and I made it through the gauntlet there. One of the tough things about being laid off from Polygon is the realization that this is the only real job I've ever had.

When did you first join Polygon, and what do you remember about joining?

I got hired at the end of May 2012, and I started on June 11, 2012. I remember the day. I was hired alongside three other junior reporters, and it felt like a gold mine. Not financially – the starting salary was $36,000, after nine months of working as a contractor -- but full-time jobs in media, especially writing about video games, were scarce, as they are now. If I'm being honest, it was my last great hope, because I was living with my parents and had been doing the freelancer thing, but it was never enough income to sustain myself. The goal had always been to try and get a full-time job in media, ideally at a gaming-focused publication. I was probably less than a year from giving up on that dream and just getting some kind of job somewhere.

Getting hired was this wonderful blessing, because I thought the people that founded Polygon had their finger on the pulse of not just where things were at the time, but where things were hopefully going. I was joining a forward-thinking video game publication, but also a company in Vox Media, because I had been a reader of The Verge since when it was This Is My Next. When I joined, we were still writing at theverge.com/gaming, because we hadn’t launched the website.

It was a wild time because it felt like anything was possible. That's not to say there weren't frustrations or issues. The other junior reporters and I had a pretty brutal schedule. I worked eight-to-five, and we had to write seven posts a day. I would get in at eight, and I had to have posts up at 8:30, 9:00, 9:30, 11:00, 1:00, and I think 4:00 and 5:00. Seven slots, five days a week. It was this wild crucible where you learned by doing. I got really good at writing quickly, which is a skill I've absolutely lost in the years since. It was a grind at the beginning.

You're in a unique position in that you were at Polygon since pretty much the beginning. What's one big thing that stayed mostly the same and what's one big thing that changed?

It seems kind of silly to say we had a runway considering the way things ended, but I always felt like the editorial leadership at Polygon was willing to let people try things and take swings. Obviously, it didn't always work out, but I had the opportunity to fail a number of times and I was given a long leash, and when I failed, it wasn't a punitive response that I got. That's not to say there weren't consequences, but part of what was so amazing about working at Polygon was a level of freedom. The nature of it changed over time, but that spirit was always there, in my experience. I was an active participant in my own job, and there were very few times where I felt hemmed in, or unable to contribute to discussions about what my job was.

I think this is just the nature of the business and the nature of Facebook video killing things, Google making changes in its algorithm, and then just lifting content wholesale for its AI overview, but I think we naturally became much more numbers-driven over time. It’s not a bad way to run a website, because, fundamentally, we all want people to read our stuff. That's why we put a lot of effort into it. But there are certainly downsides to that approach as well, and we needed to take that approach more and more heavily as the years went on. In the beginning of Polygon, the co-founders each had their own fiefdoms, which was a philosophy that had its own problems. But the people running those little kingdoms would shape their section the way they saw fit, without, at least to my knowledge, worrying too much about traffic goals.

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

I was hired as a reporter, and all the reporters were really molded further into generalists. We each came with our own areas of expertise or interests, but we were forced to become fluent in everything. It was really helpful for me to get that grounding as an up-and-coming journalist, doing it all – covering EA earnings calls, doing interviews with game developers, going to preview events in New York City, writing reviews, even doing some videos. One of the challenges was we were not afforded time away from our brutal schedule of posts to do things outside of news. We were really so focused on news then that if I wanted to review Madden or MLB The Show, two things that were in my area of expertise, I couldn’t be like, Alright, I'm gonna go play this game during work hours and not hit my seven posts a day. Then we had Speed Run, which was our daily news show, and I did some on-camera stuff as a host for that.

I became a senior reporter in 2015, which felt like an evolution, trying to think about bigger picture stories. Around 2017 or 2018, like many people in our field, I was reconsidering things during the first Trump administration. I remember having conversations with people like I have some skills, am I wasting them writing about video games instead of covering climate change? I had gotten burned out with the grind of the news desk. So in 2018 I was promoted to front page editor, which is a title we made up. I was still writing, but that wasn’t my primary focus. I was managing the front page, which meant deciding what stories were placed where on the website, but it also gave me a window into the SEO and analytics side. It opened me up to working with people across Vox Media, and it was really cool getting to know more people across the company. That coincided with the founding of the Vox Media Union, which was another way for me to get to know all kinds of people from the company.

I had gained experience in the behind-the-scenes stuff, and I found I really liked that role. In a trite way, you can liken it to playing support in a game like Overwatch. One of the big driving forces for me was wanting to professionalize Polygon. In 2019, I did a top-to-bottom overhaul of the style guide that took months. I was also really passionate about supporting the team with documentation, which may sound like a very boring thing to people, but I saw it as becoming a more mature organization. It was very cool that I was afforded that opportunity at Polygon. I was on staff and I was drawing a salary and wasn't focused on making content all the time. I could come up with these policies and processes that would help our team excel.

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

Being a founding member of the Union, with you. Being part of the organizing committee and then the committee that bargained the first contract. And then serving on the Labor Management Committee as its co-chair until I got promoted out of the bargaining unit.

For the first contract, I was the only representative for Polygon on the bargaining committee. [Ed. note – Almost every other Vox Media vertical had at least three or four representatives.] So that was like a part-time job on top of my regular, full-time job. Polygon was a smaller team, but when I was bargaining, we had around 25 people.

It was a radicalizing experience. It's amazing what you learn when you get together with your similarly situated co-workers and compare notes and talk about salaries and things like that. Openness and transparency are the hallmarks of being in a union – when you're not able to share that kind of information, it's the company that benefits. They are in a position of power over employees always, but especially when employees are operating in an information blackout. It was really empowering to be able to work on the union contract and collectively have a say in the terms of our employment and to make gains for all of our employees.

I had a kid in January 2024, well after I was promoted out of the union, but I had 20 weeks of parental leave because the union got it up there. Everybody benefits, not just the people who are in the union, because any decent company will typically extend those benefits company-wide. And for me specifically, there was a point during the process where we were arguing across the table about various salary tiers and who was going to be in what tier. And it was nerve racking, but also empowering for me to sit across the table from my boss’s boss at the time and advocate for myself, and make the case directly to him. He and I had a very good relationship that continued through that process, which is something I'm proud to say. That’s one of my fundamental beliefs about being in the union – it is adversarial, but it doesn't have to be combative, it doesn't have to ruin relationships. I will always cherish and treasure and remember [the unionizing experience] forever.

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

I really loved getting to stretch different muscles I didn’t always use, and bring my niche interests like physical media and TV technology to Polygon. I didn’t write a ton about TV and movies, but I think probably the single piece that I'm the most proud of in my time at Polygon is this long story I did about the infamous Game of Thrones episode, “The Long Night.” That was the one that everyone was like, It's so dark, I can't see a damn thing on my TV.

The filmmakers insisted that No, it was as dark as we wanted it to be. You should change the settings on your TV to accommodate. I saw that story unfolding, and I was like, This is the nexus of my interests as a journalist – the TV episode itself and the story the filmmakers were trying to tell, why they chose to do it the way they did, the way that intersected with how people experience TV in the modern era, and what a content distributor like HBO has to do to to account for the people who are watching this, like me, in a darkened room on a 65-inch, 4K OLED TV with Dolby Atmos surround sound and the people who are streaming on their phone on the subway. They have to provide a comparable viewing experience, in some sense, to those two ends of the spectrum. I talked to some experts and did a bunch of research, and did a pretty comprehensive story on why that episode looked the way it did, and why viewers may really never quite be able to experience something the way that the creators would ideally intend.

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

I was wearing my Hayseed shirt yesterday. Cass Marshall, they’re a hilarious writer and were just such a joyful presence on the Polygon team. And I really will miss working with them and just seeing their just endless creativity. They had written about their giant Belgian Draft Horse Hayseed in Red Dead Online. They played chaotically with that horse, and pissed off all their friends and other players online with their big dumb horse. They wrote this article about it, and we turned it into a T-shirt, because Hayseed is iconic. The fact that Polygon had the room to let writers bring their creativity to the table and go wild with that sort of stuff is something I will always cherish.

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

I think the old chestnut is Oh, you just get paid to play video games all day, right? I spent very little of my almost 13 years of Polygon playing video games during the work day. Even if I was playing stuff for coverage, it was often off-hours.

In terms of the industry, I believe passionately that media literacy needs to be taught in schools. Especially in our information environment, I find people have no conception, or very little conception, of how journalism is done and what ethical principles journalists are trained to adhere to. Even if they're not trained journalists. I don't have a journalism degree. Most people at Polygon didn't have journalism degrees.

There's just so much out there that I think is a result of so many factors, including the rise of social media as a distribution platform for news. People get their news from Facebook or from TikTok, instead of from a reputable news source.

People don't understand how journalistic outlets operate and the limitations that they are under as people who have to adhere to a set of ethics. People will tell you to your face that journalists make up news, journalists make up quotes, journalists lie for clicks, and the real truth tellers are the influencers on YouTube. I'm not casting aspersions on influencers in general, as a whole or as a category, but there are certainly a lot of issues with people assuming that the people that they like on YouTube or whose podcast they listen to are more “authentic.”

The one other thing I would say is people don't understand the money and resources that are required to do journalism, to produce that kind of work. I think it goes hand-in-hand with this devaluation of journalism as a job, and it's why local news has been hollowed out. There are so many second- and third-order consequences from that.

It is great that there are a handful of people who are able to make a living as independent creators in games or entertainment commentary or even reporting in some cases, but it's a lot harder to do that on your own without the infrastructure and support staff that a proper publication provides. That costs money, and it's harder.

What’s your wish for the future of gaming journalism?

It would be easy to say it would be great if there were magically rich benefactors to use their massive wealth to subsidize publications like Polygon at its creative and staffing peak. But I think the problems mentioned earlier would torpedo such a thing, or would really hinder that kind of effort. It's hard to have faith in new publications starting up when they're inherently behind the eight ball compared to established players, whether that's legacy media outlets or newer digital ones. It's just so hard to carve out a place for yourself, even if you have a staff that has a lot of combined authority and experience. And so I think my hope really starts with education, with people understanding what they lose when publications like Polygon are hacked to bits.

What’s next for you?

I don't immediately have any concrete thoughts. This is the first time I've been unemployed since before I had a full-time job, when I was post-college. I’m 38, and now seems like a good time to take stock of my career, but also my life. I have a 15-month-old kid, and I’m excited to spend more time with him over these next few months, and with my wife as well. It is really nice to have this six months of severance, not just as a runway to figure out next steps, but to figure out what I want my life to look like and the next stages of my career.

I will tell you right now I'm not necessarily itching to jump right back into digital media. It is the only thing I've ever known in my adult life. I imagine it's more likely than not that I will end up back in this field, but it is a volatile one. And over my dozen plus years at Vox Media, I’ve gained a wide variety of skills that could be transferable to other fields. That's another thing that I want to really take the time to think through seriously. And I'm glad I have that opportunity over the next six months.

Where can people follow you and your work?

You can find me on Bluesky at @samitsarkar.bsky.social.