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The media industry's current round of cuts and consolidation is accelerating. Sizable layoffs at Buzzfeed, Gannett and Verizon Media (home of AOL, Yahoo, HuffPost and others) were announced Wednesday, totaling over 1,000 jobs cut.
Why it matters: If the headlines signal anything, it's that the news media will continue to struggle to find a sustainable business model in an advertising and attention ecosystem dominated by tech companies like Google, Facebook and Netflix.
By the numbers:
- Verizon Media will cut roughly 800 jobs, or 7% of its global workforce across the organization, as well as certain brands and products. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg told Axios earlier this month that each of the company's three units, including the media business, needed to be able to stand on their own. (A company spokesperson later clarified to Axios that Verizon Media Group will still have access to Verizon customer data when customers opt in to provide such information.)
- Buzzfeed will cut roughly 250 jobs, or roughly 15% of its workforce, including jobs within its news division.
- Gannett cut over 20 jobs Wednesday, per Poynter, with more expected as the company tries to shed costs amid buyout talks.
[...] Bottom line: Many news companies are struggling to find sustainable business models in the digital era. There's no sign it's getting any easier.
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Over 1,000 Media Jobs Lost in One Day
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(1)
Sleep is for the weak and sickly.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @03:21AM (1 child)
Did all the anonymous sources dry up or something?
(Score: 5, Funny) by hemocyanin on Friday January 25 2019, @07:57AM
Nah -- they just realized it doesn't take 100 people to make shit up. Just as easy to do it with 10.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @03:39AM (1 child)
"Nothing of value was lost"
If you generate something which has ACTUAL VALUE, the world WILL notice and you will be compensated for your efforts.
But if you generate mostly bullshit, the world will also notice that, as indeed it has in this case, and your efforts will not find appreciation in the form of being paid.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @09:35AM
This used to be true, but thanks to companies like the ones mentioned in TFA stuff of actual value tends to get burried underneath mountains of manure, and becomes ever more difficult to find the larger the mountain of manure becomes. Quality is actually punished in the current climate because it requires a much larger time and energy investment than simply copy/pasting and exaggerating rumors your "journalists" cherrypick from social media/blogs. But... It also produces a nice feedback loop where everything is now recycled to the nth degree and eventually goes full circle. I've caught site like these recycle their own material from 5-6 years back, presumably without being aware of doing so. And as with all things that spiral out of control like that, even low quality manure is diminishing in quality as a result. And that's presumably why their bottom line is bleeding now. Quality isn't trumping manure, manure is drowing in itself (alongside quality).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 25 2019, @03:43AM (3 children)
Government has failed to prevent monopolistic growth among corporations. No, we can't blame any administration, but it was patently obvious with the bank bailout that gubbermint is the corporate lackey. Actually, it was obvious long before that, with the military industrial complex pretty much dictating contracts to the government.
Anyway, if government were to do it's job, and represent the PEOPLE instead of corporations, these monopolies and near-monopolies wouldn't be shedding PEOPLE in pursuit of profit.
Yeah, sure, any moron understands that a corporation's job is to make money. Any corp that doesn't show a profit is doomed to failure, or death. And, I ask, WTF is wrong with that? Evil Corp goes belly up, it's assets are sold off, and a couple of startups start hiring people.
Let me ask: How many people believe that big corporations create jobs? Historically, startups create jobs, and when they start showing success, some big corp buys them up, then ELIMINATES JOBS!!
I lean more and more toward the idea that our government is a complete failure. Other than the common defense, they neglect to do their jobs entirely. And, in defense, they over perform by an order of magnitude.
The current administration has zero motivation, and less than zero capability to get any of this mess under control. Maybe it has made some marginal improvement in the MIC, but it's sure hard to see if they really have.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @04:25AM (1 child)
You are not wrong. But think of what these jobs basically were.
They are little more than rumor mongers. They sit in their ivory towers and chuck stones at people for just 'looking' the wrong way.
Their job is to embellish things they may or may not have seen themselves.
"news" has devolved into little more than people yelling at each other over things they heard someone else say about someone else. Their monetary value is rapidly shrinking. They wanted to pretend they were the keepers of truth. But we have learned it is not necessarily what is true they are telling us but what they want to convince us to believe.
If you had told me 20 years ago that CNN would be publishing in the way they are now I would have laughed in your face and thought you a loon job. Yet here we are.
The current administration has zero motivation, and less than zero capability to get any of this mess under control. Maybe it has made some marginal improvement in the MIC, but it's sure hard to see if they really have.
The thing is it is these very people who have stated openly they hate him. Telling us he is a 'do nothing'.
From where I sit their tabloid news gotcha journalism is what is doing them in. In their mad rush to have 'first post'. They have conveniently forgot to actually check anything. When you have a major news anchor standing in a ditch up to his waste in water telling us how bad the weather is and his camera crew is standing in a puddle you start to question their motives in lying... about the weather?!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @05:29AM
The more SJWs learning the basic life lessons they demanded to be protected from in their liberal arts degree programs, the better.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by deimtee on Friday January 25 2019, @11:09AM
I would say that your government fails in the area of common defense too. They over perform in the area of corporate defense.
And by corporate defense I mean defense of corporate profits.
All the freedom and liberty rhetoric disguises the fact that the USA has a very elitist government. You talk openly and without irony of presidential dynasties. There is a class of people who, no matter how badly they fail, will be helped back up with huge low interest loans and porky government contracts, or even outright grants.
(The government here in Oz isn't much better, it is just smaller and has learned to keep its hands off certain things.)
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @03:44AM (1 child)
Maybe, just maybe, you might wanna take up a productive occupation, something that produce useful things, like farmers and fishermen.
(Score: 1) by Goghit on Saturday January 26 2019, @02:35AM
Well, speaking as someone with experience in both - the oceans are acidifying and the farmlands are drying out and burning up.
Still far, far better than working as a corporate flack.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @03:50AM (1 child)
As was told to all those coal miners, oil workers, and other dang, dirty, environment-destroying, blue-collar deplorables put out of work by President Obama's jihad on the energy sector. Now you get to fight for peanuts with Won and Pajeet to see who's javascript can shit out more ads for your Silicon Valley betters.
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Friday January 25 2019, @04:25AM
If you want tremendous success in life, study Coal Mining. Our Economy is growing FABULOUSLY. Because of me. And thanks to beautiful Clean Coal. We cut the Job Killing Regulations on that one. And now it's exploding!💥 Believe me, we're going to need a lot more Coal Miners. In many places, almost all our beautiful States. We haven't found Coal in Hawaii for some reason. But we're going to look very closely into that one. Because Hawaii needs Coal more than anybody. They're on an Island in the middle of the Ocean. Very hard to connect our Energy Grid to them. I'm a Master Builder so I know this better than anyone. And it's a lot like Puerto Rico. They didn't have Coal. And they didn't have the Coal Plant. So when those hurricanes came, everything went dark. Sad!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Apparition on Friday January 25 2019, @04:22AM (6 children)
Over 1,000 media job losses in one day is a good start. Now if only the remainder would follow...
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 25 2019, @04:43AM (5 children)
We just do pay cuts here rather than firings.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Kalas on Friday January 25 2019, @06:36AM (3 children)
Pay cuts on free volunteer labor? So what, you fine someone if they knock one of the servers offline? Put takyon in his cage for an hour when he forgets a link in the summary?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday January 25 2019, @12:27PM (1 child)
Nah; TMB is a fisherman. He constantly needs bait......
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 25 2019, @05:27PM
Oddly enough, that's not much of an issue here in TN. Between my cast nets, my minnow trap, and the fact that worms come crawling out on the sidewalk every time it rains (which seems like about nine times a day), I'm pretty well set on bait.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 25 2019, @05:24PM
We just did 50% across the board paycuts last week. Mind you it was mostly so we could give NCommander and Deucalion a 250% pay raise.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday January 25 2019, @12:14PM
Ten percent of nothing is, let me do the math here, nothing into nothing, carry the nothin'...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @06:01AM (1 child)
That's a lot of unemployed moles.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday January 25 2019, @02:55PM
Even if they weren't moles, now they too are getting a taste of diversity with being replaced by H1-B jobs. From the perspective of women, Indian men are the rudest, pushiest, stinkiest scum and even worse than Moroccans. We'll see how long their "tolerance of diversity" lasts having to put up with those street-shitters.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday January 25 2019, @02:32PM (2 children)
This morning at the barber's they had the local news channel on the TV. The "reporter" was exclusively talking about stories on the New York Times and the New York Post, literally talking over screenshots of the newspaper articles. It was surreal. (Maybe this is old hat to people who still watch TV--we cut the cord 15 years ago)
If that's what your "reporting" consists of, why should anybody pay to advertise on your channel?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @04:00PM
Because they have an FCC license to a limited resource.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday January 25 2019, @07:38PM
Well, you can't easily read a newspaper when you're getting a haircut. Besides, who reads anymore?