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McClatchy Follows BuzzFeed, Vice, and Others in Cutting Staff
- adamnemecek 8y agoI can’t tell if these layoffs are good or bad.
- Kye 8y agoIf I go by what I see on Twitter, it seems they're mostly cutting LGBTQ+ people and writers of color. Whether that's good or bad depends on your perspective. edit: I said "If I go by." I didn't say it was the case. It's a non-judgmental observation.
- praneshp 8y agoOne reason could be that people of those demographics are more outspoken on twitter.
- labster 8y agoGoing by what you see on Twitter is probably the bad perspective.
- vowelless 8y agoIf that was the case, there would be a MASSIVE lawsuit with lots of money to be made by the people let go and lawyers involved.
- tick_tock_tick 8y agoThey also hired a disproportionately large number into the roles they are cutting so it would make sense that they would be cut at higher rates.
- Kye 8y ago>> "They also hired a disproportionately large number" Did they? I haven't seen any statistics.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chmod775 8y agoWeird. That is what I was gonna reply to YOUR comment.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Kye 8y agoI asked for a source on a falsifiable assertion. Do you routinely ask people to go and collect data for casual observations? I don't know why this one has people so up in arms when they happen all the time here at HN.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoThe layoffs themselves— I think we'll have to wait and see. What the layoffs may mean for the future of journalism (McClatchy being a solid source of good journalism) doesn't give me a good feeling.
- analogmemory 8y agoDepends on who they lay off, but it does mean they'll have less resources to do investigative journalism. Hidden Brain had a good podcast episode on the costs of newspapers going out of business. https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/675092808/starving-the-watchdog-who-foots-the-bill-when-newspapers-disappear https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/675092808/starving-the-watchd... Unless you're a shady person, then it's all good news :(
- adamnemecek 8y agoNone of these outlets do investigative journalism.
- dublinben 8y agoIt took less than a minute to find this: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/investigations/ https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/investigations/
- jdietrich 8y agoBuzzfeed have one of the best investigative bureaus in the world. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations
- yasp 8y agoAccording to whom and on what basis? Their standards for publication seem to be low, AFAICT [1] [2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/business/buzzfeed-donald-trump-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/business/buzzfeed-donald-... [2] https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/01/20/the-liberal-media-eats-it-again-n2539302 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/01/20/the-liber...
- fitzroy 8y agoThat isn't true. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations https://www.vice.com/en_us/topic/investigative-journalism https://www.vice.com/en_us/topic/investigative-journalism https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/investigations/ https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/investigations/
- elicash 8y agoLayoffs are bad -- this is affecting real people. WTF is wrong with you?
- oh_sigh 8y agoLayoffs are bad for the individual in the short term, but not necessarily bad in the medium or long term, because it frees those people to engage in more economically productive activity.
- dang 8y agoCan you please make your substantive points without crossing into personal attack, even if another comment is wrong or annoying? Downvotes and flags are usually sufficient to convey the latter anyhow (as above).
- commandlinefan 8y agoOne thing I learned the hard way a couple of years ago - when the company starts cutting back, you're better off being in the first couple of rounds of layoffs than being a "nonexpendable" who they hang on to until the bitter end. I was at a struggling startup that went through round after round of layoffs, offering generous severance packages in each round, until there were only like 10 of us left. Then one day they completely ran out of money and I showed up and the doors were locked and there was a note informing us that we were unemployed effective immediately and we would be paid out the remainder of the week.
- hinkley 8y agoFirst round. You aren't competing with your colleagues for jobs, you don't have to deal with survivor's guilt, and generally the severance will be better (or exist at all) because they either feel guilty or are still interested in virtue signalling by making sure you're taken care of. The main downside of first round is explaining why you were in the first round.
- redisman 8y agoUnless you're some top hat wearing, moustache twirling villain I don't see how layoffs are good news. Let's not get too arrogant just because our field is on a high. Too young to be affected by 2000 or 2008 or just lacking sympathy in general?
- sct202 8y agoFor so many news/media companies to be cutting all at the same time, I wonder if they're all having issues with earning enough ad revenue all of a sudden? Maybe the high spenders like Squarespace, BlueApron, and MailChimp are pulling back ad spend?
- darkpuma 8y agoWell BlueApron is on the rocks too, aren't they? So that's definitely possible.
- notatoad 8y agoThe three you listed are big spenders in the world of independent youtube channels and podcasters, but are they also big customers in the context of Vice or BuzzFeed?
- zjaffee 8y agoIt's that these companies have been VC funded for most of their existence, as they focus on going public, they realized they need to cut back.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoYou’re right in part, but even publicly-shared media companies are doing the same thing.
- hayksaakian 8y agoIt's January when ad spends are usually much lower than the preceeding holiday season. There are currently backs accross the board, but on the outside it's hard to say if those are seasonal or not.
- 75dvtwin 8y agowithout re-iterating my views about the political affiliation of these outfit. Just seeing the timing of it, all at the same time, is indeed suspicious. Another posted suggested that they have hired at disproportionally large numbers. Seems like a plausible explanation, if true. May be it related to some political changes. Or, may be, there is an unseen 'consolidation' that will commence (layoffs in tech industry, often precedes takeovers). Just speculating, though. I definitely feel, that people will not pay for opinion pieces, but will pay for investigative journalism. However, investigative journalism, in my view, lacks economic model. It is quite resource intensive, but there is no 'story origination fee' of some sort. So it has to live of donations, which could make it very biased.
- monksy 8y agoIf it'll get newspaper to snap out of reporting their opinion pieces and baises, I'm all for it. I don't wish the layoffs on anyone, however, they don't seem to push a great value for their customers. I want to see good quality reporting, and I don't want them to try to inject their selective editing/political agenda in it.
- vkou 8y agoOpinion pieces and biases are the thing that will stay. They are cheap and easy to write. Good reporting costs money. A lot of money. Also, don't confuse our prevailing normative social biases with a 'lack of bias'.
- DeusExMachina 8y agoThe Huffington Post dropped its whole opinion section[1], so that seems to contradict your statement. - [1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/huffington-post-shutters-opinion-health-sections https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/huffington-post-shut...
- BeetleB 8y agoDoes it? It's been almost a decade since I last looked at HuffPost, but what original reporting do they do? Back in those days, it was all opinion pieces, or piggybacking on other's original reporting. If they don't do any original reporting, then dropping the opinion section doesn't contradict anything.
- vertline3 8y agoI think it may not, because we live in the "attention economy" for media. I think it would take something to reverse this somehow, because it incentivizes "hot takes".
- lbotos 8y agothis week I had two fantasies: - kickstarter for investigative journalism. Get decent writers, get people that are willing to pay to hear about what they find, and hope they maintain ethics and integrity. - a monthly news source, that is focused on "slow news". Sure, XYZ happened, 30 days later, what's relevant. 3 months later, what was the overall trend? It's not meta, but definitely "slow" and the goal is to focus on the moving average vs the noisy data.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sremani 8y agoIn the wise words of Martin Shkreli, who sounds even wiser from jail.. The web media layoffs remind us that there is no money in virtue signaling. Major media will get back to real news. The ‘fakeout’ caused by companies like Vice and Buzzfeed will retract and the CBS/ABC/NBCs of the world will realize ‘woke’ culture and uber-progressivism won’t pay the bills. People want the news, not preaching. Companies like Buzzfeed (hungry for a merger) are still upside down on cost structure and will go bankrupt. Startups, such as Gawker’s latest iteration, actually have a risk of imploding on their own smug, before they prove they’re not viable businesses, either. More 20-somethings will realize that their calling of ‘speaking truth to power’ (by trying to usurp power itself) is a distant second to operating profit. No operating profit, no whining about the benefits of socialism, sorry. reference: http://martinshkreli.com/uncategorized/1-26-2019/ http://martinshkreli.com/uncategorized/1-26-2019/
- badmadrad 8y agoI actually think Martin Shkreli is right to a degree. A business has to profit to be successful but not necessarily profit by any means necessary. As this can be a short sighted strategy. The reality is that these news outlets abandoned their stakeholders and instead decided to push an agenda for a myopic few. The reality is that these news outlets should be seeking truth and not pushing an agenda. Truth will always build you wider coalition and thus profits will ensue.
- shard972 8y agoWhy is this being down voted? Do people think that unbiased news is a bad thing or something? That these news outlets should have progressive convictions in everything they make? Sure they can exist, but they shouldn't occupy the entire mainstream landscape unless the entire population is on board with those convictions.
- cannonedhamster 8y agoBecause it's a pointless comment. Fox "News" is the leading provider of television news in the United States by a wide margin. They have a widely conservative bent and one of their anchors has nightly talks with the President. https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-network-viewership-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-networ... The claim that news can be unbiased is silly as all news has to be reported through a lens. The claim that news media has a "liberal bias" is a long standing conservative talking point going back to the 1970s where news media was listed as slightly liberal and then everyone ignored the follow that showed that media had self corrected based on the report. Claiming that there's a "liberal news problem" just points out that conservatives don't like that "their President" is getting "unfairly attacked" by the media. This completely ignores that conservative media frequently runs literal conspiracy theories that have led to real life shootings with little regard to the outcome. The point being that claiming that there's some grand liberal conspiracy ignores the fact that most of the news organizations OP cited will actually issue corrections. Fox news rarely issues them and most other mainstream conservative commentators never do because they claim they are "infotainment".
- luckydata 8y agoIs this a case of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes"?
- mudil 8y agoWhen Google and Facebook control 80% of the advertising market through surveillance duopoly, 20% goes to all the publishers in the world. They are starving. I call it Google's War on Journalism.
- djohnston 8y agoadapt or die. facebook and google offer a demonstrably better ad targeting platform than any newspaper can offer. if people value high quality journalism then they should be willing to pay via subscriptions.
- mudil 8y agoAdapt or die or be constantly followed and listened to by the surveillance multinational corporations. I hope you enjoy being spied on 24x7, including in your bedroom.
- djohnston 8y agoi dont understand, no one is forcing you as an individual to use any of these services or buy any of these devices. they also don't produce news, they just offer a better solution for advertisers. it's not like these media outlets are altruistic truth seekers anyway, although some journalists are. the NYT is a publicly traded business, Buzzfeed built whatever legitimate journalism it does on the back of clickbait gossip trash, and vice has devolved into a caricature of what it once was.
- mudil 8y agoI hope you are enjoying dystopian orwellian today of monopolistic surveillance capitalism. Maybe these publications devolved into the caricature because they are starving for the income, they just can't support good journalism? They are walking dead of journalism. Do you even realize that there is no creation of content on the internet outside of youtube, FB, and legacy publishers? No new smart websites for kids. No new media networks. No VC investments in media. It's a wasteland of journalism. And yes, people are forced to use Google and FB because they are no alternatives. Don't tell me duckduckquack is just a click away.
- verroq 8y agoThey should learn to code.
- tweezy 8y agoIs this a reference to the journalist harassing meme that is based on a lie that journalists some how dismissed coal workers by saying it's their fault for being poor and they should just learn to code (this never happened)? The meme that's used by far right 4channers as way to aggressively spam and harass journalists to the point where they want to kill themselves, while maintaining a way to step back and say "stop being so sensitive, I'm just giving career advice!" Is this what you're referencing? Sources: 1 - https://angrywhitemen.org/2019/01/30/learn-to-code-the-alt-rights-latest-anti-journalist-meme-is-based-on-a-lie/ https://angrywhitemen.org/2019/01/30/learn-to-code-the-alt-r... 2 - https://newrepublic.com/article/153019/fetid-right-wing-origins-learn-code https://newrepublic.com/article/153019/fetid-right-wing-orig...
- api 8y agoI came here and scrolled down to look for the first instance of that meme and post something like what you did but you beat me to it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- verroq 8y agoOnce you cite a website that is called angrywhitemen you lose almost all credibility. Everyone should learn to code. That has been the narrative pushed by the media, nothing wrong with throwing it back in their face. Some people getting some unpleasant messages on Twitter doesn’t diminish the humour from this situation. And I’d hardly call anyone that used to work at Huffington Post or Buzzfeed a journalist, given the amount of drivel and clickbate they spew out.
- tweezy 8y agoWhat's false about any of the information from articles I posted? If all you have is making fun of the name of the website, but not commenting on the content of the posts, then you don't have argument. You have an insult. Stop being a coward and pretending like you're giving career advice here, or just in it for the lulz. Look at the screen grabs from 4chan. It's pretty explicit that the goal is to make these people's lives unbearable simply because they disagree with what the journalists write. So why don't you stop pretending like "it's just a joke" and come out and say what you really believe? Which, if it aligns with the beliefs of the kids on /pol/ that are pushing this meme, is something like "people who write things I disagree with need to harassed so much so they stop writing things I disagree with." And if your goal is not to harass people who write things you don't like, you at least have to admit your are aligned with people who want that. It's not so much the message I find repulsive, it the cowardice of the messengers.
- AzzieElbab 8y agoIt may sound harsh, but IMHO these outlets are highly redundant, from quality of journalism to political stands. Just the same news retold the same way to the same audience
- cpr 8y agoEasy: the end of the 2-year $160M Obama anti-propaganda act, which is, as usual with government, the opposite of its name. Paid about 1K “jounalists” $80K each for 2 years.
- untog 8y agoIf it's so easy I'm assuming you can provide absolutely any proof at all backing up what you're saying?
- sublupo 8y agoI assume op is talking about this https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/effort-to-combat-foreign-propaganda-advances-in-congress/2016/11/30/9147e1ac-e221-47be-ab92-9f2f7e69d452_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/effort-to-co...
- sergiotapia 8y agoThe "learn to code" drama is priceless coming from these same journalists who viscously harped the same line to miners and blue-collar workers who lost their jobs in the midwest. Hope they like the taste of that medicine. It goes down super smooth and just what the doctor ordered!
- dingo_bat 8y agoWho knew click bait and fake news isn't a business model?!