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The Atlantic lays off almost 20% of staff
- m0zg 6y agoSeems like the unending stream of "orange man bad" in place of actual reporting is starting to get really, really old. And to be fair to their owner, if that's going to be the editorial policy going forward, you could do it with a lot fewer people. If you go to their front page right now, approximately half of it is "orange man bad" in various forms, with an article shitting on Musk for his "red pill" tweet thrown in for good measure.
- blueline 6y agoyour claim is that the atlantic is failing _specifically_ because they post too much anti-trump content? it would be pretty easy to disprove this to yourself by observing that magazine/newspaper sales have been in decline since before trump was a presidential candidate.
- m0zg 6y agoNo. My claim is they are failing because everyone with a single neuron in their head already knows their position on this issue, and they do not seem to be capable of offering a perspective on anything else anymore. Their "reporting", if you could call it that, is 100% predictable, and is, therefore, not worth wasting one's time on.
- blisterpeanuts 6y agoAtlantic is left wing, as are Vox, Buzzfeed, and numerous other troubled properties cited in the article. I remember actually enjoying the Atlantic a few years ago, but their unfortunate editorial decision to focus on partisanship has crowded out other, more substantial topics for which they were once known.
- RonaldRaygun 6y agoThe whole "Orange Man Bad" thing is the most vapid, discussion-stifling meme I've ever seen, and it's really disappointing that the right has adopted it wholesale. It's practically a guaranteed response to any criticism of Trump whatsoever, no matter how measured or ultimately warranted. Calling people "NPCs" for disagreeing with you is really revealing, and I don't think it leaves the impression that you believe it does. You can't actually think he's beyond reproach, can you?
- blaser-waffle 6y agoEvents? I would have guesses ad revenue -- it's tanking most places.
- gxqoz 6y agoThey host the Aspen Ideas festival which I'm guessing is often a big revenue driver. Many publications (the New Yorker for instance) have moved to hosting these events to diversify their revenue streams. Whoops.
- ghaff 6y agoA number of organizations that make a chunk of their operating income off events and have made them virtual still seem to be trying to collect possibly reduced but still hefty ticket prices. There's one event I was planning to attend in June that's now virtual and the $650 registration is a bar that I'm having a bit of trouble getting over. And, yes, a number of magazines in recent years have added premium events to their revenue streams.
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- minimaxir 6y agoAs noted in the Vice layoffs thread a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23193140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23193140), these industry layoffs are a function of revenue pipelines, and it is 100% not related to the type of content or political leanings.
- rayvd 6y agoExcept where revenue pipelines are influenced by readership reaction to content quality or political leanings informing that content? Don't think you can make a statement like "100% not related".
- throwawaymanbot 6y agoI dont think YOU can try to spin it, its because suddenly conservatives have decided to suddenly not pay for the Atlantic. Stop trying to get a win from lay offs. Try to be a good and decent human being.
- wiremine 6y ago> Don't think you can make a statement like "100% not related". That's likely true. Would be interesting to see ad revenue figures for a good cross section of the industry.
- bearcobra 6y ago100% not related is probably too strong, but reports say they've broken readership records and have added ~90,000 subscribers since March. It seems much more plausible that the collapse of the events and ad businesses due to current economic conditions are the driver.
- kristianc 6y agoBoth can be true. Ad revenues have been hit by COVID for sure, but the remaining ad dollars have gravitated toward higher-quality and more credible news sources. Clickbait and hype merchants like VICE, Buzzfeed, and latterly the Atlantic (the Buzzfeed of the Aspen Institute set) have suffered disproportionately.
- mikl 6y agoI guess it’s time to learn to code, eh?
- ProAm 6y agoI cant view the article, is there a way around the paywall?
- sokoloff 6y agoI can’t tell if that’s an actual request, an extremely clever meta-comment on the viability of online journalism, or a bit of both...
- thomas 6y agoGiving them the benefit of the doubt. Great meta comment. Next time add an archive.is link too.
- beervirus 6y agoWorks great unless you use Cloudflare DNS.
- radicalbyte 6y agoIt highlights a very real and very hard to solve problem with newspapers though. I read a dozen sites on the internet, a dozen newspapers. I can't afford to pay a $10 monthly subscription fee to all of them so in the end I end up paying nothing to any of them. If, however, I could pay a reasonable monthly fee which would give me access to all of the newspapers I read then I would do it. It's easier than getting around adblock or searching for open alternatives.
- wombat-man 6y agoDoesn't Apple news plus do that or something? I just picked 2-3 publications I really like and I subscribe to those. I'm not paying for everything, but I am paying for some.
- asdff 6y agoLots of them are free with your library card. Plus, you don't need to subscribe to everything. Those dozen newspapers all cover the same stories for the most part, pick whichever one has the best writing on the topics you are most interested in and just stick with that.
- jeegsy 6y agoAs long as they follow the guidelines of the medical experts, everything should work out in the end. We are all in this together.
- empath75 6y agoAs long as we ignore that the economy is in very deep trouble, the economy will be fine.
- TheFiend7 6y agoCan't gauge if you're being sarcastic or serious honestly.
- dudul 6y agoI genuinely can't tell if the parent is being sarcastic or not.
- ggrrhh_ta 6y agoI would say that if it cannot be decided whether a comment is sarcastic or not, then it actually sits in the saddle point of the truth.
- lol2143651 6y agoI read it as reveling in the misfortune of journalists who have brushed off the suffering of the unemployed and maligned the character of protesters.
- lame-robot-hoax 6y agoThe economy is in trouble because of the virus, not because of lockdowns or following advice of medical experts. People scared to die or spread a viral infection to loved ones => reduction in eating out, going to concerts, or traveling => major economic pain for the service industry.
- noarchy 6y ago
- burkaman 6y ago> Between the lines: The Atlantic's new majority ownership stake from Emerson Collective, the impact investment vehicle owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, has allowed the company to accelerate its growth in recent years, including a major staff increase and expansion that began in 2018. "Emerson Collective is a social change organization that uses a broad range of tools including philanthropy, impact investing, and policy solutions to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Established and led by Laurene Powell Jobs, Emerson Collective is working to renew some of society’s most calcified systems, creating new possibilities for individuals, families, and communities." - https://www.emersoncollective.com/about-us/ https://www.emersoncollective.com/about-us/ Laurene Powell Jobs has ~$22 billion. She could pay the salaries of these 68 employees for the next 10 years if she felt like it without noticing a change in her bank account. Obviously she is not obligated to do anything, but if employees of my "social change organization" that were hired under my watch, with my encouragement, were impacted by a possibly temporary economic downturn in the middle of a global pandemic and I could help them without sacrificing anything, I hope I would.
- ABeeSea 6y agoShe does not have $22B in cash. You pay employees in cash. Impact investing is just as brutal as any other investment fund. Dollars can be deployed more impactfully elsewhere. The goal is investments that create long term structural change and subsidizing employees of a declining business doesn’t move them towards that goal.
- mikeyouse 6y agoThe point is the business wasn't declining until she changed the mission.. In addition to her Apple wealth, she owns roughly 100 million shares of Disney. 68 staff cuts at $150k/year all-in cost mean she'll save roughly $10M/year. So she could sell 0.08% of her shares in Disney at today's price and these people would be employed for another year to work on the mission that she / the collective chose.
- donohoe 6y ago
- alistproducer2 6y agoThis sucks. The Atlantic was doing great reporting in the beginning of corona, pointing out how few tests were.being done. It was necessary work that reminded me how important real journalism is.
- zeeone 6y agoI will completely disagree with the above statement and claim that The Atlantic were biased and lacking real statistical data in their reporting.
- hprotagonist 6y agowith citations such as ...
- warranty 6y agoSuch as their website and their agenda on their websites. Go to their websites and read words printed there.
- isoskeles 6y agowith citations such as...
- ForHackernews 6y agoThis covid tracking project is part of The Atlantic's data journalism: https://covidtracking.com/about-project https://covidtracking.com/about-project
- cbHXBY1D 6y agoThe Atlantic and Jeffrey Goldberg (now the editor-in-chief) laid the ideological groundwork for the US to invade Iraq, one of - if not the biggest crimes of the 21st century. [1] The Atlantic sold the Iraq War with reporting that relied heavily on war hawks, neocons in the Bush administration, and at times complete fabrications. It it is hard to shed a tear for an organization which helped create a conflict resulting in the deaths of 1.2 million Iraqis. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Goldberg#Views_on_Iraq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Goldberg#Views_on_Iraq
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- tengbretson 6y agoI guess I would have assumed that these positions would all have been furloughed months ago since I don't imagine very many of them fit the qualification of "essential"
- jasonv 6y agoI'm surprised how much rationalization towards the billionaire class is being employed to reason against sympathy and sustenance for the working class individuals impacted by this. The billionaires have all the advantages, and often hold a moral and political posture that they promote socially that are at odds with these actions.
- jhwang5 6y agoB/c billionaires got everything, they also want to feel good about themselves & righteous too. Thus you see a lot of virtual signaling
- uoaei 6y agoSomething something temporarily embarrassed billionaires
- swiley 6y agoMy mother just yelled at my sister this week telling her “she’s not mature enough to get married” because her personal trainer job is currently on hold and my mom is paying her rent. This is something I’ve seen quite a few “conservative” parents do to their kids: they don’t think about what the kids are dealing with they just see that they aren’t making money and scream at them. It’s something she used to do to me before I finished college and it made getting out of bed and other every day things super hard. I used to be conservative but the total and complete lack of empathy people have even towards their own kids pushed me away from it.
- rayiner 6y agoThere is a very old saying: “conservatives have no hearts, but liberals have no brains.” It’s quite apt during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lots of people have plenty of (very warranted) empathy, who can’t wrap their minds around what it really means to be spending $2 trillion a month keeping the economy shut down. Innumerates who think “the billionaires should just pay for it.”
- pmorici 6y agoI'd suggest that yelling aside your mom might have a point. The fact that she is paying you sister's rent sounds extremely generous and unless your family is independently wealthy probably a financial hardship for her. Had you ever considered that the empathetic view of her side might be that she is being put in a difficult position of having to choose between paying her child's rent and being in a financially stressful position hence the yelling? Chalking it up to the by product of political leanings seems like a rationalization.
- shortformblog 6y agoTheir subscription model is strange—it’s $49 per year, which isn’t a lot, but it FEELS like a lot because there is no monthly option like most publications. But events are a huge portion of business for pubs like The Atlantic. It is sad to see these cuts though because they are really putting out some of the most important thinking around this crisis right now, cutting stuff that digs beneath the surface and highlights the broader trends at play.
- zwieback 6y agoIt's my fault - I let my print subscription lapse because someone gave me their free New Yorker gift subscription. I didn't feel like I could keep up with both plus the Atlantic RSS feed still has a lot of good stuff for free.
- GnarfGnarf 6y agoThe sum of annual subscriptions across all newspapers I'm interested in is exorbitant. What if I could pay on a per-article basis? I wouldn't have a problem paying 50¢ or $1.00 for an article I was interested in. It's not practical for each publisher to set up micro-payments. But, if there were an intermediate agent that accepted and managed payments for individual random articles, the money could be aggregated and remitted in a lump sum to the publishers. Sort of like an old-fashioned news stand. What the newspaper business needs is a middleman who will collect micro-payments from me and millions of others, aggregate the money, charge my credit card once a month, and pay each publication weekly or monthly for the collective readers who have selected articles. The middleman could accept PayPal payments, or I could open an account with my credit card, and pay once a month for all the individual articles I have read. There is a Website called Blendle that proposes to do this. However, only a subset of articles are available. Publishers are reserving the prime content for full subscribers, and leaving Blendle with the crumbs. That's not going to work.
- donohoe 6y agoIf I had a dollar for every time I heard this I would have about $78 to $96 (estimated). Been tried. Many times. By numerous entities, and some media orgs themselves. It doesn't really work. The issue is people.
- ericd 6y agoHave any of them gotten WSJ, NYT, and one or more other heavy hitters onboard? If not, I don't think we know whether it'd work or not. If they have, I'd be interested in learning what happened so I can stop wishing for this. Also, I think pay per article is doomed to failure, the amount of friction it adds would shrink the market by too much. It needs to be a fixed sub with all-you-can-read a la Spotify, with your subscription fee being split between the orgs you actually read. It seems like it'd need to be a JV between news orgs, and not a third party. No sane news org with any leverage would hand their customer relationships over to a third party over which they have little control.
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- nojito 6y agoReal Journalism is very expensive. I fear the day when all the financially viable "news" is some YouTube channel with no investigative staff powering it, but caters to a niche that doesn't care about accuracy or integrity to sustain itself.
- InTheArena 6y agoI don't know - I would argue that Scott Manley and Tim Dodd do a better job then any mainstream media on reporting on Space news, and the tech youtube community is better then almost anyone save maybe Ars Technica.
- nojito 6y agoThe Tech youtube community is centered around clickbait and shoehorned brand warfare to generate views. There are some worthwhile youtubers, but the vast majority create useless content to keep you watching. >Scott Manley and Tim Dodd Space is very very niche. But The Economist and Nature have provide some pretty good space content in recent memory.
- bryanmgreen 6y agoI hope this isn't indicative of larger business troubles. They've provided some of the most quality editorial over the years. Thankfully John Oliver, podcasts, paid individual-contributor newsletters, and documentaries are taking over long-form investigative journalism and news-aggregator sites and social media are increasing their reach, but I still feel there's value in "traditional" editorial institutions.
- mmhsieh 6y agowhat is really the minimally-functional enterprise size for a journalistic organization? you need reporters, editors and fact-checkers. that is the atlantic model. or, if you want just reporters, we can have pure indy reporting on massive platforms where it is a pure marketplace of ideas. the future does not appear to favor the atlantic model.
- minimaxir 6y agoOff the top of my head: - Sales (for ads/sponsorship to actually make said revenue) - Tech (for managing said traffic to make said revenue) - Social media/distribution (for sourcing said traffic to make said revenue) - Data Analysis (for analyzing all of the above) - Legal (not directly related to revenue but is essentially required for journalism at this level) Even the "indie" journalists often have teams in these areas working for them, just with less visibility.
- mmhsieh 6y agoyou are right, the overhead is bigger than i thought. i suppose if one wants to be a youtube journalist, google somewhat takes over the role of sales, tech, social media, and even data analysis if you count their optimization of pushing your videos to key users. either you pay out of pocket or put yourself at the mercy of google.
- jbellis 6y ago85 comments and not one seems to have read past the headline here. "The 68 staff cuts are mostly attributable to the collapse of the company's events business." Reporters aren't losing their jobs here. Events staff with no events to run are.
- linsomniac 6y agoFrom your high horse :-) you seem to have missed that the next line was: "sales, editorial and events staff are all impacted". So not just event staff.
- burkaman 6y ago> In the memo, Bradley says that sales, editorial and events staff are all impacted. There will more than likely be events to run in the near future.
- empath75 6y agoNot for the next year or so.
- GoodJokes 6y agoMaybe start with cutting all the conservative editorial worriers they have been hiring to uh show both sides.
- throwawaymanbot 6y ago90k+ Subscribers added in the past few months. Its nothing to do with content, as some alt-righters on here are saying..
- sunstone 6y agoWhy don't the magazines get together and offer a package deal? Kind of like cable but for print media. I know Apple has something like that but I'm not an Appostle. If I could pick the publications I want I would be on that in a heartbeat.