#media layoffs

[iww-gnv]

The company — which was once valued at $5.7 billion in its go-go years — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year and in July 2023 closed a $350 million sale to a group of its former lenders, Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital. Last fall, Vice made another round of layoffs after several Vice News shows failed to get renewed, and consolidated its five operating divisions down to two. After those cuts, Vice Media had over 900 employees worldwide; at one point, it had about 3,000.

[thatstormygeek]

Layoffs are more than just lost jobs. They are lost stories. Somewhere, a corrupt city councilmember will get away with a career of heinous wrongdoing because of one of the jobs lost to recent cuts. Journalism matters. How we see the world matters. The journalists who lost their jobs last week, last month, last year, and last decade deserve better than they’ve gotten. They shouldn’t have to hope to land Tinkerbell Jobs that exist through belief and patronage. In fact, they can’t. It’s not sustainable. What so many of them have provided is a public service whose value cannot be valued in simple economic terms alone.

[toshootforthestars]

ALT Text:

Every few months another cultural institution gets trashed by some conglomerate for short term profit and loads of talented, hard working people lose their jobs. We mourn it and we move on, but this world is getting remade by those with no interest in art, culture, or people.

It's incredible that, when I graduated high school and looked at college, journalism was still a thriving career choice. Now just over 20 years later it's as devalued as ice delivery after the refrigerator was invented. But crucially, it's not being replaced by anything better.

(third panel is a troll claiming journalists are themselves responsible for being unemployed, allegedly for choosing not to create any value)

(source)

[nusca]

"The media industry has announced 17,436 cuts so far in 2023, the highest year-to-date (YTD) on record. The second-highest YTD for the sector occurred in 2020, when 16,750 cuts were announced through May. After 2020, the next highest YTD occurred in 2001."

—Challenger, Gray, and Christmas report for May 2023

[thenewsbeat]

ESPN Lays Off Top On-Air Personalities 2023-07-01 01:02:19

Jeff Van Gundy, Suzy Kolber, Jalen Rose and Steve Young are among roughly 20 ESPN commentators and reporters who were laid off on Friday as part of job cuts by the network. ESPN had planned this additional round involving on-air talent to prevent further reductions to off-air staff after two rounds of mandated cuts by its corporate owner, the Walt Disney Company. Disney CEO Bob Iger announced…

[allthecanadianpolitics]

As Bell Media blamed regulators and policymakers for its decision to announce a fresh round of layoffs Thursday, federal and provincial politicians accused the company of unnecessarily killing off local journalism. Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge decried the company for breaking its promise to invest in news after it was granted more than $40 million in annual regulatory relief. That's the same amount the company said its news division, which includes CTV News and BNN Bloomberg, is losing annually.

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Tagging @politicsofcanada

[samuraisharkie]

I can’t wait to see how badly this new business venture of Watcher’s fails. I hope Steven, Ryan, and Shane’s America centric self obsessed asses lose everything and I hope Steve has to sell his Tesla and bullshit matcha machine and the others have to downsize whatever else bougie shit they have and LEARN how valuable $6 is, not just in the US but everywhere else. This is going to crash and burn and I can’t wait to see the decline.

[reality-detective]

Hmmm 🤔

[soapdispensersalesman]

[valmillion]

i think the downward spiral of the games industry has absolutely nothing to do with e3 going away BUT there is something about how big publishers publicly revealing their games and the direction of their company to an audience of game journalists who can write almost anything they want (usually) and The General Public, who can tell them to their face that their game sucks

[iww-gnv]

The Insider Union, affiliated with NewsGuild of New York, said 22 of its members as well as “many of our non-union colleagues” were laid off. “From the timing of today’s announcement — not even a month after our layoff moratorium expired — it’s clear that management has been eager to lay more of us off,” Emma LeGault, unit chair for Insider Union and a senior copy editor for Business Insider, said in a statement.

[msclaritea]

Don’t cheer the spate of media layoffs: Newspapers are essential to our republic

By Social Links for Daniel McCarthy

Bad news for the media often feels like good news for conservatives.

So word that Vice and BuzzFeed are laying off hundreds of journalists, weeks after the complete collapse of the Messenger, won’t elicit much sympathy from the right.

Then again, it’s not just conservatives who disapprove of the news business today: Gallup last year found a paltry 32% of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the mass media.

The same survey found 29% had “not very much” trust in the media — and a record-setting 39% confessed they had “none at all.”

Last month, the Los Angeles Times announced reductions of its newsroom by more than 20%.

Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post has also been through rounds of buyouts and cutbacks.

But the troubles of traditional newspapers are often taken for granted.

A decade ago, online outlets like Vice and BuzzFeed were meant to be the future of media — new species adapted for the internet ecosystem.

First came “search engine optimization,” then gaming the algorithms that decide what content gets served to millions of Facebook and Twitter (now X) users.

BuzzFeed was notorious for “listicles,” which were addictively easy to share until Facebook became so saturated with BuzzFeed and Thought Catalog junk that Mark Zuckerberg’s platform decided to change the rules.

After all, how much clickbait could readers take?

Online media startups attracted investment by showing phenomenal growth, but it was like an athlete on steroids.

Entrepreneurial young journalists, well-connected with classmates and former colleagues at established outlets, garnered hype and headlines from their friends.

That sparked investor excitement, and with investors’ money, new sites could show a rapid explosion in traffic — since they were starting from nothing.

But how could they maintain investor-dazzling double-digit growth after the first spurt?

The social media on which the news sites depended faced the same problem.

The solution for Facebook, once new users started tapering off, was to get existing users to spend more time on the site, which meant no longer sending them to other sites, like news sources, through links.

Now Facebook and X make it nearly impossible to promote journalism on their sites — they want the eyeballs to stay on their own platforms.

YouTube and Facebook felt like the Wild West in those days, with neither copyright law nor political correctness putting a damper on what users could share.

Today politics isn’t the main reason social media suppress news, but it’s an aggravating factor, as the Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Smith recently noted on X.

Smith pointed out that progressive campaigns to shame advertisers into abandoning Fox News, or X itself under Elon Musk’s ownership, encourage advertisers to avoid all political risk.

Budweiser’s humiliating losses after turning the transgender “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney into a brand representative demonstrated how much it could hurt to alienate conservatives.

So why advertise with any politically charged news organizations?

If left-leaning sites like Vice and BuzzFeed are collateral damage in progressives’ war on right-of-center political expression, that may seem like just deserts, as well as a poignant irony.

But the wider lesson is that online media were never on a secure footing, dependent as they were not just on advertising — which is true for almost all media — but on the whims of Big Tech, which has its own growth worries.

Newspapers, by contrast, flourished as local institutions sustained by local retailers.

The emergence of online national and even global retail, however, has meant ad spending isn’t dictated by geography anymore.

Businesses can reach consumers directly or cast a wider net by buying a little exposure on large platforms like Google or Facebook.

Yet not only news but our very system of government is built on localism — on distinct cities, towns, states and congressional districts.

Newspapers served as their town halls, even more than physical town halls did.

The wipeout of hype-driven, placeless new media isn’t a cause for celebration, but it’s not a disaster for our republic.

The loss of local distinctiveness, on the other hand, is at the root of much of our polarization and deadlock today.

In “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville argued “that the number of newspapers must diminish or increase amongst a democratic people, in proportion as its administration is more or less centralized.”246

Fewer newspapers means more centralized power — and more conflict over it.

Conservatives who don’t want that have reason to want newspapers to survive.

And newspapers that want to survive have to fight hard for local interests and values — including conservative ones.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.

Twitter: @ToryAnarchist

Insert of the author of this crap. 👆

First off, none of it makes a damn bit of sense, especially the fact that this is an opinion piece in the CONSERVATIVE New York Post, written by a guber with the word, Anarchist, in his Twitter handle, it can't decide what to blame the layoffs for, and keep blaming all of this on Conservatives, when the Champagne Socialists pretty much alienated the whole country. Like, WTH. Beheaders, indeed.

[jcmarchi]

Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora Cover Story And Talos Principle 2 | GI Show

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/avatar-frontiers-of-pandora-cover-story-and-talos-principle-2-gi-show/

Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora Cover Story And Talos Principle 2 | GI Show

In this week’s episode of The Game Informer Show, Alex and Marcus break down our latest cover story featuring Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and chat about their multiple play sessions thus far. However, prior to our cover story discussion, we call out this week’s layoffs at Ubisoft, during which the company laid off over a hundred employees. Later in the show, we chat with Charles about his positive Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 review before diving into a new puzzle game, The Talos Principle 2, and Fortnite OG, the popular battle royale’s latest season that’s smashing records.

Watch Or Listen To The Game Informer Show:

[embedded content]

Follow us on social media: Alex Van Aken (@itsVanAken), Marcus Stewart (@MarcusStewart7), Charles Harte (@ChuckDuck365)

The Game Informer Show is a weekly gaming podcast covering the latest video game news, industry topics, exclusive reveals, and reviews. Join host Alex Van Aken every Thursday to chat about your favorite games – past and present – with Game Informer staff, developers, and special guests from around the industry. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Matt Storm, the freelance audio editor for The Game Informer Show, edited this episode. Matt is an experienced podcast host and producer who’s been speaking into a microphone for over a decade. You should listen to Matt’s shows like the “Fun” And Games Podcast and Reignite, a BioWare-focused podcast. 

The Game Informer Show – Podcast Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Intro

00:03:10 – Ubisoft Layoffs

00:06:12 – Cover Story: Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

00:43:23 – Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 Review

01:00:30 – The Talos Principle 2

01:21:18 – Fortnite OG

01:31:16 – Housekeeping and Listener Questions

[allthecanadianpolitics]

"Sources say newspaper publisher Postmedia Network Corp. is laying off 11 per cent of its editorial staff, less than a week after workers were told the company was grappling with "economic contraction.''

Postmedia, which owns publications including the National Post, Vancouver Sun and Calgary Herald and employs about 650 journalists, announced the layoffs at a town hall Tuesday afternoon.

In an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The Canadian Press, Gerry Nott, acting senior vice-president of editorial content, said the cuts would affect all of the company's publications with the exception of Brunswick News and Postmedia Editorial Services, which have already been downsized."

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada