Earlier this week, Vice Media, a consortium of web sites together with Motherboard, Noisey, The Creators Mission, Munchies, Refinery29, and a reasonably good microsite known as Vice Sports activities, introduced that it might not produce content material. The layoffs quantity into the tons of.
Additionally, there have been reviews out of New York that the “information, computer systems and data, together with info on privileged sources” of former CBS Information reporter Katherine Herridge had been being seized. Herridge, a senior investigative correspondent, was considered one of about 20 information staffers laid off amidst a spherical of price chopping all through the Paramount World firm.
And at present, the NPR affiliate in Washington, D.C. made an announcement that it might be shutting down the hyperlocal information website DCist. Previous the announcement, nevertheless, was a memo which detailed an entire shutdown of the station’s pc community and the whole automation of content material on the radio station all through the day.
It’s exhausting being a journalist today, particularly when many individuals point out they get their info from sources apart from tv, radio, or newspapers. However the individuals working the present media have resorted to techniques which will be thought-about “draconian,” or excessively harsh and extreme.
A few buddies of mine from my previous days within the dailies had been confronted with harsh therapy after they had been a part of the media arm of a significant sports activities league. The league was shutting down due to a labor state of affairs, and that may have an effect on the media arm.
And with it, a number of hundred programmers, IT individuals, writers, photographers, and editors.
Because the story goes, an all-staff assembly was known as in the primary constructing the place all of them labored. They had been then directed to their workplaces, the place they’d log into their computer systems. The outcome was that the consumer would study whether or not or not they’d be working for the corporate.
It’s an extremely impersonal approach to make adjustments to your employees. I do know individuals who fell on both aspect of the divide, and that one occasion affected so many lives.
The cruel therapy, sadly, continues to this very day.