Digest 02/01/2023

“Just give your laid off friends a hand up because it's gonna be you one day.”

LAYOFF CONTAGION

By Jane Drinkard

It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad couple of weeks in media. On January 20, Vox Media laid off 7 percent of its staff, followed by Adweek laying off 10 percent of its staff (mostly editorial positions) just a few days later. That layoff was followed by layoffs at The Washington Post and Dotdash Meredith (which also axed 7 percent of its staff). And just this morning, Bustle Digital Group laid off 8 percent of its staff and shuttered the new Gawker (RIP yet again). 

Nearly 1,000 jobs were cut in the English-language news media in January alone, according to media reporter Bron Maher at PressGazette. Despite continued reports that the overall job market is strong and the economy is healthy(ish), media reporters and analysts still expect more layoffs to come. The fact that we’re all bracing for a recession that hasn’t (or, perhaps, won’t) show up is apparently enough to send media bosses on cutting sprees. The big question is, why now? CEOs have cited economic uncertainties in their often impersonal notes to staff, but industry watchers have been quick to surmise that the cuts are more about keeping investors happy and workers insecure. If nothing else, 2023 is shaping up to be the year of fear.

What sets this wave of layoffs apart from others, like the widespread “furloughs” from the early days of the pandemic, is that there’s no specific answer to the why now? question — just a lot of bad economic vibes. “There’s all these reports that companies are doing layoffs amid ‘recession fears,’ which is only exacerbating those fears,” one media reporter, who wished to remain anonymous, told Study Hall. “It’s become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.” (A similar contagion-like cycle of layoffs is playing out in tech, too.) 

Massive cuts also happened in December at publicly traded companies like Gannett (6 percent) and BuzzFeed (12 percent). “These CEOs talk about economic uncertainty, which affects everyone, but they are especially concerned about it because of the constant profit pressure they face,” said RodneyBenson, a sociologist and professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. “They can’t afford to get caught flat-footed at the next quarterly profits report, so their way of being cautious is always to cut costs — and staff are among their biggest expenses.” 

Even if the recession has not exactly arrived, its ominous shadow is informing workers’ behavior, too. In a sharp essay for her substack “Culture Study,” writer Anne Helen Petersen makes the strong case that “Layoff Brain” has shaped entire generations of media workers. “Layoffs are the worst for the people who lose their job, but there’s a ripple effect on those who keep them — particularly if they keep them over the course of multiple layoffs,” Petersen wrote. “It’s a curious mix of guilt, relief, trepidation, and anger.” At this point, we’re all basically waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

So in a way, the bad-vibes layoffs are almost a reflection of our darkest thoughts about work. “That fear is the product of an economy that has normalized mass layoffs and as a result, 85 percent of workers cite job loss as a top concern,” Emma Goldberg, the Future of Work writer for The New York Times, told Study Hall. “It’s not just the event of the layoff but living with that fear or uncertainty of being able to plan for the future that really takes a toll on workers.” Currently, she’s working on yet another article about layoffs for the Times.

The fear is sending some journalists running into the arms of other, more stable industries. And those who stay, according to Benson, have to operate like an individual business or brand more than ever. “There’s this assumption of permanent precarity,” he said. “Even when you have a salaried position [in journalism], you’ve got to think like a freelancer or an independent producer, you’ve got to focus on promoting your own brand. The age of the organization is over.” 

Capital deliberately maintaining an uneasy — if not outright afraid — labor force is a story as old as capitalism itself. But this does seem to be a uniquely existential moment in job insecurity. Instead of worrying about an actual financial catastrophe, the looming threat is that there could be a looming threat. At the end of the day, there doesn’t really need to be a good reason to lay off a bunch of people if that’s what a company is determined to do. That’s why you need to be ready to help, and to be helped, according to labor writer Hamilton Nolan. “Just give your laid off friends a hand up because it’s gonna be you one day.” He added, “If you’re in this industry and you have a good job, the tables are gonna turn one day, so we all gotta look out for each other.”

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FREELANCECORE  

The dresses and other garments in the new 14-piece Rachel Comey x New York Review of Books collection borrow a number of recent covers from the magazine. The images are blown up to such a grand scale that the cover art becomes almost completely abstracted, leaving only bits of typography, including the cut lines and bylines for articles, fully recognizable. “We liked the idea of current events, books and writers’ bylines being a part of the literal fabric of our clothes,” the Comey website explains. NYRB has no staff writers, making all of the highly visible names on the Comey pieces those of freelancers. And no, Comey apparently did not comp contributors with the dresses, shirts, or pants that bear their names. With pieces costing between $250 and $1175, what would it take for a NYRB contributor to snag a Comey with their name on it? With rates around a buck a word, probably a good chunk of a paycheck. But maybe Vivian Gornick, whose name is featured on one of the pieces, has it right. When asked by The New York Times, “Would you ever wear a garment with your own byline on it?”, she had a short, quick response. “No. Would you?”  

THE WORLD’S LITTLE MAGAZINE

Amidst the news of layoffs (and more layoffs, artificial BuzzFeed-quiz intelligence, and the market responding favorably to automation – even if that’s not exactly what’s happening just yet), something good happened in media last week: there’s a new little magazine in the world. The Dial promises monthly digital issues on a theme — the first, “Egg,” is focused on reproductive justice — from a global perspective. The magazine includes “journalism, literature and essays in translation, bringing new and celebrated voices from beyond the Anglosphere to our readers for the first time,” according to a note from Paris-based editor-in-chief Madeleine Schwartz. And right now does seem like a good time for American audiences to read about how, say, Argentina was pushed to overturn its abortion ban. —Willy Blackmore

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LONGREAD OF THE WEEK:

So, why is the rent too damn high?

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York City, residents started leaving like never before, leading to a 3.8 percent population decline between April 1, 2020 and July 1, 2020. And the city’s deserters never quite “flooded back,” despite what the real estate industry and reporters who cover it have said. So when the rent started rising wildly, allegedly because of all those who fled returning again, writer Lane Brown wondered what the real story could be. For Curbed, Brown examines whether there might be some truth to the conspiracy that landlords are actually to blame, having inflated prices by intentionally warehousing vacant apartments across the city. (At least 20,000 rent-stabilized units are definitely being warehoused, and possibly far more.) But Brown apparently left out the most important detail. Paul Williams, director of the Center for Public Enterprise pointed out on Twitter that Brown neglected to account for “household formation” as a key indicator of “how housing demand gets created.” New York Mag Intelligencer senior writer Eric Levitz also tweeted, “The main reason why New York City rents have gone up — even as its population has declined — is that the number of people-per-household has been going down.” He added that “demand for housing is measured by household, not individual.” —Erin Corbett

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

—Bina Venkataraman is leaving The Boston Globe to join The Washington Post as a columnist where she will be writing about the future.

—Sia Michel is the new Culture desk editor at The New York Times. “Sia is as comfortable innovating new forms as she is in shepherding more traditional ones and she does both brilliantly,” writes Times assistant managing editor, Sam Sifton.

—Abbie VanSickle is leaving The Marshall Project as a staff writer to join the Times’ Washington Bureau as a Supreme Court reporter. 

—Ike Sriskandarajah and Chris Benderev are joining “This American Life” as producers. 

—Jay Owens is joining the London Review of Books as Head of Audience. “This new role is about imagining how the LRB can and should exist on the internet,” Owens writes.