Digest 09/28/2022

BRANDBUSTING AT BDG

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WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON AT BDG?

The ax came as a surprise to staffers at Mic and Input. Mic received a splashy reboot last year after BDG, formerly Bustle Digital Group, acquired the site in 2018 for a reported $5 million. Meanwhile, the nearly 3-year-old Input was fast-developing a reputation for its stories about the weirder corners of the internet. Employees at both publications, which are owned by BDG, had forward-looking conversations with management in recent weeks — but after a chaotic day of Slacks and Zooms last Monday, it was clear that layoffs would upend both publications. Mic’s newsroom was all but eliminated with 10 employees laid off, while Input is being shut down altogether; its reviews section and some staff are being absorbed by BDG’s other tech site, Inverse. 

In a nightmare scenario reminiscent of tumultuous mass layoffs-past, some at Input said they found out about the site’s closing through their union reps, and only got an email from management later in the day. “Everyone was finding out over email or just over the one-on-one [meetings] that were popping up onto their calendar for later in the day,” one former Input employee told Study Hall (who, like many sources in this story, spoke to us anonymously as they are still in negotiations with the company). “One by one, people are losing Slack access and disappearing, and many hours later we got a very bland, emotionless email from Bryan [Goldberg, Founder and CEO of BDG] that felt like an extra slap in the face.” (Goldberg told Study Hall, “that’s a complete mischaracterization of what happened.”) 

Goldberg’s shopping habits have frequently been in the news over the past few years, as he’s bought up not only Napoleon’s Hat but a slew of struggling media brands as he moves toward taking BDG public. Yet, workers who spoke to Study Hall struggled to find the rhyme or reason in BDG’s management decisions. “I think honestly Bryan probably just gets bored,” one former Mic employee said. “I think he enjoys the shiny new object and buying a legacy brand that’s like you get a lot of press when you relaunch a site like Mic or Gawker.” Doing the actual work of keeping them running, however, isn’t as much fun. As another former staffer told Study Hall, BDG may want to bolster its portfolio before its planned IPO, but without any kind of tailored plan to sell ads for its more niche brands like Input and even Gawker, it’s no wonder that some of these websites are dying on the vine. Ultimately, thoughtful journalism and people’s livelihoods become collateral. 

“They spent all these millions of dollars on launching these sites and then I don’t know if it’s a management issue from up above, but it seems like they don’t really know what to do with their portfolio right now,” said Matt Wille, a former associate editor at Input. “There seems to be a lot of confusion about how they want to move forward.”

BDG’s buying streak has included everything from Nylon and W Magazine to parenting websites Fatherly and Scary Mommy, and often on the cheap. Aside from the company’s namesake publication, Bustle, and Romper, another parenting site, only one other of the 12 brands BDG owns was developed and launched in-house, and that’s Input. Nominally a tech site with a remit that spanned from Hypebeast-esque sneaker reviews to an advice column helmed by The Eve 6 Guy (aka Max Collins), Input was the latest publication launched by Josh Topolsky, who was BDG’s Chief Content Officer of Culture & Innovation until he left the company in April. 

Topolsky has made a career out of running culturally savvy, slightly weird tech publications, including Nick Denton-era Engadget (where he was editor-in-chief from 2007-2011), The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, and weird-era Bloomberg (remember when the magazine used to put 38,000-word essays pondering “What Is Code?” on the cover?). Engadget (where he was editor-in-chief from 2007-2011), The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, and weird-era Bloomberg (remember when the magazine used to put 38,000-word essays pondering “What Is Code?” on the cover?). He ended up at BDG in 2019 after it acquired The Outline, another off-beat publication from Topolsky. The site had a bit of a cult following, but also saw layoffs in 2018 when all of the staff writers were let go.

Goldberg picked up Inverse, an online tech and science magazine started by a friend with whom he co-founded Bleacher Report, later in 2019, and launched Input that December, giving BDG three separate tech newsrooms. That number dropped to two when The Outline was killed (again) in 2020, and now of course there’s just Inverse. Are you still following?

Some Input staffers said that in retrospect, they could see the writing on the wall over the past year. Despite some kooky, brilliant scoops, Topolsky’s departure created a vacuum. Positions were left vacant (notably, a job listing seeking an editor-in-chief is still posted on BDG’s site, where it has been for months), and freelance budgets were slashed. “Once Josh left the company, we all felt a lot more vulnerable,” one former staffer said. “We didn’t have somebody there to protect the site. It was very much Josh’s baby.” (Topolsky declined an interview request.) 

Another person formerly at Input speculated there may have been some discontent behind the scenes between Topolsky and management. “I think that Josh never fit in at BDG, and by extension Input never fit in at BDG. It became very clear that they considered Input to be Josh’s little pet project,” this source told Study Hall. “It all felt like there was some petty stuff happening behind the scenes and we paid the price for it.”

But Goldberg told Study Hall that the economy is to blame. He said BDG’s biggest ad clients are responding to the decline in the global economy “by redoubling their budgets on larger properties where they have a lot of advertising history,” and at the same time “are less inclined to try new things or advertise on newly-created brands.” Inverse, he noted, is a larger and more established brand than Input, and has a bigger reach too. “We had to adjust our investment plan accordingly,” said Goldberg. 

Whether or not that adjusting would have been necessary if Input got the sales support that former employees said it desperately needed is anyone’s guess. And as always, the editorial staff that made the site was left holding the bag. “It’s a shame,” a former Input staffer said. “Because we really made a name for ourselves in a short period of time and were able to get the trust of the rest of the space. We were getting the big scoops from a lot of the major companies and again, from a brand perspective, none of it makes sense to me…it felt like it was kind of a game to him.”

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article misrepresented Josh Topolsky’s job history and overstated the scope of the 2018 layoffs at The Outline. Both have been corrected, and we regret the errors.

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AND EVERYTHING ELSE

—Working at BuzzFeed from 2014-2017 sounded like a nightmare. 

—Podcast companies are buying listeners by auto-playing parts of episodes in free mobile games. IHeart has spent more than $10 million on these ads since 2018, Bloomberg reports. 

—Fast Company shut down its website Tuesday night after it was hacked. The hack resulted in racist push notifications being sent out to Apple News subscribers. Fast Company said Tuesday’s hack was related to a “hack of FastCompany.com that occurred on Sunday afternoon.” 

—ProPublica is in a legal battle with the US Navy that could have far-reaching consequences. The outlet filed a complaint and motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction as the Navy continues to withhold military court records in the case against Ryan Mays, a sailor accused of arson. Michael H. Dore, who is representing ProPublica, said the Navy’s attempts to withhold the requested records from the public “is government-imposed censorship.” 

—David Zwirner announced a partnership with literary magazine The Drift on Wednesday. Zwirner will become the magazine’s lead funder. His son, Lucas, contributed to the magazine in 2020.