Our best wishes to the folks at Time Inc., who are enduring a really terrible and sustained day of major layoffs, which is at least maybe a small relief after suffering through endless waiting, knowing this was coming for weeks. Hmm. Nope. Actually, probably not. If you have a Time Inc. friend, buy them a drink today.
Today's hideousness was brought to you by the fine folks at McKinsey & Company, and the management team of Time Inc.
"A bolt of panic shot through my body as Tom continued shitting HR-speak from his mouth, repeating phrases like 'skill set' and 'moving forward' until I eventually tuned him out." —The Way We Get Laid Off Now.
Layoffs at Vanity Fair have been ongoing since yesterday-they're not centralized, which means that editor Graydon Carter need not be present. And that's handy, as the rumor that Carter was on a private plane is indeed said by staffers to be true. Well, while he was out, a trend emerged, according to a staffer, as department heads made their layoff choices. Of the 13 or so let go so far-with possibly a few more yet to come-only two were men. And of the 11 women let go, it's estimated that just three five of them were under 35. The overall office population, with some variation by department (photo and [...]
The New York Press went out and asked young people how much money they are making in New York City! Their answers may not surprise you.
Free magazine story pitch for you! Remember how back in the Olden Times (like the 80s and 90s), when people (okay, men, mostly) would get laid off from their jobs, they'd go back in the office and shoot everyone? Not, like, every time. But enough that it became a trope in movies, like The Rapture, the best movie in the history of cinema. But there's only been three or four in the U.S. in the last decade or so—while the layoff corporate culture has increased, and then unemployment soared. (The most recent non-military event of this type seems to be the 2010 incident at Hartford Distributors in [...]
I couldn't sleep all night! I was tossing and turning, my mind afire, as I wondered: how are there 14 editors at the New York Times Book Review? This is not simple spite! I like the Book Review. Or at least I like it abstractly, not in the "Yay it's Sunday morning, here's the Book Review" kind of way. And yes, there is a hell of a lot of reading involved in it. But I'm pretty sure me and Maud and Lizzie and Mark Greif and a couple interns could get it done by Tuesday and then sort of just chillax on Wednesdays before starting all over [...]
What we've seen in companies that have been successful through the last year-so we're excluding, say, the car companies and most of the media companies oh and real estate and physical goods, etc.-is they've both shed staff and, both independently and relatedly, increased their revenues. Interestingly, this graph from Gawker honcho Nick Denton is pretty darn similar to what it would look like if you graphed Goldman Sachs' expenses and revenues, with even some similar trending during the same quarters! In both these cases, on the micro-scale of Gawker Media, as a small company, and the macro-scale of a big one like Goldman Sachs, there's no decline in revenue [...]
I left the corporate world in 2008 to write about music and entertainment because I wanted to work from bed, only leaving to maybe smoke joints with Kid Cudi while asking him pretentious questions about string arrangements. I don’t ask for much! During this time, my main gig has been permalancing for AOL Music. There, I aggregated content about hip-hop and indie rock, with a stray shot at actual journalism—attempts which were usually trumped by stories about Rihanna deboarding a plane or Jay-Z making funny faces at Madison Square Garden.
And then, in early February, AOL purchased the Huffington Post and handed over its editorial keys to Arianna Huffington. [...]
With much of the opinion-making world fretting that American executives may no longer be compensated at their customary levels of obscenity, and fearing an exodus of the kind of top-notch managerial talent that brought the US economy to the brink last year, it may seem perverse, or at the very least unsporting, to dwell on the lot of the garden-variety shitcanned American worker. And it's undeniably true that joblessness is a subject that much preoccupies me these days. Still, as the official rate of unemployment continues inching toward 10 percent-and the real jobless rate having long ago left that benchmark in the dust-even investor-smitten outlets such [...]
Law firm Fish & Richardson just deferred two-thirds of their incoming first-year associates. That's pretty bad! Though don't feel terrible for them. Half those kids are all getting paid $5000 a month for a year to not come to work. (The other half are only getting paid for six months.)
