How Many Nice People Does It Take To Edit 24 Pages A Week? @9:11 AM
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 again. 10
Rich People Things, with Chris Lehmann: In Praise of Being Made Redundant @11:20 AM
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 as Bloomberg News are forced to concede that unemployment is now a chronic drag on an economic recovery that's been largely predicated on bank bailouts.
But the news on the jobless front isn't uniformly grim, reports Business Week's Michelle Conlin. A recent study of the impact of mass layoffs at the home plants of the airplane manufacturing giant Boeing turned up some unexpected findings. READ MORE 14
'Vanity Fair' Layoffs: More Than 80% Female @2:22 PM
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 fashion are mostly women; editors are largely men), has a fairly even gender distribution. Although the one senior editor that was laid off was a woman. 10
Gawker Media is the Goldman Sachs of the Internet @1:35 PM
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 from their creating more unemployed non-spenders, which both did in fairly severe layoffs. Gawker Media revenue doesn't depend on its sites' readers being employed—unemployed people read the Internet just fine, even if it's in their parents basement. And GS certainly doesn't depend on the little people for its income. So both can indulge in fairly hard-core cost-cutting and then find themselves rolling in cash without any negative expense besides the most nebulous: ill will. 13
An Entire Crop Of New Lawyers Gets Laid Off (And Well Severanced) @2:30 PM
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.) 6
How Much Do Young People Make In New York? @12:34 PM
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. READ MORE 6
