Steve HermanLA Times staffers say ~150 of their colleagues were laid off today in a Zoom webinar by HR with chat disabled and no Q&A.
As Shira Stein at the SF Chronicle points out, there are now just eight reporters, including her, covering Washington, DC for California newspapers.
Among those let go today by the LA Times -- White House reporter Courtney Subramanian.
Meanwhile Time magazine's union says management today "laid off 15% of our unit members, with additional layoffs in edit and business. We are heartbroken and outraged for our colleagues who lost their jobs."
Nuncio Bitis 🏳️🌈 🇵🇸 🇺🇦@w7voa So all these news media are laying off reporters? Why? So they can use AI to write the news?
LOL
This is going to be interesting
LOL
This is going to be interesting
Michael Weiss@w7voa So all these news media are laying off reporters? Why? So they can use AI to write the news?
LOL
This is going to be interesting
LOL
This is going to be interesting
James Brooks@w7voa FWIW, it's alternated between zero and one for Alaska for years now. (Plus one for public radio.)
Matunos@w7voa this may be a controversial take, but is 8 not enough? Do more reporters from a single state covering the same centralized events really add much value?
There must be diminishing returns sending more reporters to DC… as opposed to for example, to local political events and courthouses.
Thorium@w7voa They should be thankful it wasn't a text message. /s
sigi714
Voron@w7voa there are constant layoffs in the news, and no one I know has gotten any kind of raise of note this last year, so I’m not so sure about these economic metrics (as I look at the last grocery bill)
Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈@w7voa oofff, the owners are a shower of bastards 😞
Beeks@w7voa how many of the 150 had recently written an article about how good the economy is?
@infosec_jcp 🐈🃏 done differently
Court Cantrell does not comply@w7voa That HR is staffed with cowards.
birdpoof
Oregon Wine Woman
Venita@w7voa They might as well have said see ya wouldn't want to be ya.
chicating
sleepfreeparent@w7voa well to be fair, how many staff can it possibly take to mindlessly copy+paste official press releases and op-eds from billionaires?
@w7voa
And in other news by the L.A. Times: “Giraffes refuse to fill the tub with brightly colored power tools”
And in other news by the L.A. Times: “Giraffes refuse to fill the tub with brightly colored power tools”
Sheila DeBonis@w7voa yikes. I thought employers knew how much ridicule and dislike this gets them after the CEO of mortgage company Better.com did this. I thought companies cared about their reputation. But maybe since this is a different industry they think that faux pas doesn't apply to them. Or that since they are in LA and lots of people are struggling entertainers they should get used to curt rejection. Still stupid, cowardly, and mean.
Unprecedented 2023
Nicole ParsonsThe layoffs at the LA Times have little to do with business performance.
Major newspapers nowadays are vanity projects for billionaires, and when billionaires eff up, it's the staff who pay the price.
Billionaires own newspapers for the same reason they owned papers during the 1890's Gilded Age: to control the narrative.
https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/01/23/german-court-bans-forbes-from-saying-billionaire-alisher-usmanov-fronted-for-putin
floydgump
bsxsmtd@w7voa Cowards. Would be interesting if “HR” was human or a new GPT App. Without chat and Q/A interaction, they could’ve also just stream a prerecorded video… handy and scalable solution. ♥️ the new social distancing