The Media Oxpecker: Return of the Buyouts
february 10, 2012 01:38 pm
Rounding up media & tech industry news you may have missed.
- There will be another round of buyouts at the Washington Post, which wants up to 48 newsroom employees to voluntarily accept its offer to leave. Among the targeted "non-core" departments, the Metro desk will be the hardest hit, which apparently means the paper does not consider local coverage as one of its "core coverage areas." The New York Times notes that over the past three years, the Post newsroom has shrunk by 200 employees.
- Meanwhile, 665 Gannett employees have received early-retirement offers from the company. The offer was extended to staffers "who are age 56 with at least 20 years of service." This comes less than eight months after the company laid off 700 of its employees.
- "Has anyone done a story on how the newsroom layoffs of the past decade have been one of the greatest exercises in age discrimination in U.S. history?" asks R.G. Ratcliffe in a letter to Romenesko. A lively debate in the comments ensues.
- The grass isn't greener for young journalists, says Kim Bui:
For young journalists, especially, I think the growing demand on reporters is worrisome. Reporters need to tweet, write, Facebook, shoot video and photos and blog. You somehow needs to be a jack/jill of all trades and specialized at the same time. We need to talk about balance and time management more than ever. Journalists are notoriously bad at work-life balance and the increasing demands on us are making it even harder. This is an industry full of burnout that could be prevented.
- GigaOM has acquired paidContent for an undisclosed sum.
- The citizen journalism site MyMissourian.com, launched in 2004, will close and be folded into the main Columbia Missourian site as the "From Readers" section.
- In her first year at the helm, Elizabeth Spiers has transformed the New York Observer into a web-first operation, with the print product "quite explicitly in the position of an afterthought," says Felix Salmon:
When you’re working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you’ll be rewarded for it — even the bad posts get some traffic, and it’s impossible ex ante to know which posts are going to end up getting massive pageviews.
- What is Pinterest and why should you care?
- Magazine newsstand sales fell nearly 10 percent year-over-year according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations report.
- Yelp advertising is a rip-off for small advertisers, says Rocky Agrawal. Not so, says TechCrunch writer Josh Constine, you pay to seal the deal.
- How Groupon is trying, and failing, to work with ad agencies.
- AOL has hired Rachel Fishman Feddersen for the newly-created position of Chief Content Officer at Patch.
- Get ready for location-based stories, which will "create context to location, providing video, pictures and narratives of where a user is."
- And finally, here are "Words Journalists Use That People Never Say," by Bob Ingrassia.
