Digital media's pivot to nothingness pt. 2

0:00Hey pals, you are listening to The Culture Journalist, a podcast about culture and media in the age of platforms. So we just talked about the pitchfork layoffs on our last episode, but the situation in media is somehow getting even more bleak. The 2024 media bloodbath claimed yet another victim a couple of weeks ago. You might have heard Vice Media. That news came on the heels of Complex getting off-boarded to a live streaming shopping platform, along with cuts to 16 % of its remaining staff. Don't worry, it gets worse. The LA Times, Sports Illustrated, The Messenger, and a bunch of others also saw cuts totaling over 900 journalism job losses in January alone, which actually is about on par with January of last year.

0:51So to borrow from one of our 2023 episode titles, since it does bear repeating, what the hell is happening? To help answer that question, we brought on Max Chaney. He's a media reporter for Semaphore. He serves the very important role of helping to break a lot of this news. And he's going to tell us a little more about it. Hey, Max. Hey, how's it going? Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you guys for having me to discuss such an interesting and kind of depressing topic. But I'm ready for it. Yeah, you're living it. You're working it. You're all in it. Well, hopefully not living it that way. But I've managed to avoid it so far, but I'm sure, you know, I'm sure it'll come for me someday.

1:32I've done enough layoff stories to know that I'm not that special, but fingers crossed. Many blessings to you, sir, and Godspeed. So, yeah, we've all lived through these media layoff seasons. But, you know, these last few months have just felt like particularly ominous. Like I said, the LA Times, Vice, The Messenger, Pitchfork, Sports Illustrated, so many others announcing cuts or closures in rapid succession. As someone who's been reporting for a long time about the moves that these media companies make, what feels different about this moment? Yeah, I mean, I think that as kind of silly as some previous pivots in media have been, basically, I think that they have given these kind of darker moments a little bit of hope.

2:19Let me explain what I mean by that. Like basically a few years ago, if you worked in digital media or if you read or kept up with media, you might have noticed that a bunch of media companies said that they were pivoting to video, which was something that a lot of people in news media, people who worked in media in general thought was kind of funny or sad or kind of pathetic or whatnot. These were pivots that accompanied kind of cuts and layoffs. But as silly as that kind of thinking was, that was a real strategy for these places, for a lot of these companies. They really thought that, okay, there's a lot more money to be made in digital video than there is in text-based stuff.

2:55So we're all going to kind of move over to putting our, we're going to build our businesses around that. So the cuts that we're making now, hopefully maybe in the future, we won't have to do this because we've built this other sustainable business. What's going on now is you have a lot of cuts and layoffs and reductions without any sort of, there's no light at the end of the tunnel. I haven't really heard much of a strategy from some of these companies that have done layoffs or cuts that you mentioned, whether it be Pitchfork, which basically got rid of half of its staff, including its senior leadership, Sports Illustrated, which is shuttered entirely, though that's kind of a different case because it's like a licensing dispute.

3:34But the LA Times, all these other places, there's not really a strategy that they're leaning into. They're just cutting and saying, well, it's been a tough year, so we have to lay everybody off. And a lot of the cuts are also more dramatic, right? We've seen the shutter in The Messenger. Vice is basically out of news completely. The LA Times laid off a significant amount of its staff. And God, which one am I forgetting? Pitchfork is essentially, right, had been kind of cut in half, but it really seems like it exists mostly at this point to kind of service its events business. It's keeping its editorial going seemingly in kind of service of events.

4:10That situation is also a little bit more complicated, but But that's a real cynical way to kind of look at it. Vice is leaning into its agency side, I suppose, slash maybe Hollywood stuff. Yeah, they talked a lot earlier this week on a call basically about the lines of business that they have that they say are doing well, which is it's advertising business, it's studios business, basically making and selling documentaries and films, among other things. But Vice, as we know it, was created as a news and culture publication first. No matter what you might have thought of it, certain eras were obviously better than others.

4:49But it always had news and culture reporting and writing at its core. And it really seems like that part of the business basically does not exist at all, unless some other company wants to pay Vice to do a documentary that has something to do with news. Yeah, I was reading a post by this guy, Ben Dietz, who we've had on the podcast. He's a friend. He worked with us on Vice, but more on the business side. He has a blog called Sick. He was saying that, you know, part of the model of Vice originally was you have this journalism and you use the journalism to create like spinoff IP, things like, you know, TV shows.

5:28But then that all kind of serves as an advertisement for this like creative services department simultaneously, or that was part of Vice's revenue strategy. And now that they're doing is they're sort of severing off a lot of the editorial IP that would attract people to work with them in the first place. and we don't know if that's still going to work or not. Yeah. I mean, the strange thing to me is I think that a lot of this stuff, that kind of the current thinking, I think underestimates the potential and likely damage that's been done to the brand by basically laying off and getting rid of all of the people that people associated with Vice.

6:06Like I'm sure if you have a friend who doesn't work in media who knows about Vice, if they know anything about what's been going on now, they might have seen a headline about it. basically shutting down news, but they still associate Vice, that brand with whatever the writing or kind of, you know, video reporting journalism outlet. I don't think that they're like associating it with the advertising agency, right? Like, I don't know. I just feel like the damage, I feel like they're banking on the assumption that people will still like the Vice brand, even though they've gotten rid of the thing that created the Vice brand, right?

6:40Yeah, it's like Playboy. Like, I feel like it's exactly like Playboy, right? It's like weird Playboy still exists, but it's like purely a brand now. Right, exactly. And that's not an amazingly successful business. So to me feels like real wishful thinking on the part of folks who are still there and on the part of Fortress, which was its last remaining investor and which essentially owns Vice entirely at this point. I mean, it's like Vice's like 37th pivot at this point. I mean, I almost want to go back and do like a one for one comparison of all the times they've announced layoffs over the years and then use the word that's because they're pivoting.

7:20Right. Maybe try a new a new word or I don't know. Actually, the episode that we did with Bendits was just called what do we call it? We called it Media's Pivot to Nothingness. I think that's a really good title. And it's I don't know how long ago you guys did that episode, but obviously I feel like that encapsulates exactly kind of what's going on here. Exactly a year ago, actually. It was February 23. That's crazy. Very prescient. Which is the season. Yep, exactly. And it actually really is. The end of every year and the beginning of the next year is obviously when all these companies are looking at the amount of money that they have and oftentimes making these types of decisions.

7:59Yeah, that was actually that was going to be my next question, which is like, why is this happening right now? And also every situation is a little bit different. It's not necessarily one to one. But what, if anything, feels like the common denominator in all of these recent stories? I think that's a really good question. I was thinking about this before we kind of got on here, but there are a few obvious big business related issues that I think contributed to every single publication that has gone through some cuts or downsizing, whatever you want to call it, over the last several months. And that's two things, which is 2023 and the end of 2022 were pretty difficult times in the advertising, the digital advertising business.

8:42A lot of companies were pulling back on digital advertising spending. And that always impacts media companies more than it impacts a lot of other places where people buy ads. Just because basically these advertisers might not cut down on like spending that they're doing, trying to reach people directly on like Instagram or like TikTok or something like that. But they will cut back on, they're more scared of having their ads next to stories about, let's say, Gaza or something like that. Though, again, that's a different situation. And then the other big thing that actually I heard from a lot of media companies about last year was Facebook getting out almost entirely of linking to anything related to news and media.

9:24Even though I feel like I have not clicked on a Facebook, an article on Facebook or been on Facebook in a significant amount of time. A lot of people still did. And that actually drove a lot of traffic, which still helped the digital media companies with their audience numbers when they were talking to advertisers or whatnot. And so that actually seriously impacted a lot, a lot, a lot of different media outlets. And it was something that I heard across the board. There were very, very few media companies last year that didn't see a pretty dramatic fall off and traffic just from like literally Facebook.

9:57And so those two big business related trends impacted all of these publications. And I think that probably caused a lot of them to miss the numbers that they were expecting to get. But I think a lot of the places that we mentioned had deeper problems that weren't necessarily just related to Facebook traffic or digital ad dollars. Like what, for example, without getting too deep into it. And that's it for the free preview version of this episode. There's lots more ahead. You can get full access by becoming a paid subscriber for just five bucks a month over at theculturejournalist.substack.com. If you're a media worker or journalist who has lost work or been laid off, we will happily send you this episode for free.

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