Another Day, More Media Layoffs; Possible $ for a Bridge on Indian Canyon–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Nov. 9, 2023

Indy Digest: Nov. 9, 2023

It’s been another terrible day in terms of media layoffs.

The biggest news: Jezebel, a news website that focused on women’s issues, is being shut down by its corporate owners. ABC News reports:

G/O Media said 23 staffers would be laid off, including Jezebel’s team, as part of a restructuring to cope with economic headwinds and a difficult digital advertising environment. The New York-based company also announced the departure of G/O Media editorial director Merrill Brown.

In a memo to the company, G/0 Media CEO Jim Spanfeller said he made the “very, very difficult decision to suspend publication of Jezebel” after an unsuccessful search for a buyer for the website. Spanfeller praised Jezebel’s editorial team but said the company’s “business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s.”

Jezebel was launched in 2007 by Gawker Media with Anna Holmes as its first editor-in-chief. It established itself as an influential voice in feminist commentary years before the explosion of the #Metoo movement pushed issues of gender and power to the forefront of mainstream media coverage. In 2019, Jezebel became part of the G/0 Media portfolio, which also includes Gizmodo, Quartz, the Onion and the Root. …

Jezebel writers, however, blamed the shutdown on the parent company’s “strategic and commercial ineptitude,” in a statement released by their union, WGA East. …

The site’s shutdown comes two months after Jezebel’s interim Editor-in-Chief Laura Bassett resigned, accusing G/O in a tweet of failing “to treat my staff with basic human decency.” Jezebel’s current editor-in-chief, Lauren Tousignant, wrote in a tweet Thursday that she is angry and sad about the shutdown and would have more to say later.

Yikes.

In not surprising but still sad news, Vice also announced more cuts today. CNN said:

Vice Media, the one-time digital media darling that has seen its value and influence greatly diminish in recent years, moved on Thursday to further hollow out its once prestigious news division, shutting down several shows and laying off dozens of staffers.

“To be clear, Vice News is not going away,” the company’s co-chief executives, Bruce Dixon and Hozefa Lokhandwala, said in a memo to staff obtained by CNN. “Vice will continue to produce digital news, as well as Vice News documentaries, both series and films, for FAST Channels, streaming services and other partners.”

In April, Vice Media ended “Vice News Tonight,” its flagship program, citing restructuring that would result in cuts across the organization, CNN previously reported. In May, Vice filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy ahead of a planned sale. In June, the digital media company was purchased by three investment companies, including Fortress Investment Group, for $350 million.

It was not immediately known which shows would be shut down, but Dixon and Lokhandwala said they had reached the end of their production cycle and had not been renewed by their distributors, adding that “certain roles” from the shows would be affected. A person familiar with the matter said “less than 100” staffers would be laid off.

For more media-layoff news, Forbes has a running list for the year here. If you care about media, news and journalism, it makes for some pretty depressing reading.

I’ve said this before, and I am sure I’ll say it again: Support the news and media sources you value and enjoy—because if you don’t, who will?

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Portions of Riverside County, including the Coachella Valley, have been dealing with 911 outages off and on since Wednesday evening. Various local agencies, including the city of Palm Springs, announced then that 911 service for cell phones was down—but 911 worked for landlines. Late this morning, the city announced service had “been restored to all wireless carriers, EXCEPT for AT&T customers.” (Insert AT&T-is-terrible joke here.) Then this afternoon, our cell phones got a “public safety alert” saying there was (apparently another) 911 outage. However, as of this writing, KESQ News Channel 3 is reporting that service has been completely restored. For future reference, if you have an emergency, and 911 doesn’t work, call 951-776-1078, 951-776-1278, or 760- 250-6268.

• Some much-needed state help may be coming for a bridge over the wash on Indian Canyon Drive. The Desert Sun says: “On Friday, staff at the state’s transportation commission recommended the project for $50 million in grant funding for which the Coachella Valley Association of Governments, or CVAG, applied. The project was one of just two that received the state’s highest priority ranking. The commission will vote on whether to approve the recommendation at its Dec. 6 meeting. The grant would provide two-thirds of the estimated $75 million cost of building the bridges. A CVAG spokesperson said the remainder of the cost would be paid for with ‘local and regional transportation funding.’”

• The headline on the piece from The Conversation: “More than one journalist per day is dying in the Israel-Gaza conflict. This has to stop.” Some details: “According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Gaza-Israel war has been the deadliest conflict for media workers since the organization began counting statistics in 1992. At the time of writing, the committee said at least 39 journalists and media workers had been killed in the month since the war began. Reporters Without Borders put the number slightly higher at 41. But the rate of fatalities is so high—more than one per day—it is likely there will be more dead by the time you read this. The victims are mostly Palestinian journalists and media workers killed in Israel’s attacks on Gaza, but they include four Israelis, whom Hamas murdered in its initial cross-border raid on October 7, and one Beirut-based videographer killed in south Lebanon. He died in shelling that also injured six other journalists. Witnesses said the shelling came from the direction of Israel and hit a group of journalists in clearly marked vehicles and body armor. It is worth pausing for a moment to remember these are not merely numbers. Each of the victims has a name, relatives, loved ones and a story. The committee has a grim list of all those who have been killed, injured or are missing.”

• Our partners at CalMatters have published an impressive series chronicling various portions of the mess that is the state’s unemployment system. Here’s the series intro: “Behind the scenes at the state Capitol, California is launching an unprecedented $1.2 billion overhaul of its battered job safety net. Its Employment Development Department—better known as the EDD—is attempting to rebuild its unemployment and disability systems as it recovers from a pandemic that left millions of workers waiting for payments and tens of billions of dollars missing to suspected fraud. A year-long CalMatters investigation finds that the state was primed for disaster by years of missed red flags and failed reforms. Once COVID hit, public records and interviews reveal that California’s system was initially friendlier to scammers than to many real workers—and then the state got so aggressive that many workers struggled to prove their own identities. New financial reports requested by CalMatters show that amid the chaos, the EDD and its unemployment payment contractor Bank of America split a half a billion dollars in revenue, though the bank says it ultimately spent more to cover fraud losses. Another large EDD contractor, Deloitte, made more than a quarter of a billion dollars on tech contracts and emergency contracts to build systems that state reports say buckled during the pandemic. The question for the EDD now: Will history repeat itself, or can California finally lead a nationwide quest to reinvent unemployment?”

• The U.S. government’s dietary guidelines could soon get a major overhaul—with ultra-processed foods being a major focus. The Washington Post says: “For the first time, the guidelines committee is examining the science on obesity and ultra-processed foods—industrially manufactured foods that have unusual combinations of flavors, additives and ingredients, many of which are not found in nature. These include things like chicken nuggets, sweetened breakfast cereals, boxed mac & cheese, frozen dinners, potato chips and fast food. The committee’s conclusions could lead to a seminal change in how Americans view nutrition, forcing them to think beyond the basic nutrients in a food, and instead consider how their food is made and what happens to it before it reaches their table. … In recent years, dozens of studies have found that people who consume a lot of ultra-processed foods have higher rates of weight gain, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.”

• The end of the actors’ strike is good news for people in the entertainment industry, film and TV fans, and the state’s economy. However, getting the industry back up and running will not be easy. The New York Times explains: “The traffic jam includes projects that were paused because of the strikes, those that are ready to be released but need actors to publicize them, and those that were scheduled to begin filming and now may be delayed because of actors’ delayed responsibilities elsewhere. ‘It’s a bit like all those ships that were stuck in the harbor during COVID because they couldn’t offload them fast enough,’ the producer Todd Garner said. ‘They are just going to have to go through the canal one by one, and then it will catch up and resume again.’ … Depending on a production’s size, getting started back up again will add $500,000 to $4 million to the budget, said two studio executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the tensions surrounding the strike. That’s in addition to extra costs for maintaining leases on soundstages and keeping rented equipment throughout the pause, the better to get things up and running quickly when the strike ended.”

• And finally … there are a lot of things in the world right now that don’t make any sense at all, and one of those things is this New York Times headline: “Move Over, Gels. Heinz Wants Runners to Refuel With Ketchup.” What? Some explanation, sort of, from the piece: “A new video from Heinz insists that ‘runners everywhere are using Heinz ketchup packets on their runs.’ The company has also created running routes in the shape of its branded keystone logo in several cities, including New York, marking restaurants where ketchup packets are available for eager runners to grab. There are no known studies on the effects of ketchup on long-distance runners, (sports dietician Amy) Stephens said. But the ‘gold standard’ for refueling on longer runs is between 30 and 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour for any run more than 90 minutes, she added. … A ketchup packet has just two grams of carbs, meaning that in order to fuel up adequately on a long run, runners might have to consume at least 15 of them. And at 90 milligrams of sodium per pack, she added, that’s ‘too much sodium’ she said.” Am I the only one here who finds the sentence “There are no known studies on the effects of ketchup on long-distance runners” to be hilarious?

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