It’s Not the Stuff of a Playful BuzzFeed Quiz

"...a company that puts such an emphasis on this idea of all of us in it together, all of us as a family..." Hopefully the Buzzfeeders - those laid off, and those still with the company - learned an important lesson: There's no such thing as "family" when it comes to work or business. When the axe falls, it does so mercilessly. Any boss or manager trotting out the "we're a family" shtick is not to be trusted. Organize your workplace!

This article should include a comparison to other companies and their policies. The press fawns over Unilever, but Unilever also does not pay out any unused vacation. If you plan well, you can take “vacation” before your layoff date. Of course, when you’ve been laid off, the last thing you need is more time off and less money. I’m sure many other companies do the same.

Let’s be honest with ourselves first. I don’t, but many use aggregators like HuffPost and BuzzFeed et al for news and information ( much of such is fake news and infortainment ). Or go to Facebook and late night tv and elsewhere to get ‘news’ and interact on current events via memes and bloggers. It is few true blue, long standing news outlets that still create real hard news - eg NYT, WaPo, The Atlantic, The New Yorker among others. If nobody subscribes to these, but uses the freebies, then the business model is drastically altered. With the landscape of revenues from print advertising and classified advertisements is heavily reduced and folks avoid paywalls, the quality and sustainability of true news reporting and unbiased features is affected. But the upstarts , akin to the first dot com bubble are merely social/economic/ information experiments based on lower startup costs and hyperbole.

I suppose I feel bad when anyone loses his or her job, but it's not like anyone could have reasonably believed they could write things like "42 Things You Don't Need But Will Definitely Buy Anyway" forever.

Workers of the world, listen up and take notes: this is now the second time in the last few months in which squeaky wheels got oiled in service to avoiding a corporate PR disaster. In this case, Buzzfeed's PTO non-payout was leaked to the press and social media sphere. A few months ago, the workers of Google staged a walkout to loudly complain about the severance payout of a known sexual harasser. In both cases, the companies conceded their original positions. Not, mind you, because it was the right thing to do, but because the press got wind of these grievances and it made the companies look bad. And rightly so. The game has changed, peeps. White collar workers may not be able to unionize in this day and age, but they can certainly harness the power of the press and social media to get concessions. Because there's nothing more motivating to a company than making sure their stock price doesn't tank. Even if it means treating their employees like human beings.

Can anyone explain the "learn to code" issue?

So. Mr. Vucic was an ultranationalist and worked in the administration of Slobodan Milosevic. That says it all right there. Milosevic? The guy accused by the ICTY of war crimes,and by the ICJ of a breach of the Genocide Convention? The only way these guys know how to govern is through intimidation, corruption, and rigged elections. And brutality. The opposition is correct about everything they are saying. I am sure Mr. Vucic would have every person opposing his government arrested, tortured, and disappeared if he could get away with it. Ties to Russia and Putin - strong, very strong. I have read that most of the current governing politicians in the Balkans are hold overs from the vicious wars in the ‘90’s. They are just refueling the sand old prejudices and hatreds that started that whole thing. And they are by nature authoritarian. The older people are afraid so they say nothing and keep their heads down. But the young crave the promise of democracy, want the opportunities the EU would provide, and loath the old prejudices. The EU must resist admitting these countries into the EU until they show genuine development of government institutions and leaders who respect the values of democracy, free and fair elections, and real attempts to end corruption. Otherwise they will just spawn a whole bunch of little Hungary ‘s.

I feel bad for the buzzfeed staff who were laid off and for professional reporters and editors in general. Watched my reporter/editor mom survive rounds of layoffs all through my childhood as her mid-sized traditional print media employer contracted and contracted. Even when she survived the cut, each time was painful. As a kid, not knowing if your parent will come home without a job is hard enough, I can’t imagine what it was like for her to make a career “on the losing team” all those years. It’s one thing to say “learn to code”, but when she got in that game, traditional newspapers were still thriving and the Internet was decades away. By the time it became clear the direction things were going she had committed years of education and decades of work to it. Besides which, I’d argue that we still need accurately-reported, fact checked, well-written news, and this requires skilled labor. However, professional reporters/editors can’t live on the warm glow of an informed populace. Unfortunately it seems like buzzfeed and many other media companies are planning to mostly rely on free or very cheap labor from hobbyists—which might be fine for making fun quizzes, not so fine for investigating issues central to our democracy, or even really for accurate coverage of local issues. People are reading and watching more news than ever; time to get the revenue streams working better to keep high quality reporters, writers and editors performing this essential function for our society.

This is a good start...hopefully much more to come. “Journalism” should be a regulated profession, given its potential for great harm. We regulate anything and anyone else who has the ability to cause harm through their employment. All except these, whatever they call themselves on a given day.

So, why should we feel bad about a bunch of poor quality bloggers who got laid off? Perhaps like they say to coal miners they should learn a technical craft?