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Layoffs Hit Washington Post Mobile Team
imac.usr writes "The Huffington Post is reporting that The Washington Post has gone through yet another round of layoffs, but this time instead of cutting editorial positions, they're apparently cutting IT positions, specifically in the mobile applications department. According to Washington, DC media blog FishbowlDC, 54 people, including the General Manager of Mobile and Director of Mobile Products, were given the axe on Valentine's Day. A particularly damning quote from the FishbowlDC article: '"[CIO and VP Shaliesh] Prakash thinks these are 'inefficiencies' – that is the exact word he uses for human beings who are not useful according to him," said a source who spoke only on condition of anonymity. "Get rid of experienced people to save money, under the garb of streamlining is the new trend inside the Post."' Given that mobile products seem somewhat more likely to succeed than printed newspapers, this seems a strange decision at best."
I wonder if CmdrTaco is the source.
http://xkcd.com/1174/
Was Malda given the chop? He was supposed to be some kind of Web 2.0 guru for them/ If they gave up on that mirage, his position is precarious. He's unlikely to be welcomed back here as editor. Though we will probably see more of him as a contributor as you cant spend all your life consuming drugs and hookers..
Well ,it's capitalist like Warren "Larry the Liquidator" Buffet, just milking the Newspapers for their last shred of profit.
Have you noticed most newspapers getting bought up, kind of turn into bad news tabloids, filled w/ads?
That's because, that's what sells the papers now. They're dying anyway and mostly just propaganda and spin, which is just entertaining as you want, but useless for actual news. Eventually,when it cannot sustain itself, all will be fired and assets sold off. It was replaced by the internet. Just like the music industry, it is already dead and being eaten alive, it just won't admit it to itself.
Ironically, it is justice for disservice to mankind and manipulation of information for political agendas. SO, nothing of value was lost. I hope it's like that in Russia.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
There are many things in Net 2.0 that are very popular, but that do not necessarily have utility or profitability.
For example, just about everyone and their dog (on the internet, no one can tell you're a werewolf) uses Facebook, and before it MySpace, Friendster, Digg, Reddit, etc. But do these services have a working business model? It seems they all flounder at that point.
It seems to me that most Net 2.0 firms have an unsustainable business model, which is:
1. Get really popular.
2. ???
3. Sell company -> Profit!
In the same way, we know we've got a lot of people who like using their phones to tweet, click, troll, sext, etc. But is this actually useful? And other than the cell phone providers, is anyone making money off this with a sustainable model?
Futurist Traditionalism
The source is unhappy they were let go. The 'inefficiencies' terminology was not attributed in the original source article, which includes a copy of the memo; I'm surprised no one has posted a link to the source article yet, so here it is:
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/washington-post-layoffs-valentines-day_b96626
According to the original source article, more people than just the mobile team were let go.
I can understand them doing this, particularly since they referenced Web 2.0 in their hiring of Rob Malda (cmdrtaco), HTML5 is enough along that it can be used to deliver the content in a reasonable way, using a centralized paywall, and trying to maintain 7 iOS apps and 100's of Android apps, due to minor variations in platform, makes a browser-based experience a no-brainer, in terms of the money they spend on development.
Overall, I think this does not bode well for non-game, non-vertical market app writers, so for all the people who are thinking that going to app writing is going to be a really lucrative payoff, this is probably the beginning of a trend, and they should consider some other line of work.
Alas, but beware! Computer science != software engineering. Both aspects are important for a successful software developer. If you're in a computer science course of study in academia, I do expect you to be no better in software engineering side of things than a self-taught kid fresh out of the college. Same goes for those who only know the engineering side well, without grokking the mathematical theory.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Is it a big assumption that mobile will do better than newspapers in the future? News on paper exists today only because of inertia.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Here's the result cascading into anything connected with it & the "holy dollar" in publicly held companies (no small wonder Micheal Dell's attempting to BUY BACK the company he started - my guess is, even HE realizes it's a road to eventual ruin, & allows the WORST "virus of the spirt" as I call it, in greed, to take over everything).
* "Welcome to the WORLD, in 2013", folks...
More like welcome to the world of working for a for profit business at any time in history. The Washington Post needs to make money or it goes out of business. There are three ways the mobile platforms model can help with that: (1) They could contribute to the subscriber base (2) they could sell ads (3) They could create buzz about stories and link to stories that sell ads.
To pay 54 people including a CIO and a General Manager, you'd need to be generating a lot of money from the mobile business -- more than $5M per year. Obviously top management at the WP took a look at how much money they could possibly be generating out of their mobile business and concluded that it wasn't generating that much money and didn't have any prospect of generating that much money any time soon, nor a plan to do so.
It has been bandied about for over a decade by consulting agencies who have been hired by corporations who have already decided to downsize.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
You can deliver television-like content via mobile.
Getting paid delivering news works for a lot of sites, which are ad-supported. Or slashvertisement-supported.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They're dying anyway and mostly just propaganda and spin, which is just entertaining as you want, but useless for actual news. Eventually,when it cannot sustain itself, all will be fired and assets sold off. It was replaced by the internet. Just like the music industry, it is already dead and being eaten alive, it just won't admit it to itself.
Read what I have to say, please, before you mods troll it out; I'm serious about what I'm saying.
Those stages all sound like a drug habit.
That's always been my opinion of successful media-oriented businesses; they start out with good intention. They make money. Things sort of level off. They see some idea that can make them more money and jump at it. It profits like you wouldn't believe. They invest more, more, more in it so they can profit more, more, more. The baseline for what's considered 'acceptable profit base' goes up with each success... Eventually, they do something stupid themselves or the profit-providing sources run dry and they have what I cannot say is any different than withdrawal symptoms.
That's where the self-destructive (firings) or stealing for a fix (money laundering, tax evasion, etc) tendencies kick in.
The outcome is determined by how and when they get caught.
From this article's perspective, it looks like they're at the stage "But I gotta have MORE because it's been so damn good up until now!"
Move to Germany, we have not destroyed our industry as you did.
My boss can't find any developers at the moment.
www.vacos.de
Send application to dirk.vialkowitsch@vacos.de. Don't worry about no (yet) speaking German. 50% of English words are (essentially) the same as German words. Almost everybody speaks English here (at least in engineering and sw development). We are based in Stuttgart and so are many American soldiers a. You can meet them in Böblingen in the Irish Bar, if you like to chat to a native American speaker.
O.K. "Deadish" and "Aliveish" Mr. Particular Pants!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
But do they pay for researching and writing stories? Sites break down, from what I've seen, into two major categories: (1) adjunct outlets for newspaper, broadcast and cable news outlets (2) aggregator and commenting sites like (majors like Google or Yahoo, mid-rank like DrudgeReport or HuffPost and minor league like slashdot).
The latter category are parasitic, including slashdot. They feed off news content generated by newspapers, television and radio news and contribute little or nothing to news content, although they do arguably help inform the public. But with each such service having a self-selected audience attuned to their sitegeist, they tend not to expand the horizons of your knowledge like a general news service or a local/regional newspaper is likely to do.
I'm not saying WashPost shouldn't have a web and mobile presence. They probably should, but if they can't build it into their dominant source of cash, they have to devote the bulk of their staff to print journalism.
A few facts to clarify things here.
The Post isn't getting rid of their entire mobile division. Basically, there was a product management team that collaborated with the news room and developers to build these products.
It seems that once the core products were built, it was decided that the news room would just take over maintenance of these products and the people who created them were thanked with a pink slip in order to cut costs.
Washington Post is a print-first company with absolutely no true desire to go mobile. It threatens their core (and dying) business model: maintaining circulation of a newspaper with overpriced ads.
I am a DC refuge and was a dedicated Post dead-tree reader for decades. These days, I primarily access the Washington Post through their website (which I would happily pay for, by the way). As an avid consumer of online media, I can personally attest that the Post's implementation of "mobile" content is just abysmal. Their iPad app was, until a few months ago, a total embarassment. Many of their "special" mobile features (of which I have downloaded and deleted more then one within minutes of downloading them) crash more often then they work. Frankly, if I were the editor-in-chief, I would have fired the mobile division staff for sheer incompetence long ago.
I have no inside information -- but I wonder if there's a positive take from all of this: the Washington Post has long been behind the curve in reaching out on mobile devices. Perhaps this isn't the end of their efforts to improve their web presence, but the beginning of a more serious effort. Just a thought. Time will tell.
Let me guess: the jobs that were just eliminated will be sent to India. Based on the CIO's surname, it wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly what happens.