i'm mad on behalf of all the people who got laid off in media today

I planned to publish an interview with my mom today about the 90s and pasta salad but that will wait until next week (sorry, mom). Instead, I’m thinking a lot today about the layoffs that were just announced at Insider and BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed News shuttering and laying off 180 people and Insider firing 10% of its staff are gutting changes, even in a digital media landscape that’s constantly contracting and shifting. 

I never really mourned the end of my career in journalism. When I got a new job at a marketing agency in April 2020 I was, regrettably, a bit ashamed. I was ashamed that I couldn’t hack it and find a new job in journalism or make it as a freelancer, I was ashamed because leaving journalism felt like selling out to me, I was ashamed because it felt like some admission of failure, even though what it was was a stable job teaching me new skills in an adjacent field. Some loser DMed me the day I got my new job and asked me all these impossible hypotheticals that you would probably not ask anyone who hadn’t just worked in journalism, like, “what are you going to do if you have a client you find unethical?” that I didn’t have an answer for because it was my first day of work. It was also April 2020, so I was much more focused on themes such as “remaining sane and staying alive” as opposed to feeling like I could give myself permission to be sad about the end of a years-long career that was so embedded within me that it felt like an inextricable identity. Every time another round of these media layoffs has hit since then I feel it. 

I started my career at the entity then known as Business Insider, which had previously been known as Silicon Alley Insider, in 2014 as the intern on the NYC tech desk (the “Silicon Alley” desk, if you will). I felt lucky for the opportunity to work in digital media—this was my foot wedging itself inside of what felt like a heavy door that had been slowly closing since 2008/2009, and it was my way to get myself into New York City, a thing that felt so insurmountable and impossible for me. I spent years in college feeling so intensely alienated by my peers talking about their unpaid summers spent interning for magazines in New York City that I convinced myself that that could never be me, that I could never have a career in an industry so inhospitable to Poors. These people had a leg up on me and I wasn’t deserving of and couldn’t buy my way into the success they’d had already. 

I treated my internship like a full-time job, like I was already a reporter. And for all its flaws — the pay was shit, traffic metrics took up most of the valuable real estate in my brain, nobody ever told me to take a vacation until it was too late and I was already burned out — I was treated like a reporter, which would not have been the case at a legacy outlet. When I went to events and the people there from other outlets were seasoned veteran reporters years older than me, I felt excited to be treated the same as them. I got a burgeoning large platform to tell stories about Uber driver strikes and New York’s venture ecosystem that far outweighed any opportunity I would have been given on a more traditional track in journalism had I started out in a fashion closet or as an assistant. 

The influx of VC cash into media startups like Insider and BuzzFeed was not a sustainable solution for companies that still hadn’t figured out viable business models. Ultimately I don’t think that media startups receiving venture investment and being valued like software companies was much more than a way for media organizations to deprioritize and procrastinate the need to find ways to make their businesses self-sustaining. But if those cash infusions did one thing that wasn’t a longterm failure, they allowed for the hiring of diverse young reporters who might not have otherwise made it at stodgy legacy publications where everyone attended the same prep schools. They supported award-winning journalism and in the case of BuzzFeed News specifically, they allowed for the funniest, smartest people to be put in one newsroom and make cool shit. That internship at BI was my golden ticket, and I know I can’t be the only person with a story like that.

The decision-makers at the top of these companies are now, of course, allowed to carry on unaffected, continuing to make bad business decisions and run their companies into the ground only to the detriment of those who work for them. These people have gutted an industry full of talented people way smarter than they are. It is so painful today to see people I worked with in 2014 and 2015, people who have spent unimaginable, almost decade-long careers at these outlets, be cast aside and treated as if they were dispensable, and I’m thinking of them today. It is only thanks to the tireless work of these employees that many of them now have newsroom unions to fight for them to have decent severance agreements. Still, they deserved so much more from their employers.