Yesterday we heard about the beginning of the pricey 600-person layoffs at Time Inc.—memos went out at several major magazines announcing that dozens of staffers would be cut. But this is an international company, and its trouble isn't limited to America. We hear that the European offices of Time, People, and Fortune could be facing severe cuts as well: A tipster tells us:
I confess, I'd never heard nor read of Solid Cactus, a company that builds Yahoo stores, before the following cri de coeur dropped into the inbox a few minutes ago. I have no idea if any of the accusations in this email are true. But I liked the part where the CEO blogs his vacation pics. "Time to Get Away," indeed.
Bluetooth headsets make you look like a rambling idiot, addressing an audience of one. San Francisco startup Aliph solves that problem: Wearing its sleek Jawbone makes you look like a stylish, rambling idiot. An appropriate accessory for CEO Hosain Rahman. Venture-capital news site PEHub reports that Rahman ordered $500,000 in new, high-end furniture for the office, instructed employees to box up their things, and then laid off a third of the company's 75-person staff. The company has raised $42.5 million in funding. Its backers include Sequoia Capital, the VC firm which recently issued a cost-cutting fatwa to its portfolio companies. Whatever one might say about Rahman, one should credit him for good taste: He has also commissioned a mural for the office from DeYoung Museum artist-in-residence Tucker Nichols.
♦ Keith Olbermann has signed a new, four-year contract with MSNBC. He'll earn $7.5 million a year, which is 25 percent less than what his arch-nemesis Bill O'Reilly is collecting from Fox News. [TVDecoder]
♦ MSNBC's new slogan—"Experience the power of change"—has absolutely nothing to do with Barack Obama's victory, naturally. [NYT]
♦ The job cuts at Time Inc. are underway. People is looking for 18 people to take buyout packages. Time is looking for 20 volunteers. [WWD]
♦ Jared Kushner says revenues at the Observer are up 40 percent, although the paper is still losing $2 million a year. [Guardian]
♦ Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, from DreamWorks/Paramount, reeled in $63.5 million in its first weekend. [NYT]
People magazine just sent out a staff memo soliciting buyout candidates, as part of the 600-person company-wide layoffs announced at Time Inc. two weeks ago. Although People has a large staff, the reporting cuts they seek in both New York and LA—which total 18 editorial employees—would add up to a significant loss of celebrity-watching resources. Click through for the entire memo [UPDATE: and details of similar buyout offers at four other titles]:
In honor of the Friday layoffs sweeping through the media today, we bring you even more funny-sad stories of being fired. (Esquire, Wenner, O at Home, this one goes out to you.) As always, send your own anecdotes to tips@gawker.com. Read on for sick-bed and weekend layoffs and a guy who's been laid off so many times, he's a "kiss of death" to any company.Get Well Soon! Yeah Right:
As recently as a year ago, Google was scrambling to get more office space in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. Now, just as swiftly, it's trying to offload it, putting 50,000 square feet up for sublet. The company has cut back on snacks in New York, as elsewhere — but real estate is a far more serious thing to trim. With less room for warm bodies, it suggests Google will soon be shedding staff.
A fine Friday news dump: a tipster tells us that a slew of layoffs just went down at Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, and Men's Journal. Let go, we hear, were several online people, several marketing people, an assistant, a sales rep, and three unnamed people from Men's Journal. Also, "the entire Detroit and San Francisco office," according to our source. That's harsh, but quite possible. Know any more details on the Wenner layoffs? Email us.
The layoffs at Hearst this week have already hit Redbook and Good Housekeeping. So as not to be sexist, now they've come to Esquire. We hear the upscale men's mag laid off four editorial employees yesterday, including two editors, and decreed that another open assistant editor position won't be filled. "They gathered everyone together to tell them not to tell anyone the exact number cuz they don't want any media," says a tipster. That's somewhat embarrassing. But not as embarrassing as the spending habits of another layoff-happy mag, the recently decimated Conde Nast Portfolio: According to P6,
Reid Hoffman's heft regularly makes reporters turn to their thesauri for polite terms for "fat." BusinessWeek, to keep the tone of a new profile appropriately flattering, writes of his "expansive body." But the article is anything but expansive in its probing of LinkedIn's business. It focuses instead on how Hoffman is trying to figure out survival strategies for his portfolio of startups. Nowhere are LinkedIn's own layoffs mentioned. Instead, Hoffman implies that the employees he put out on the street should use the site to seek new careers: "Every individual is a small business." Not an expansive one.
Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, has a promising career as a cult leader. In a blog post, the online shoes-and-clothes retailer's boss acknowledges the layoffs his employees were Twittering about this morning, writing that the company had laid off 8 percent of its workforce. He all but admits the cuts were forced on him by investor Sequoia Capital. The severance packages are generous in comparison to most startups; two months or more of pay, and six months of health insurance. Sweet enough, perhaps, that people won't ask a key question about the layoffs."Tony cares about his company and his employees more than anyone else around," says an entrepreneur who knows Hsieh. His employees, even the former ones, seem to be returning the favor on Twitter. But if he loved his employees so much, why didn't he resist the pressure from Sequoia to make the cuts? We hear Sequoia is insisting that all of its portfolio companies cut payrolls by around 10 percent, regardless of the particulars of their businesses. Zappos seems to be doing well in its e-commerce niche — well enough, at least, to afford a generous severance. Hsieh's company offers free returns if the shoes its customers buy don't fit. Why didn't he just mark Sequoia's orders "return to sender"?
We hear that there were four editorial layoffs at Good Housekeeping today as part of the broader Hearst layoffs we mentioned yesterday. And FishbowlNY reports 20 layoffs at M. Shanken Communications, the publisher of Cigar Aficionado, Wine Spectator, and Food Arts. And Eric Schurenberg, the managing editor of Money, was laid off today as part of the Time Inc. layoffs.
No company has embraced Twitter quite like Zappos, the online shoes-and-whatever-else retailer — from its CEO, Tony Hsieh, on down. It even hosts a live feed of all Zappos-related messages on the microblogging service. That has made it easy to gather that the company is going through a tumultuous round of layoffs.Zappos_Jackie reports that she was laid off an hour ago; other ex-employees are proclaiming their lasting love for Zappos. We look forward to the New York Times updating its trend story about how companies blog about layoffs. They must now Twitter them instead, lest misinformation spread quicker than sluggish RSS feeds. (Oddly, Hsieh never mentioned the pending layoffs in an interview he gave to the Times about Zappos' vaunted corporate culture.)
What's the only thing worse than another "Open Letter to Jerry Yang?" A freaking poem to Jerry Yang. Shakespeare was so much better at this, plus he didn't put his vanity site's URL in the final stanza.
