Bloomberg just bought CityLab and put half its reporters out of a job | Hacker News Reader

Bloomberg just bought CityLab and put half its reporters out of a job

motherjones.com

210 pointsaaronbrethorst65 comments

"But the site started to show signs of struggle earlier this year when the Atlantic laid off CityLab’s dedicated business staff. “The writing’s been on the wall for a long time,” one of the staffers said about CityLab’s future with the Atlantic. Another staffer said that during the meeting Atlantic management had announcing its sale to Bloomberg Media, the management made it clear “that the company is really focusing on the Atlantic and that they just feel that they can’t focus and invest in CityLab to make it robust.”"

That's in the second to last paragraph in the article, which really makes this feel unfairly biased. If those jobs were doomed anyway, it's plausible that Bloomberg's saving several jobs that would be lost, instead of causing the loss of jobs as this title implies.

According to this tweet, the entire staff was laid off by the Atlantic before the deal. So saving half the jobs is exactly the situation.

https://twitter.com/kristoncapps/status/1205602897733521410?...

That's too bad. I really like Citylab, and having half the employees is still better than none, but is overall far from good.

I think one issue I had as an occasional reader is that they were too invested in one perspective only.

Surely we need to study and be curious for things which can improve city life. There is a lot of good in that.

The one peeve I had is that "city-first PoV" made them a bit myopic and only wanted to see things though the lens of city life to the neglect of alternatives.

That's the topic they focus on though, and they do it well. It's CityLab, not CountryLife.

I agree with that and don’t have a problem with that but their attitude is “we’re right and they’re wrong and we'll make them”. CountryLife I would say wouldn’t be as ideological about how people should live their lives.

You've got some rose-colored glasses on if you don't think people out in the country are ideological about how people should live their lives.

Not just city first, but young healthy people of a particular sociotype first. If everyone is just super healthy and rides bikes or scooters in the rain or 100 degree heat then we'll have amazing car free roads!

Unfortunately, in 2019, no big corporation is allowed to be seen as the good guys no matter how noble their deeds are.

It's far saner to assume that all for-profit companies are in it to make money first and foremost, or will be eventually when they start to fail or have less scrupulous competition. From this starting point, and if you care to, you can then evaluate a company to get an informed opinion of whether or not they're doing "noble deeds", aligning with your interests, what you believe are societies interests, etc.

Assume your neighbours are noble by all means, but assuming all or even most large corporations are will lead to inevitable disappointment (or lessons learned).

I see a lot of the same with PE firms buying companies - "<PE firm> buys <beloved company that was failing> and lays off half the workers! Evil, evil PE firm!" Now obviously there's a fair amount of the time when PE firms do dividend recaps and other financial engineering that harm the companies, but there's plenty of time when they trim the fat from a failing company and save a lot of jobs. That doesn't make for a nice clickbaity headline, though.

One thing about the free market is it is constantly reallocating resources from lower performing uses to higher performing ones.

That's assuming the free market is actually free.

Some lower performing resources are at an inherent disadvantage, created by the higher performing ones.

Wait, so let me get this straight: nine people lost their jobs over this and it's front page HN? Are we gonna have a nuclear war the next time a startup closes up shop?

Is there something special about The Nine that separates them from the hundreds of thousands of scientists and doctors and engineers and burger flippers who get laid off everyday?

Y'know, like, other than having journalist friends?

CityLab is a popular publication on HN, with over 1400 submissions and usually over a hundred comments on each. It's normal that people care more than about other companies.

I get the feeling I could make some kind of comment here about an aristocracy of labour, especially given that it's motherjones

The means of mass communication is the new means of mass production.

Is it time to seize it?

well idunno, last time around the people who seized it did a pretty piss-poor job afterwards. mostly they just ran it into the ground, in fact. there's a lesson to be learnt there.

It's not about the nine people. It's about the perceived guileless neutering of a media outlet by a far more powerful entity with financial attachments to a financially formidable presidential candidate.

Of course, it's too early to know if the perceived outcome is the intended or actual outcome. Whatever the outcome, this is still an event remarkable far beyond the bounds of those nine journalist's social circles, regardless of where the actual cause falls on the continuum between incompetence and malice.

But they were let go before the deal happened, so if anyone is the baddie it's CityLab/The Atlanic itself!

Well, the remaining folks could have gone anywhere, but now that they're employees of Bloomberg Media, they're expressly forbidden for writing anything _critical_ of any Democratic candidate for President.

This story fits into a larger context of wealthy investors buying up media properties and gutting their staff. It's extra relevant b/c Bloomberg is outrageously wealthy and running for president.

The right thing to do in those situations is clearly to just let the media properties die rather than salvage them.

Headline said "half" and most ppl didn't bother to read the article, so assumed it was a much larger number?

Bloomberg is running for president and his prior company shares his name.

> “I don’t want the reporters I’m paying to write a bad story about me,” he said on Radio Iowa. “I don’t want them to be independent.”

Did I read that right? “Don’t want them to be independent”

What’s the point of journalism then?

Full context:

Henderson then pressed the ex-mayor on how Bloomberg media would cover him during a campaign. The billionaire said he had already engaged in discussions about the issue with Bloomberg’s head of news, John Micklethwait.

“We’ve always had a policy that we don’t cover ourselves. I happen to believe, in my heart of hearts, you can’t be independent and nobody’s going to believe that you’re independent,” he said.

“And quite honestly, I don’t want the reporters I’m paying to write a bad story about me! I don’t want them to be independent. So you’re going to have to do something,” he added with a laugh.

Bloomberg said his companies would either completely divest from political coverage or pepper news with frequent disclaimers about ownership.

(From https://www.thewrap.com/mike-bloomberg-says-hell-sell-his-me...)

I knew it was probably missing context, but even with more context it’s not that reassuring.

I agree wholeheartedly that it’s a positive move to abstain from political coverage when your majority stakeholder is running for office. However, the messaging doesn’t sit right with me.

Even if you can’t be truly independent, you should still strive for integrity.

I have the opposite knee jerk reaction and see people openly talking about their biases and dubious incentives to be an indication of honesty and forthrightness. It's when people make a big song and dance about how pro-independance they are and make a whole song and dance about it that I get suspicious. It reflects not just a lack of honesty towards others but even a lack of honesty towards oneself and an inflated view of their own ethics.

Vertically EVERYBODY with a conflict of interest will put their finger on the scale given enough opportunity.

Yes the candid approach is great, similar to the Intercept, but read elsewhere in the article about the how they haven't followed through on not covering these things. That's very bad.

Abstaining from topics where you have conflicts of interests IS integrity.

Strive for, yes.

Expect others to believe you are striving for integrity and journalistic independence?

I don’t reckon that’s going going to work.

Better off, in my opinion, to be honest about it.

That context seems very important - completely changes my initial opinion.

It's a difficult choice. I would have liked him to say that Bloomberg Media should be free to write pieces showing his shortcomings - but its not very realistic of me to expect that.

I'm not sure if I would have the same opinion - but his PoV sounds very human. I'm not sure if I would have liked my employees causing issues for me either, if I was in his position.

We don't _have_ journalism in the Unite States any more. We have a product to generate clicks and eyeballs so that ads can be sold.

Has journalism ever existed in the united states? Ads and clickbait have existed long before the internet in print.

Couldn't agree more. Journalism hasn't been independent ever since advertisers became the primary the customer and readers became the product being sold.

So, the last 50-100 years? Ads paying for the news had been the standard for most of the 20th century.

When has it been otherwise? I don’t have numbers, but I suspect print subscriptions typically only cover delivery and printing costs, with maybe a little surplus beyond that. Advertising has always been what paid the bills for print publications.

This has always been the predominant business model for periodicals. The other, much smaller alternative is paying a lot of money for access to what amounts to research, and it barely exists outside the financial markets.

For a relatively brief, glorious period in the middle of the 20th century, the majority of Americans held--or at least were kind--to the idea that independent, objective, professional journalism could exist and was valuable. During that period publishers could profitably compete attempting to sell that product.

Today most Americans, learned and unlearned, are significantly more cynical, habituated to reject the idea that independent, objective, professional journalism could exist. Regardless of the philosophical truth, what's certainly true as a practical matter is that it cannot exist even aspirationally unless we believe it can exist.

I dunno I went to high-school with a guy that went on to win a Pulitzer for covering the aftermath of the War on Terror, focusing on when the troops involved came home and the effects on them and their families and communities.

One guy in my home town came back a serial killer and started murdering women. Others formed gangs or killed themselves or harmed their families. There is real journalism out there still.

Ever since 4 years ago this has been a view that will apparently not instantly get you exiled any more.

That stood out for me too. It sounds kind of improper to the point of being illegal. Or at least, "It oughtta be illegal."

Edit: Well I said that before someone dug up the context. Makes more sense that way. Still leaving this comment here.

In the US a law saying a newspaper owner isn't allowed to control editorial policy wouldn't make it past the first amendment.

That’s an incredible statement, but aligns with the popular idea that anything published should align to the desired political narrative.

Journalism is a loss leader for people who have or want power.

It has seldom been anything else and with the current direct of things that is unlikely to change in the near future.

Who else has the money and drive to pay a bunch of artists—writers in this case—and publish their work.

If anyone did set out to be fair and unbiased the work would immediately be co-opted by someone’s agenda, someone who either has or wants power, or more of it.

Might not have been the right financial model or the right content for Bloomberg, but the work CityLab does is essential to fix these large problems. Maybe city sourced funding model would work...

One of the recent HN postings from CityLab was authored by Brooks Rainwater, who works for the National League of Cities in their Center for City Solutions. https://www.nlc.org/program-initiative/center-for-city-solut...

NLC appears to have a "city sourced funding model". They have a web site https://www.nlc.org/about-nlc and a blog https://citiesspeak.org/

That article is so clearly biased, why is this front page? The author clearly is trying to grind their axe, instead of reporting news in a matter of fact way. First of, the headline claims Bloomberg the company laid off half the staff, while in the following sentence saying that it's actually the Atlantic who's doing the firing. But that's not done before putting a picture of Bloomberg the candidate, first, to make sure the headline and the picture are what strikes people's imagination.

Rather disgusting.

That’s too bad. CityLab has great content.

Bloomberg has its own content management systems, and has data resources and such that CL doesn't have. CL was already losing money -- no harm in right-sizing it.

It's a shame but I'm sure they are reducing staff with a duplicate function at Bloomberg.

This will continue to happen to publications that cant find a way to finance their operations. Employing a team to publish a publication is expensive so I dought subscriptions alone will be enough to support a team. I think it will have to be a combination of advertising, subscriptions and something else which we still have to define.

I'm surprised there aren't more nonprofit outlets running entirely off of dividends from an endowment. It's not like you need to run a massive expensive print and distribution operation anymore, or that salaries for journalists are especially high.

I guess the question is how does a larger publication like Bloomberg make money whereas a more specialized one like CityLab struggle?

Maybe the smaller publications can mimic their business model?

Bloomberg News likely does not make money (I.e. a profit).

The terminals do and very likely subsidize the news.

If the News side makes money, it’s likely because they get to share all the administrative costs with the terminal side.

What’s a terminal in this context?

Probably referring to the Bloomberg Terminal [0] as in the hardware/software product that offers real-time economic data and enables a large portion of the market’s electronic trading.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal

It's a computer Bloomberg produces with access to data, news, and tools used by workers in the finance industry. A subscription for one is around $20,000 per year, and there are currently 100,000s of active subscriptions.

Economy of scale, fixed costs spread over more reporters, lower cost of capital. It’s cheaper to be big.

So CityLab was going to get axed, but in the end half of them get to keep their jobs, yet the article's slant is Bloomberg is a bad guy because of it.

I’m shocked so much great content is put out by such a great team. Hopefully Bloomberg can invest more into the business.

Bloomberg Media uses feel-good opinion pieces to accumulate trust and interest. Then, it uses this to drive a very specific agenda from the top brass. The company has used this strategy for years. Sheeple continue to upvote these pieces and serve special interests, though. The acquisition of CityLab is intended to capture more social capital and drive more political agenda when Mike Bloomberg makes his phone call. Firing half a company is essentially killing the mission and culture that was CityLab and confirms the acquisition strategy.

My advice to those who were fired is to organize and continue what you created elsewhere.

Note that Bloomberg has shills and PR working among us on Hacker News. They also have sentiment bots searching for comments such as mine and organize down votes. Hacker News Admins are not equipped to handle modern day communication control by powerful interests like Bloomberg.

Breaks pool stick over knee, throws one half on floor of newsroom

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