CityLab has been relaunched under the Bloomberg umbrella | Hacker News Reader

CityLab has been relaunched under the Bloomberg umbrella

niemanlab.org

97 pointshhs43 comments

I've been a big citylab reader for the past few years - always loved their detailed takes on urban issues and some solid long form stuff.

After reading this, just clicked on bookmark and their homepage made me want to cry. I've never seen a brand murdered overnight before. (i guess the articles are the same? But design matters...it's a very clear message).

Same thing happened to BusinessWeek. After being consumed by Bloomberg, it's a shadow of its former self -- predictable, overly cautious, and much less interesting or informative. It feels like it's run by lawyers and investors rather than journalists who know and care about business.

Brand building for the terminal business.

Sondag is a little unusual for this media age, in that she’s spent her entire 20-year career with one company, Bloomberg. She’s transitioning to the top job at CityLab from a six-year stint as a standards and training editor at Bloomberg.

Bloomberg has a reputation in the media world as being a very conservative company to work for. I have a relative who worked for them, and while the pay and perks were solid (thanks in large part to Bloomberg's successful terminal business) you can never criticize the company once you leave owing to a very restrictive NDA tied to severance.

There is also, as the NYT put it, "an entrenched culture of bullying, where women are often objectified and sometimes face discrimination, according to interviews with more than a dozen former employees, as well as lawsuits and internal corporate documents." (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/business/michael-bloomber...)

For CityLab supporters, I would be very concerned about the way it's being absorbed into the Bloomberg mother ship. There won't be much independence to ask hard questions when buttoned-down Bloomberg lifers are brought in to keep the kids in line and global multinationals like Hyundai are footing the bill.

That’s a pretty rich comment coming from the New York Times, controlled by different, equally troubling oligarchs, with both known and whispered-about baggage of its own.

The fact of the matter is, all of these jobs where others pay you to write can be a bummer if you end up deciding something/someone connected to your workplace is a juicy target for a story. Hence the long-standing tradition of outsiders becoming insiders, and so on, as it has been for all of eternity.

What’s the whispered about baggage? The CIA connections?

Yes, please expand here, I didn't even know about the aforementioned CIA connections

Carlos Slim is the reason the NYT made it through the media’s trough of sorrow when they went from trying to be a somewhat objective paper of record to being all partisan all the time. He’s a Mexican billionaire who made his money off of having the political connections to get the mobile phone monopoly. There’s shag all negative coverage of one of the world’s richest men whose wealth was based on clientilism.

For the record, once Warren criticized him about the NDAs during his short presidential bid earlier this year, within two days he released all the women he had under NDA from them as well as any current employees who wished to be released (not sure about other former employees).

No, he announced that anyone wishing to be released from an NDA could contact the company “and they’ll be given a release”. He very explicitly did not give a blanket release, and we have no way of knowing whether anyone requested but was not actually granted one, because they would remain under an NDA.

(He also deleted the statement as soon as he dropped out of the race, so I have to link to Wayback Machine.)

https://web.archive.org/web/20200307041238/https://www.mikeb...

I don't get what you're saying. Are you claiming he lied? Based on him deleting a bunch of campaign related pages after he ended his campaign?

What the parent comment is saying is that he made a comment that in practice didn't actually amount to anything.

But he sent out emails to employees saying they just had to email HR and they would be released from their NDAs. I don't understand what more you want?

I'd like to see some proof it was actually followed up on and people were released from NDA's.

It's also worth noting that it doesn't sound like what happens after you get released from the NDA was formalized. Given Bloomberg's reputation it's not unreasonable to think that asking for this puts a target on your back for later retaliation.

I mean the company is 20,000+ people and there hasn't been one story of anyone saying they were not allowed to get out of their NDA, nor any stories about being fired or treated poorly after being released. So either, no one took him up on the offer (highly unlikely given 20k people), or there was no issues when it happened.

What's the latest on that? I hadn't heard that he released any of the NDAs, but it looks like I missed it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-21/bloomberg...

Am I missing something broader? That sounds more narrow scoped than what you mention.

While I've enjoyed reading CityLab articles over the past few years, I've never quite known what their business model was.

Getting acquihired it seems ... loved the articles, now I probably won't be able to read them anymore. Shame.

Aside from the financial news that's tied to terminal subs, Bloomberg doesn't make much of an effort to enforce their paywall. An incognito window will get around it every time.

Firefox's Reader Mode also worked for me reading 20+ pieces/day, around 6 months ago. They have a pretty low rate limit which gives you ReCaptcha, but only an issue if you use middle click to open many articles at once.

Well with journalism these days, you either don't know what it is or don't like it.

May the news be entirely subscriber funded in a post-UBI world where everyone can afford to subscribe.

And how much do you believe should be the UBI allocation per person for online news subscriptions?

Then considering this hypothetical money would come from the government (read: other peoples money) can recipients spend this allotment on whatever news sources or viewpoints they want?

UBI means recipients choose where to spend the money. It's income, not a subsidy.

And how is the amount of "income" determined per person - based on what necessary expenses? Should news subscriptions be one of them?

> May the news be entirely subscriber funded in a post-UBI world where everyone can afford to subscribe

Probably not. UBI doesn’t end the appeal of “free” and doesn't change that the people trying to sell you stuff have a motive to spend money disguising efforts to get you to buy it as other things, like “free" news services.

The advertising targets can afford to pay for the news now, because they are paying for it. But they still pay for it indirectly, and UBI doesn't change the systems which feed into that.

I know it's hard to reduce the purchasing power of advertisers, but w e can produce their monopsony power by making subscription viable again.

People already complain about how media outlets won't write articles critical of their patrons, and now we want to make the problem worse by making everybody a patron?

This sounds like a great way to turn all media into tepid listicles.

I'm, it makes the problem better because the patronage cancels out. The problem was never patronage in the absolute.

And the RSS feeds are now gone :( I contacted support, maybe if enough people do they'll come back. I've had success complaining about this in the past when sites did a bit move.

> Beizer stressed that the Hyundai sponsorship won’t affect editorial output, but it’s hard not to see a car company sponsorship as somewhat out of step with the average CityLab reader’s idea of the future of cities. As Joshua Benton noted (foretold?) when Bloomberg acquired the site last year, “CityLab has a comparatively small but unusually passionate group of fans (all of whom either take public transportation or bike to work) and some of them seem nervous about the new ownership.”

With a bike riding low car audience, how does it make sense to take on a car company advertised as part of your reboot?

tbf Hyundai, in particular, seems to attempt to go into city planning[1] and Toyota is apparently building some sort of futuristic company town[2]. It seems like Japanese auto makers are attempting to branch out into urban development so I guess it makes some sense to use this as some sort of branding opportunity

[1]https://tech.hyundaimotorgroup.com/article/ces-2020-hyundai-...

[2]https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/31171023.html

So the primary funding source for citylab is now a car company? that seems a bit problematic.

Even more problematic is the fact Michael Bloomberg owns it, you know, the guy who stopped journalists that worked for a subsidary of his from doing their job.

I have zero doubt he'll interfere with the normal operation of CityLab to suit his own agendas.

Out of curiosity, why are CityLab articles so often on Hacker News homepage? I've never heard of CityLab elsewhere.

And a related question, is the popularity of paywalled articles here organic? I would expect that the vast majority of HN visitors don't have a subscription to Bloomberg etc., so paywalled articles should have a big handicap.

> why are CityLab articles so often on Hacker News homepage?

I've always assumed it was because they had quality articles about cities. Software engineers often have an extracurricular interest in other types of engineering.

It also helps that a lot of the urban planning trends in vogue, like "tactical urbanism", resemble the "move fast/break things" fast experimentation ethos.

Cities produce a crapton of data, and in general HN is receptive to anything trying to make sense of and improve things based on data.

A trip to Europe or Japan is enough for to people like me to say, "there's something wrong with my urban environment but I can't quite put my finger on it." CityLab is an answer to that nagging feeling. There's also a neat software engineering cross-over as design patterns in software engineering is a response to Christopher Alexander's work on urban design patterns, "The Pattern of Streets"

I believe CityLab was a startup that was created to "bring tech" to Architecture and (as similar startups) pivoted into Media. Architecture is probably one of the most difficult sectors to disrupt. It's obscure but there is a lot of research already (most architecture interns are doing it and often for free) and no low hanging fruit to pick. Most startups aim to transform this research in "tech money" but soon they acknowledge that their task is sisyphean.

Architect here.

Re paywalls, it's not so much that most users have subscriptions as that they're making use of various workarounds. That's not by coincidence because paywalls with workarounds are the ones that are allowed here. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Yes, the popularity of such articles is, as far as can tell from the data, organic.

MapLab is really cool and everyone should subscribe

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-coronavirus-lockdown...

In adjacent news, Treehugger recently got a redesign. They're content has always been hit or miss with a few decent redas amd a number of aquihires, but I think it's still worth checking out from time to time.

Citylab has been a real gem. Hopefully the team can withstand the headwinds at Bloomberg and keep up the great work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com