Layoffs Hit Washington Post Mobile Team 108
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."
Source (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good to hear you care so much about the people (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:When money becomes your God (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
NOT (Score:3, Interesting)
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.