Surviving Layoffs
"the bandages—an entire saint! Here's / what I own: a blackened coin and yes // for an answer. The countdown to the next major miracle / is on." - Kaveh Akbar, "Best Shadows"
I’ve been working on a poem called “Hauntings” for about a year. It started as a series: six poems, all called “haunting,” about a different haunting. It’s now a long-ish poem, around 40 lines, and Bob/Elizabeth Bishop may have inspired me to try to re-write it as a sestina. Point is, I’m trying something with this poem that I haven’t fully figured out. What I do know: it’s not a ghost story, it’s about layoffs.
Layoffs: something they worried about in The Office (2005) season one but I hadn’t seen much of in real life. I was a junior in high school in 2005 and out of college by 2010. I think my entire social circle has either been laid off or survived a round of layoffs at some point. My wife was laid off during the pandemic. Before our son was born, I worked at the same company, in an adjacent department. This means I was only spared the layoff rod because the company didn’t pay me enough to afford childcare.
Layoffs hit BuzzFeed last week, with CEO Chelsea Peretti’s Brother killing off the entirety of BuzzFeed News, aka the readable part of BuzzFeed, aka the Pulitzer Prize-winning part of BuzzFeed, aka the part of BuzzFeed that Chelsea Peretti’s Brother said he “made the decision to overinvest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much.”
Shut the fuck up and pay for it, then, Jonah.
As I write this, Disney/ESPN are doing layoffs. The Ringer reports it will be three motherfucking rounds of layoffs. Christ Jesus! Imagine working your job knowing another round of cuts is coming in a matter of months. Then another. Great boost for morale. Maybe why that article’s list of talent lost at EPSN is so staggering (darkly funny that a Ringer article begins that list with “Bill Simmons” and ends it with “…just about all my former Grantland colleagues”).
Defector—an excellent website started thanks to layoffs’ cousin, Being Sold To An Equity Firm—has the only correct take on layoffs: Greed Is Still The Problem. BuzzFeed can’t support BuzzFeed News because they don’t want to pay for it. Jordan Peele’s Brother-In-Law can’t take a paycut, the shareholders can’t watch the line go anything but up, the Narc Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks of the world hate journalism and have made the internet bad for it. The end result? Something absolutely essential (good news journalism) but also intangibly valuable (doesn’t sell anything) will always struggle in capitalism.
As Diana Moskovitz says in Defector:
But for a brief moment in time—and, in the grand scheme of the history of the printed word, it was very brief—running a newspaper could also make you rich; stockholders, it seems, would rather kill the product than accept a meatloaf dinner. Buzzfeed and its ilk, like Insider, sparkled and shined to investors because they promised, once again, to revitalize that dream: This humble, labor-intensive, hand-made business could make you rich again!
“Rather kill the product than accept a meatloaf dinner” is going to live in my head for a long time. Especially since meatloaf is delicious.
The thing about those nebulous “shareholders” I keep hearing about—presumably faceless under hooded robes like Sith Eternal—is that their animating principle is to be rich. Writers? We’d certainly like to be rich, but our animating principle is doing good work. Maybe changing the world, probably not, maybe getting a Pulitzer, probably not, maybe even getting rich (but almost certainly not). If getting rich was our actual animating principle, we’d be shareholders. Or as Diana puts it:
Anyone who has answered a newsroom phone could tell you that news would not make you rich. It was, at best, simply one of many reasons why anyone ever subscribed to any publication—and that's OK. I did not enter journalism to become rich. I would like for journalism to provide me with my basic needs and, yes, a few vacations would be nice too. This is, I suspect, what many, if not most, people want from their work—they will trade hours of their labor to be able to live comfortably and not have to worry about the next paycheck.
Live comfortably and not have to worry about the next paycheck. Here’s 42 Reasons We Can’t Even (Make That Happen).
As always, when it comes to writing and money, I must acknowledge a position of privilege. My wife has the real job and I freelance for some nice places who pay decently and on time. Our kid proudly goes to public school and we get to take decent vacations sometimes. I submit my most precious work to places that pay nothing because I can afford to be precious about where I publish (or try to publish). The goal, of course, is to eventually sell some books, which also won’t make money. I don’t know business models for media that aren’t advertising-based (subject to constant layoff turmoil) or user-subscription based (like this one, if I ever wanted to turn that faucet on). Hell’s Bells, Trudy—I don’t even have hints for surviving layoffs, despite the title “Surviving Layoffs.”
It’d just sure be nice if things were different.
All I can say is solidarity to those going through it right now. Keep writing, and especially try to do work that pisses off these wedge-salad-eating, Howard Hamlin-ass corporate suits. Let the shareholders have their Chicago Tribune and wonder why no one reads it. We’ll be over here, making cool stuff and trying to pay the bills.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
