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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can't speak for all of us WaPo employees, but I'm not happy....[/quote]

Your employer is circling the drain and you want one final DEI hire to be the person who fires everyone and turns out the lights.[/quote]

The paper is owned by the richest man in the world, who just endorsed a new long-term 10-year business plan. I don't honestly think it matters to him how much money it's losing, and I think it's extremely unlikely any of these new people will be firing everyone and turning out the lights.

And while you're using "DEI hire" as a racially coded stand-in for "unqualified," I'd say "random editor at the Telegraph who's never worked in U.S. journalism" also sounds unqualified to run a major newspaper here.[/quote]
DP. It was actually a little funny and the fact that you cannot just laugh at the absurdity of it a little is very telling for what ails the paper. [/quote]

Oh, believe me, plenty of people at the paper are laughing at the absurdity of some of these management decisions. Just not at the racist jokes about them.[/quote]
It wasn’t a racist joke though. It was a joke pointing to the absurdity of making management diversity your primary concern above all when your Publisher has told you directly that the paper is hemorrhaging money and no one is reading your work.

Since you seem incapable of having a sense of humor, let me ask sincerely if it would make you feel better if the person making these changes was a Black woman?

Considering that it was a Black woman that reigned in the similar problem at WAMU/DCist, I’m going to speculate that the answer is no. [/quote]

I guess I just don't think jokes about DEI hires are funny, sorry; if that makes me "incapable of having a sense of humor," I guess I'll have to live with that shame.

I don't think anyone is saying management diversity is their primary concern. Or at least, not anyone I've spoken to. I think the real primary concern is that no one has heard any details at all about this new plan the previous editor disliked enough that she lost her job rather than carry it out. I do think it's pretty outlandish to just go hire people you know without even looking around at other possible candidates, regardless of diversity. You think it's totally fine for the CEO to hire the two top positions for half of the company without consulting or considering anyone else, fine, but I don't think that would fly at many other places. It certainly wouldn't fly at any other newspapers.

FWIW, I'm a middle-aged white guy, so I'm theoretically better off if other middle-aged white guys start giving middle-aged white guys promotions we don't have to compete with anyone else for. But that doesn't mean I think it's a particularly smart way to run a business.[/quote]

WaPo employee PP here. Not newsroom though. And I guess I'm the only one on this thread that was there. It's a shame the media is taking shots at the DEI question, because the first part of the reporter's question was not DEI-related but rather much closer to the post I've quoted. The CEO is just hiring his buddies, and no indication that there was a search for the best person for the job. And this isn't an isolated incident - [i]every single[/i] exec hire has been his buddies, even some folks further down the management chain. It has already led to an "us vs them" mentality between exec and staff, which obviously isn't good for morale.

And while the traffic declines are real, and bad, every media outlet is facing a similar issue as Facebook, Google, etc, pull back from promoting news. [/quote]

The NY Times added another 300,000 subscribers last quarter. That brings them above 10 million. Digital subscriptions alone are bringing them more than a billion a year. Their profits are up nearly ten percent this year over last.

I don't know, Washington Post. Maybe create a quality paper and people will read it. But no. Instead you complain about facebook and your newsroom is fixated on diversity hires. It's no wonder the publisher wants to shake things up. You guys aren't delivering. You lost the plot years ago. [/quote]

FWIW, the Times also made smart decisions that the previous publisher at the Post specifically said he wouldn't emulate, to (a) buy organizations that already had existing subscriber bases and audiences, like the Athletic or the Wirecutter, and (b) to make it possible to subscribe to products outside the core news product, like Games or Cooking (or the Wirecutter or the Athletic), and to give possible readers a good reason to want to do that by making those standalone products quite good. It's starting from a false premise to assume that all the new subscriptions at the Times are directly tied to people wanting to read their news product. If they hadn't bought Wordle, their growth trajectory would be slower.[/quote]

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