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The Era of Antisocial Social Media – Harvard Business Review

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HBR Staff/Jorg Greuel/Getty Images

Social platforms are still reporting robust growth — yes, even Facebook — despite a growing chorus of opposition. Social conversation continues to shape everything from culture to the media cycle to our most intimate relationships. And we now spend more time than ever on our phones, with endless scrolling through our social feeds being a chief reason why.

But dig a little deeper, and a more nuanced picture emerges about social media users today that has important implications for the ways in which brands reach customers. Specifically, when you look at who is — and more importantly, who is not — driving the growth and popularity of social platforms, a key demographic appears to be somewhat in retreat: young people.

For example, 2019 findings from Edison Research and Triton Digital show social media usage overall among Americans 12 to 34 years old across several platforms has either leveled off or is waning, while 2019 research from Global Web Index suggests that the amount of time millennial and Gen Z audiences spend on many social platforms is either flat, declining, or not rising as greatly as it has in years’ past.

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To understand what’s driving this shift, you need only talk to young people. They’re saying that after years spent constructing carefully curated online identities and accumulating heaps of online “friends,” they want to be themselves and make real friends based on shared interests. They’re also craving privacy, safety, and a respite from the throngs of people on social platforms — throngs that now usually include their parents.

To reach these younger audiences on social, marketers are going to have to re-think their approach. The first step is to understand the distinct characteristics of these more closed, and often more private and interactive online spaces. Since I believe that naming a trend helps provide a framework for understanding it, I have dubbed these spaces “digital campfires.”

If social media can feel like a crowded airport terminal where everyone is allowed, but no one feels particularly excited to be there, digital campfires offer a more intimate oasis where smaller groups of people are excited to gather around shared interests.

I’ve identified three categories of digital campfires: private messaging, micro-communities, and shared experiences. Some digital campfires are a combination of all three.

Let’s examine the characteristics of each, as well as how brands are successfully navigating the challenges of reaching the audiences in these environments.

Private Messaging Campfires

Private or small-group messaging — usually but not always with one’s real-life friends — is the primary purpose for gathering. 

In a 2019 survey from ZAK, a youth-focused creative agency, nearly two thirds of the 1,000 people polled, all under 30, said they prefer to talk in private message threads rather than on open forums and feeds. Sixty percent of respondents stated that talking in private groups means they can “share more openly.”

Private messaging campfires often exist on traditional social platforms. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are among the most well-known examples. According to the ZAK survey, 38% of people under 30 only use Facebook for the private messenger function. Instagram, the rare platform showing an upward usage trend among younger Americans, recently launched a new, standalone app, called Threads, designed expressly for quick-fire messaging with close friends via the camera and text.

For the most part, brands aren’t invited into these private chats. Some have responded by adapting similar technologies, like texting (whether with actual humans or human-seeming chatbots), to mimic the intimacy of personal conversations with friends.

For example, there’s Text Rex, a members-only, text message-based, personalized restaurant recommendation service from the dining review site The Infatuation (a favorite among millennial foodies). Users can text questions like “Where should I take my date in midtown Manhattan?” or “What’s the best midday sushi in Santa Monica?” and receive answers from actual humans (Infatuation staffers).

Similarly, there’s Community — another text-based service that launched last year to help corporations, stars and high-profile individuals facilitate direct conversations with their fans via text messaging “without getting buried by social feeds and algorithms.” Community’s primary users are celebrities (among them: Kerry Washington, Amy Schumer, and Paul McCartney). But some fashion and lifestyle brands like MadHappy, APL, and Beautycon have already signed on, and the opportunity for brands to speak more directly to their customers via a channel they’re already using is a promising development.

Tip: This is the hardest campfire for marketers to penetrate. Get to know your audience intimately in ways that go way beyond simple demographics. Specifically, work to understand their habits — especially how they consume content and communicate across multiple platforms — and use this to inform the channels on which you communicate with them. Think about how you can reach customers by mimicking their behavior.

Micro-Community Campfires

Primarily interactive private or semi-private forums where people gather around interests, beliefs, or passions.

Like the private messaging campfires, micro-community campfires often live on traditional social platforms. Facebook Groups are probably the best-known example. The “close friends” feature within Instagram Stories has become a tool some influencers are using to share exclusive content and interact with small groups of their followers, for a fee. Slack, best known as a workplace messaging tool, is also a place where micro communities are connecting, often around shared professional interests.

YouTube has long been a hub for hyper-specific communities and that’s still the case today, especially among teens. Sure, anyone can watch or engage with a YouTube video, but the cornucopia of channels means there’s something for every conceivable niche interest. For a user, the effect of wading through a vast sea of content to stumble upon something meaningful — combined with the intimacy engendered by the direct-to-camera style of videos on the platform, and the loyalty that comes from subscribing to creator channels — can feel revelatory. (The same cannot be said of the Chinese-owned app TikTok, which, while growing at a phenomenal clip, is largely oriented around the consumption of a seemingly endless feed of entertaining videos served up by an algorithm. It does not allow the user to intentionally connect to specific interest communities).

Micro-community campfires can also spark in unexpected places. Young people are gathering, for example, on Discord — a voice and text chat platform designed for gamers, which has become something of an under-the-radar hub for beauty obsessives, with multiple servers devoted to topics like advice about makeup or cruelty-free products.

Brands can tap into existing micro-community campfires by partnering with influencers, or they can invest time and resources to build their own campfires from scratch — a heavier lift, of course, but if the brands doing it well are any indication, it’s an effort that is well worth it.

One example is Sprite, which spearheaded a campaign for the Latin American market last year called “No Estás Solo” (“You Are Not Alone”). Working with an agency, the company used data from Google to determine personal pain points that young people were searching. It then set up Reddit forums, each helmed by an influencer who had personal experience with issues such as feeling like you’re in the wrong body. The outcome: poignant personal discussions about loneliness, all led by Sprite.

Another example is the private Slack group created by beauty brand Glossier, often called one of millennials’ most trusted brands. Created exclusively for its best customers to talk about all things beauty, organize meet-ups and discuss products, the brand credits the group with helping to co-create one of its now-top-selling products, Milky Jelly Cleanser. At one time, this type of forum might have been dubbed “market research.” Today, it also serves as an engine for fandom, while simultaneously allowing the company to be nimble and responsive to anything that is discussed there.

Tip: These campfires are not indexed by Google or advertised on the platforms themselves, so they’re hard to find by traditional means. Study your audience to find breadcrumbs that will lead you to their micro-community campfires. Then, partner with an existing campfire or create your own.

Shared Experience Campfires

Private or public forums where participating in a shared experience — often around a specific shared interest — with a like-minded community is the primary purpose for gathering.

Perhaps the best example of this type of campfire is Fortnite, a multiplayer video game that has more than 200 million users, up to 8 million of whom are online at any given time. The game has been called a de facto social network thanks to the role it occupies in the lives of its players: Indeed, half of teens say they use it to keep up with their friends — some of whom they’ve never actually met in person — with most spending six to 10 hours each week on the platform). Last year, the EDM artist Marshmello staged a virtual concert inside the game that 10.7 million people “attended.” Fortnite is a form of entertainment, but more than that, it’s a catalyst for bringing together like-minded people for a shared experience. And the game’s steep learning curve lends it an aura of exclusivity.

The live broadcasting and viewing platform Twitch serves a similar function. Live streamers, primarily gamers, broadcast their own gameplay, usually with audio commentary, for fans who can watch and interact via chat. Twitch users consumed 592 billion minutes of live-stream content last year, and Twitch has recently pushed into non-gaming categories like music and sports. As with Fortnite, the primary draw to Twitch is its entertainment value, but the “stickiness” comes from the community and sense of excitement that forms around a shared interest or individual.

So how can marketers zero in on the right shared experience campfires for their audience? As with the other campfires, they must first identify the communities and parts of the culture that their brand fits into. Then, determine the online experiences these audiences seek. Brands like the NFL, Marvel, and Nike have done just that, leveraging Fortnite, for example, to reach their audiences by selling skins (stylized weapons and outfits for players’ in-game avatars), creating branded mash-up game modes, and doing limited-edition product drops inside the game.

Tip: Customization is key. Don’t simply replicate what you’re doing on other platforms — it will come across as ham-fisted. Instead, pay close attention to the behavior of the people in the campfire you want to reach, think about what value you can bring to them, then get creative about the products and messaging you’ll use to engage them.

Without question, the digital campfire trend is firmly on the radar of the big social platforms. “Today we already see that private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a March 2019 public post, announcing a strategic shift toward more closed, private modes of communication.

Zuckerberg is paying attention to this shift not only because the data shows that Facebook is losing young audiences, but because the re-direction of attention to more private modes of communication represents a major challenge for the company. About 98% of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, and people in smaller, more closed forums are much harder for advertisers to reach at scale.

It is neither simple nor straightforward to reach audiences gathered around digital campfires. But as traditional social platforms grow, they become more crowded, and it becomes more difficult and expensive to reach people there anyway. In light of this, digital campfires become a much more attractive alternative — one that requires more groundwork and more careful tending, but one that could potentially have big payoffs for brands in terms of loyalty, retention, and long-term love.

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Ontario school boards take social media giants to court for disrupting student learning – CBC.ca

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Four major Ontario school boards are taking some of the largest social media companies to court over their products, alleging the way they’re designed have negatively rewired the way children think, behave and learn and have thus disrupted the way schools operate.

The public district school boards of Toronto, Peel and Ottawa, along with Toronto’s Catholic counterpart, are looking for about $4.5 billion in damages from Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc. and ByteDance Ltd., which operate the platforms Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok respectively, according to statements of claim filed Wednesday.

“The influence of social media on today’s youth at school cannot be denied. It leads to pervasive problems such as distraction, social withdrawal, cyberbullying, a rapid escalation of aggression, and mental health challenges,” said Colleen Russell-Rawlins, director of education at the Toronto District School Board, in a release Thursday.

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“Therefore, it is imperative that we take steps to ensure the well-being of our youth. We are calling for measures to be implemented to mitigate these harms and prioritize the mental health and academic success of our future generation.” 

The school boards, operating under a new coalition called Schools for Social Media Change, allege students are experiencing an “attention, learning, and mental health crisis” because of “prolific and compulsive use of social media products.”

Trying to respond to this has caused “massive strains” on the group’s funds, including in additional mental health programming and staff, IT costs and administrative resources, the release states. The boards call on the social media giants to “remediate” the costs to the larger education system and redesign their products to keep students safe.

Neinstein LLP, a Toronto-based firm, is representing the school boards in their lawsuit. The boards will not be responsible for any costs related to the lawsuit unless a successful outcome is reached, the release states.

“A strong education system is the foundation of our society and our community. Social media products and the changes in behaviour, judgment and attention that they cause pose a threat to that system and to the student population our schools serve,” said Duncan Embury, a partner and head of litigation at Neinstein.

CBC Toronto has reached out to the companies named for comment.

The latest lawsuit comes after a large civil suit against Meta Platforms Inc. was initiated in the U.S. last fall. Over 30 states accused Meta Platforms Inc. of harming young people’s mental health and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that cause children to be addicted to its platforms.

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Four Ontario school boards sue social-media giants for products that harm students' behaviour and education – The Globe and Mail

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Colleen Russell Rawlins, Director of Education with the Toronto District School Board, talks to students at Selwyn Elementary School on Mar 27.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

Four of Canada’s largest school boards are suing the companies behind social-media platforms Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat and TikTok, accusing them of negligently designing products that disrupt learning and rewire student behaviour while leaving educators to manage the fallout.

In four separate statements of claim filed on Wednesday in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, the Toronto District School Board, the Toronto Catholic District School Board, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and the Peel District School Board accused social-media companies of employing “exploitative business practices” and choosing to “maximize profits” at the expense of the mental health and well-being of students.

The addictive nature of social media means that educators spend more classroom time trying to have students focus on their lessons, the boards say in the statements of claim. They say the compulsive use of social-media platforms has also strained limited school board resources: Schools require additional mental health programs and personnel; staff spend more time addressing aggressive behaviour and incidents of cyberbullying; and information-technology services and cybersecurity costs have increased.

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“The Defendants have acted in a high-handed, reckless, malicious, and reprehensible manner without due regard for the well-being of the student population and the education system,” according to the statements of claim.

Similar lawsuits against social-media companies have been filed in the United States in recent months by individual states and school districts. This would mark the first time it’s being done by school boards in Canada.

The four boards filed their lawsuits against Meta Platforms Inc., which is responsible for Facebook and Instagram, Snap Inc., the parent company of SnapChat, and ByteDance Ltd., owner of TikTok.

The school boards are advancing combined claims of around $4.5-billion. They are also asking that the social-media giants redesign their products to keep students safe.

None of the allegations have been proven in court.

In an e-mailed statement, Tonya Johnson, a spokeswoman for Snap, said the platform was “intentionally designed to be different from traditional social-media” so that users could communicate with friends. “While we will always have more work to do, we feel good about the role Snapchat plays in helping close friends feel connected, happy and prepared as they face the many challenges of adolescence,” she stated.

Meta and ByteDance did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Social-media use by children and young people has been the topic of widespread discussion among parents, policymakers and educators. Earlier this week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that bans social-media accounts for children under 14 and requires parental permission for 14- and 15-year-olds.

In Canada and elsewhere, there are growing concerns over the role social-media platforms play in cyberbullying, disrupted sleep patterns, brain development, and the inability of young people to focus.

A survey from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in 2021 found that 91 per cent of students in Grades 7 to 12 use social media daily, and about a third spend five hours or more daily on it. Researchers surveyed more than 2,000 Ontario students. Almost one-third reported being cyber-bullied at least once in the past year.

In their lawsuits, the four school boards said the companies “knew, or ought to have known, that the deliberate design of addictive and defective social-media products would interfere with students’ access to an education, negatively impact the learning environment, and create a public nuisance within the education system.”

Colleen Russell-Rawlins, education director of the Toronto District School Board, the country’s largest school board, said in an interview on Wednesday that social media has affected the education system in “very significant ways.”

“Students are not present,” she said, describing the addictive nature of social-media platforms. Educators are hearing about more incidents of cyberbullying. They are witnessing the rapid escalation of aggression that starts online. And they are helping students who are coping with anxiety and other mental health challenges.

The lawsuits, she said, are not just about raising awareness, but about protecting children by calling for safeguards and ensuring that school boards have the resources to help address the negative effects of increased social-media use.

“I think there’s no other childhood addiction that’s impacting children’s futures through education that we as educators and leaders would be expected to remain silent about. We feel compelled to act on behalf of our young people,” Ms. Russell-Rawlins said.

Pino Buffone, the education director at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, echoed the sentiment, adding that the compulsive use of social media has further strained the finite resources of the school board. Educators and other school staff are being forced to manage behaviour that stems from social-media use.

“It has become clear that we need to hold social-media giants accountable,” Mr. Buffone said.

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Is the US media layoffs phenomenon the next housing crisis?

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In the past few months, the media sector in the United States has gone through one of its worst rounds of layoffs in decades, with some voices within the sector even asking if journalism is a viable career path despite surging subscriptions at publications like The New York Times.

Most recently, outlets like Vice and the sports blog Deadspin were decimated in a massive round of job cuts. Vice ended its online publication, and Deadspin laid off its entire editorial team.

These are the latest in a slew of headcount reductions at countless newsrooms around the US over the past decade at the hands of wealthy owners. The latter overwhelming have the backing of some of the biggest private equity and wealth management firms in the US like Apollo Global Management, Fortress Investment Group and Alden Capital, to name a few. These institutions are also called shadow banks.

A surge in private equity investments in media, experts said, has led to decisions that benefit investors but not always the companies and their employees, similar to the 2008 housing crisis and private equity’s ability to flourish during that time.

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While the media business is in the spotlight now, it is a microcosm of a bigger challenge across the US economy. What makes it stand out is that it’s been a long and high-profile battle.

One such moment came with tech’s control (overwhelmingly led by Meta, then Facebook) in 2018 over audience traffic, which made newspapers, magazines and news portals beholden to the algorithmic choices of social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, which ultimately hurt the sector.

That was an optimal entry point for private equity to get a stronger foothold in the media business.

“Media companies were struggling at the time but not nearly enough as the journalism community was led to believe,” explained Margot Susca, the author of How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy.

“Funds use these market conditions to justify the gutting of these American institutions,” said Susca, who is also a professor of journalism at American University in Washington, DC.

‘Liquidating the entire industry for profit’

Like in the housing market, financial institutions capitalised on someone else’s misfortune to make money from it. In the 2008 recession, it was lenders and big investment banks ranging from Lehman Brothers to Washington Mutual, a move that ultimately led to their collapse.

The key is real estate. In the housing crisis, banks seized foreclosed homes for pennies on the dollar after homeowners defaulted on subprime mortgages.

In the case of the media sector, shadow banks are going after physical newsrooms and selling them. For instance, in 2018, Gannett sold the headquarters of the Asheville Citizen Times to Twenty Lakes Holdings, a real-estate affiliate of Alden Capital. Gannett sold the building for $3.2m. Alden then sold it to developers for $5.3m.

A comparable move happened at Vice last year. Only months after Fortress Investment Group acquired the publication, it left its office in Brooklyn, New York.

There’s a lot of real estate at shadow banks’ disposal. Private equity, hedge funds and other comparable firms control roughly half of all daily newspapers in the US.

“The problem with the news media sector is not its viability. The problem with the news media sector are these locust funds that are liquidating the entire industry for profit,” Susca said.

But where do shadow banks go once physical assets like real estate have been liquidated?

They squeeze out revenue where they can for as long as they can. That often means cutting staff.

G/O Media, formerly known as Gizmodo Media Group, sold off Deadspin, its sports blog. The new owner, Lineup Publishing, said it would not bring over any existing editorial staffers even though it aimed to “be reverential to Deadspin’s unique voice”, G/O CEO Jim Spanfeller said in an email to employees.

Great Hill Partners acquired the media brand in 2019 and drastically shifted Deadspin’s editorial vision. The publication was a sports-centric one that also housed vibrant cultural commentary on a variety of topics. At the direction of the new owner, the publication was directed to “stick to sports”. The announcement led to mass resignations.

This week, G/O Media sold two more publications from its portfolio — The AV Club and The Takeout.

G/O is not in a financially dire position, according to Spanfeller, who told Axios this year, “We’re not strapped for cash.”

Unionized staff at Condé Nast walk the picket line during a 24-hour walk out amid layoff announcements
Unionised staff at US publishing company Conde Nast walk the picket line during a 24-hour walkout amid layoff announcements in New York City in January [File: Angela Weiss/AFP]

According to the Writers Guild of America East, which includes various unions representing editorial staff from multiple media firms, Great Hill Partners made an estimated $44m in revenue in 2023. The guild suggests that Great Hill Partners has enough money to make decisions that do not undermine the financial security of its staffers.

When Spanfeller was appointed in 2019, the private equity firm said he was a significant investor in the company but did not disclose the specifics of the financial agreement. Spanfeller’s appointment came directly from the firm suggesting that it intended to oversee day-to-day editorial operations across G/O’s portfolio.

Great Hill Partners did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

G/O is the latest in a string of companies laying off workers in the last few months alone.

Last month, Engadget, a brand owned by Yahoo, had a series of layoffs including of high-profile editors. It came amid a reported refocus on traffic growth. But how can you drive more traffic with high-quality reporting with fewer people to make the product?

Meanwhile, Apollo Global Management, which now owns Yahoo, is doing very well. The asset management firm’s stock is up nearly 250 percent over a roughly five-year period – 80 percent this past year alone. The firm acquired Yahoo in 2021 and also has a significant stake in several other large media companies, including Gannett, which owns hundreds of newspapers around the US, including USA Today, the fifth largest. In 2019, Apollo provided $1.8bn to finance the acquisition of the newspaper giant and merge it with GateHouse Media.

‘Layoffs were the core strategy’

Once Gannett’s acquisition of GateHouse was complete, it scrapped hundreds of jobs immediately. In 2022, the newspaper group slashed roughly 600 more jobs in two rounds of cuts in August and November.

Apollo also acquired both Northwest Broadcasting and Cox Media Group, which included 54 radio stations, and 33 TV stations.

“After funds became owners, layoffs were the core strategy to try to maximise revenue. [These are] firms that just had profit as the sole motivation,” Susca said. “Layoffs are the stark reality of hedge fund ownership and private equity investment.”

Historically, private equity firm involvement has led to layoffs – an average of 4.4 percent of job losses in two years as well as a 1.7 percent decrease in pay, according to a study from the University of Chicago.

That is what happened at Cox Media Group. Almost immediately after its acquisition, talent from local TV and radio stations across the country was laid off.

Apollo Management did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

New York-based Alden Capital operates a similar job-cutting strategy and is one of the most infamous hedge funds in the sector for decimating a number of newspapers around the country.

In 2020, Vanity Fair referred to the firm as the “grim reaper of American newspapers”.

Vanity Fair’s stern critique is because of the massive slate of layoffs at the papers Alden Capital owns, including the Denver Post, even as one of the company’s executives said “advertising revenue has been significantly better”, according to reporting from Bloomberg in 2018.

Alden bought Tribune Publishing and gutted many of its newsrooms. At the time, Tribune was profitable, but Alden still moved forward to strip down its papers to make more profits.

Alden often pushed to beef up subscriptions even after shedding physical assets like office space and social assets like its people, which, Tim Franklin, senior associate dean at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, suggests is a losing strategy.

“It’s like charging for 16 ounces of Coca-Cola and putting it in a 12-ounce bottle. You’re giving people less and then expecting people to pay. The problem is that you end up in this doom loop. You’re getting less digital subscription revenue because you are providing less content, so then you make cuts and then you see even less revenue and you make more cuts. It’s this never-ending cycle of rinse and repeat,” Franklin said.

Alden Capital did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Doomed to failure

Shadow banks and big banks have made risky investments and hoped they would work out financially.

They sold the idea that someone could very well make payments on a subprime mortgage. Now, the idea is that a media company can create quality reporting on a shoestring budget and a fraction of its headcount. But those are unrealistic expectations and doomed for failure.

During the 2008 housing crisis, big banks essentially created an insurance plan for themselves: sell the debt and make money off the interest. Now private equity is employing a comparable strategy for media.

In the housing crisis, the banks bundled the mortgage loans in a package and sold them to the bond market to random investors. The banks had protections. If a lender defaults, they sell the debt on the secondary market for a profit. The strategy was to bet on the homeowners who were most likely not going to be able to afford the mortgage payments. But ultimately, that backfired, and the resultant housing crisis has been well documented.

“The only people there [who] were able to buy homes at the point could do so with cash or with Wall Street financing because that cash was still flowing,” said Aaron Glantz, author of Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream.

“Private equity is not depending on that credit system,” Glatz added.

A view of a sign for NBC News at Rockefeller Center in New York
NBC and MSNBC laid off employees [File: Justin Lane/EPA]

In either situation, the protections afforded investors were not passed down to homeowners in 2008 or writers, editors, on-air talent and others in the media industry now.

While some savings and lending banks failed and were the recipients of massive bailouts, shadow banks flourished. Generally speaking, these companies make money during times of economic vulnerability, leading to an even more challenging situation for average people.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, funds were largely criticised for buying up distressed housing across New York City and forcing out longtime residents – a move that brought rent-stabilised properties to market rate, which ultimately allowed them to drive up prices on their buildings and raise the value of the buildings around them.

“They’re reliant on cash that is just sitting around ready to be spent or credit lines that they can get from banks like JPMorgan Chase or they can leverage other assets. They own so many other assets,” Glatz said.

One of those assets over the past decade is a growing number of media companies.

But even then, it poses the question: If all these media companies are struggling, why are their executives so wealthy?

Behind a number of these mass layoffs are uber-wealthy executives. That’s the case for Business Insider, The Washington Post and Vice, just to name a few.

In January, Business Insider, owned by the German media giant Axel Springer, laid off 8 percent of its workforce. Axel Springer, however, is doing well financially. Its CEO, Mathias Doepfner, has a net worth of $1.2bn.

Executives on both the editorial and business side at the short-lived outlet The Messenger raked in close to million-dollar salaries. Meanwhile, editorial staffers launched a crowdfunding campaign to make ends meet because the outlet did not give them any severance packages.

NBC and MSNBC laid off 75 people this year. Brian Roberts, the CEO of NBC’s parent company, Comcast, raked in more than $32m in 2022.

Despite the recent layoffs, the network hired former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel as a contributor. Hiring McDaniel was met with swift backlash from high-profile talent across the news organisation and the NBC News Guild, the union representing journalists across the network.

The union in particular pointed out that McDaniel – who was known for helping to enable former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged – was hired after the company laid off more than a dozen unionised journalists. Amid the backlash, NBC cut its ties with McDaniel.

NBC is just the latest major network to make job cuts. At CBS, despite its high viewership during American football’s Super Bowl, parent company Paramount laid off staffers the following day at CBS News. Meanwhile, CEO Bob Bakish made $32m in 2022.

In November, Conde Nast laid off 5 percent of its workforce. The Newhouse family, which leads Advance Publications, the parent company of the magazine giant, has a net worth of $24.1bn, according to Forbes.

A VICE Media Group location
Vice Media, which was once valued at close to $6bn, has since filed for bankruptcy and ended publishing on its website [File: Eric Thayer/Getty Images/AFP]

In recent weeks, Vice laid off hundreds of employees and ended publishing on its website. It has been plagued with a nearly endless series of layoffs in the past few years. Prior to filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year, the media company paid its executives roughly $11m – even though its executives were notoriously known for mismanagement.

Yet they were bailed out. Amid the Chapter 11 filing, Fortress Investment Group acquired Vice – a company that was once valued at $5.7bn – for $225m. Executives left with hefty paycheques while staffers were left jobless with little notice.

Fortress did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

The Washington Post eliminated 240 jobs, yet it is owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is worth more than $200bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the second-richest person in the world.

In 2019, Senator Sherrod Brown sent a stern letter to Alden Capital, pressing the fund not to buy Gannett. Brown was unsuccessful.

In 2021, Brown, alongside Senators Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren, introduced the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, which would have reformed the private equity industry.

The bill never made it past committee, so it never had a vote in the full Senate.

Experts believe that Washington has not done nearly enough to curb the power of private equity.

“You have a government system, a regulatory, legislative system that has basically failed at every turn to stop the growth of these hedge funds,” Susca said. “And private equity firms in the journalism market, to me, is an institutional failure.”

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