Vox Media Axes ‘Around 50 People’ in Staff Shakeup
“The groups bearing the biggest impact are the Racked, Curbed, SB Nation, and the Video Services teams,” says Vox Media chief Jim Bankoff
Jon Levine | February 21, 2018 @ 7:09 AM
Last Updated: February 21, 2018 @ 7:15 AM
Vox Media laid off dozens of employees in a major staff shakeup, the company announced on Wednesday, with Curbed, Racked and SB Nation feeling the brunt of the cuts.
The news was announced by Vox Media Chief Jim Bankoff in a memo to employees Wednesday morning.
“This morning we will let go around 50 people and are offering role changes to about a dozen others. The groups bearing the biggest impact are the Racked, Curbed, SB Nation, and the Video Services teams, although there are also some smaller changes elsewhere in the company,” Bankoff said in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by TheWrap.
“Our leadership team and I took this decision very seriously. We know it has a big impact on the lives of our co-workers who will be leaving, as well as on the morale of those who remain. We commit to treating all those affected with professionalism, compassion and dignity,” he added.
The cuts were mainly around social video teams from the company’s smaller brands and suggests a scaled back investment for social video platforms and follows a decision by Facebook earlier this year to move away from news brands.
In his memo, Bankoff did not address the recent decision by Vox Media staff to unionize, a situation critics online pounced on immediately.
In January staff at the company affiliated with WGA East.
“A union will give us the means to maintain what we love about working for this company, and to have a collective voice when we address anything that may change,” the Vox Media Union Organizing Committee said in a statement in January.
News of the layoffs was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
Fox News' Jesse Watters: His 10 Most Offensive Moments (Videos)
Shortly after O'Reilly was ousted from Fox News, Watters took his own vacation from the network after coming under fire for making a comment about First Daughter Ivanka Trump, which some interpreted as inappropriate sexual innuendo.
Watters' recurring segment on "The O'Reilly Factor" involved sending the host out to various events and locations across the country for man-on-the-street style interviews that mock various cultural subgroups in their own communities. In a 2016 segment, Watters went after Italian Americans at the Feast of San Gennaro festival.
One of Watters' most controversial segments came in the form of a 2016 venture into New York's Chinatown. In the heavily criticized piece, Watters turned his signature schtick on Chinese Americans, resulting in a blatantly racist segment that played on Asian stereotypes and openly mocked its subjects.
Watters' October 2016 venture to the Amish community in Pennsylvania was turned into one recurring punchline -- over the fact that the Amish don't vote or pay much attention to presidential politics. "Lucky you," he tells several people.
In 2007, O'Reilly sent Watters to ambush Bill Moyers in the street after the PBS host released a documentary criticizing the Bush administration for the Iraq War. Bill O'Reilly would later go on to call that segment a contributing factor in Moyers' decision to retire.
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
In 2015, Watters went to Penn Station to criticize the "rise of homelessness" in New York City, pointedly asking those sleeping at the station about their drug habits and what they did to make money on the streets.
On the anniversary of 9/11, Watters went to a convention for Muslim Americans to ask them about terrorism and Islamic radicals. When a woman criticized the media for linking terrorism to the Islamic religion, Watters and O'Reilly both balked at the suggestion that "Christian terrorism" could even exist.
In 2009, Amanda Terkel, then the managing editor of Think Progress, wrote a column in which she said she was "followed, harassed, and ambushed" by Watters while on vacation after she ran a column criticizing Bill O'Reilly for his comments toward rape survivors.
Watters was caught on video getting into a fight at the 2016 White House Correspondents' Dinner afterparty with The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim. It was later reported that Grim approached Watters with a camera asking him to apologize to Terkel for his behavior in 2009.
O'Reilly sent Watters to Philadelphia for a tone-deaf segment about racism in which he mocked the Black Lives Matter movement, criticized political correctness and generally failed to elevate the conversation surrounding race relations in America.
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Bill O’Reilly protégé will have permanent seat on network when “The Five” moves to primetime
Shortly after O'Reilly was ousted from Fox News, Watters took his own vacation from the network after coming under fire for making a comment about First Daughter Ivanka Trump, which some interpreted as inappropriate sexual innuendo.
