I don’t even know how many rounds of lay-offs I’ve survived in digital media. Three? Four? And those are just the ones I know about – how many other times has my neck been on the line? Probably more.
I take no pride in having navigated the digital media bloodbath. To take pride would be to imply that I had some sort of agency in my continued survival, as if through a combination of diligence, hard work, and the appropriate amount of brown-nosing to senior management, I used my wits to survive. But this wouldn’t be true.
The reason I’ve survived is luck. A highly paid management consultant (probably the same age as me), never got around to crossing out my name on an Excel spreadsheet during an annual round of job cuts. That’s not because I’m good. It’s just because it wasn’t expedient for them to lay me off at the time.
When I started there, my publication was a darling of new media. In the open-plan office, beer was plentiful. Most people did not start work before 10.30am. Everyone had shagged; everyone did drugs with each other. You could progress from intern to managing editor in a few years, if you slept with the right person, and liked cocaine.
Arriving for my first day at work, I was met by a receptionist in a Calvin Klein bra and jeans. I acted nonplussed, but found it weird. Where is her top? I thought. Executives slopped around in £650 Balenciaga hoodies and griped about being jet-lagged from all their transatlantic flights. The grunts – myself included – wrote content for the site for £22,000 a year.
Even when I arrived, there was a sense that the glory days were over. Staff complained loudly that there was no free swag bag at the Christmas party. (A few years back, everyone had been gifted wraps of coke.) Our company had recently secured mega-bucks investment from corporate investors, and over the coming years the pressure to make good on that investment became increasingly strained.
Redundancies crashed over the editorial team in waves. First our news division was laid off. Then the parts of the site that were trafficking badly were excised, then a wider round of lay-offs that seemed to cherry-pick people at random. One time, they forgot to lay off a colleague for the simple reason that they forgot he existed. Someone eventually remembered him, and got in touch to let him know his services would no longer be required – after he’d enjoyed the sweet relief of thinking he’d escaped.
So many talented people were laid off, and so many mediocre employees survived. There was no way the lay-offs could be performance-related. Executives crashed through strategies. We were pivoting to video, pivoting away from video, pivoting to a digital-first strategy, pivoting to a multi-platform strategy, consolidating our brands under one brand, unconsolidating them again.
