Layoffs and Job Reductions

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      CNN Cuts 100 Jobs, and Announces Plan for Digital Subscription Product

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      The network’s C.E.O., Mark Thompson, has promised a more robust digital strategy as people flee traditional cable packages.CNN’s top leader announced 100 job cuts on Wednesday as well as a digital strategy that would include a new subscription-only digital offering by the end of the year.The company is laying off around 100 people, or about 3 percent of its work force. The layoffs would come “across the company,” Mark Thompson, the network’s chairman, said in a memo to employees. CNN last had significant layoffs in late 2022.Mr. Thompson announced the job cuts as the company began to unveil steps on a digital plan that he said would help the network “regain a leadership position in the news experiences of the future.”Mr. Thompson, the former chief executive of The New York Times and a senior leader at the BBC, has been in charge of CNN since October 2023. He has promised a more robust digital strategy as people flee traditional cable packages in favor of streaming entertainment.CNN’s ratings have plummeted over the last two years, more so than those of its primary competitors, Fox News and MSNBC. Additionally, CNN’s parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, has an enormous debt load, and its share price has fallen sharply this year.CNN got a recent shot in the arm when it organized and broadcast the first presidential debate in late June, an event that continued to set off alarm bells within the Democratic Party about the future of President Biden’s campaign. CNN made the debate available for other outlets to broadcast, and it drew more than 50 million viewers overall. About 9.5 million of those watched on CNN.As part of the announcement on Wednesday, Mr. Thompson said CNN.com’s “first subscription product” would debut later this year. He also said the company would create “a growing stable of ‘news you can use’ offerings” in lifestyle coverage. Additionally, he said the company would make a push into artificial intelligence.Mr. Thompson laid out a reorganization that would include merging three separate newsrooms (U.S. news gathering, international news gathering and digital news) under one leader, Virginia Moseley. And on the prime-time television front, he has directed deputies to “increase audience competitiveness and also keep a close eye on production costs.”“Turning a great news organization toward the future is not a one-day affair,” Mr. Thompson wrote in a memo to employees. “It happens in stages and over time. Today’s announcements do not answer every question or seek to solve every challenge we face. However, they do represent a significant step forward.” More

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      Dear Elites (of Both Parties), the People Will Take It From Here, Thanks

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      I first learned about the opioid crisis three presidential elections ago, in the fall of 2011. I was the domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s campaign and questions began trickling in from the New Hampshire team: What’s our plan?By then, opioids had been fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in American history for years. I am ashamed to say I did not know what they were. Opioids, as in opium? I looked it up online. Pills of some kind. Tell them it’s a priority, and President Obama isn’t working. That year saw nearly 23,000 deaths from opioid overdoses nationwide.I was no outlier. America’s political class was in the final stages of self-righteous detachment from the economic and social conditions of the nation it ruled. The infamous bitter clinger and “47 percent” comments by Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney captured the atmosphere well: delivered at private fund-raisers in San Francisco in 2008 and Boca Raton in 2012, evincing disdain for the voters who lived in between. The opioid crisis gained more attention in the years after the election, particularly in 2015, with Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on deaths of despair.Of course, 2015’s most notable political development was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch and subsequent steamrolling of 16 Republican primary opponents committed to party orthodoxy. In the 2016 general election he narrowly defeated the former first lady, senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who didn’t need her own views of Americans leaked: In public remarks, she gleefully classified half of the voters who supported Mr. Trump as “deplorables,” as her audience laughed and applauded. That year saw more than 42,000 deaths from opioid overdoses.In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities, or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Little, Brown, a Hachette Imprint, Lays Off Seven People

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      The shake up at the Hachette Book Group imprint comes at a time when publishers are feeling pressured by sluggish print sales and rising supply chain costs.Hachette Book Group laid off seven employees at its Little, Brown imprint on Wednesday, according to the company, in a shake-up that was the latest example of turmoil in the publishing industry.The layoffs, which the company described as part of a corporate restructuring, come as major publishing companies have been buffeted by sluggish print sales and rising supply chain costs, and have struggled to find new ways to get books in front of customers who have migrated online.The seven people being laid off include the editors Tracy Sherrod, Pronoy Sarkar, Jean Garnett and Ben George, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who wasn’t authorized to discuss personnel matters.To many industry observers, the departure of Sherrod, a high-ranking Black editor, is a troubling sign that publishers are faltering in their promise to diversify their companies, particularly within their executive ranks.A Hachette spokeswoman said the restructuring was part of an effort to better serve readers and was not a cost-cutting measure. As part of the restructuring, the company said, it will hire in new roles. The news was reported earlier by Publishers Weekly.Last month, Penguin Random House let go of two publishers of its most prestigious literary imprints, casting off Reagan Arthur, the publisher of Alfred A. Knopf, and Lisa Lucas, who was the publisher of Pantheon and Schocken and had been the first Black publisher at Pantheon in its 80-year history. Their departures were part of a cost-saving restructuring, according to a person in publishing familiar with the decision.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy Steps Down as Company Cuts 15% of Workers

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      Barry McCarthy took over as C.E.O. in February 2022 to revive Peloton from its late-pandemic slump, but the company has struggled to become profitable.Peloton said on Thursday that its chief executive, Barry McCarthy, was stepping down and it would lay off more workers, as it continued to struggle in the fitness market.The connected-fitness company announced disappointing quarterly earnings on Thursday, with revenue down 4 percent from last year. The company, which has not turned a profit since December 2020, is also looking to refinance more than $1 billion in debt.Peloton had a spectacular rise at the start of the pandemic, when gyms and fitness centers closed and consumers were hungry for at-home workout options. But after gyms reopened, Peloton began to face stiffer competition from companies like Bowflex and Lululemon.Barry McCarthy, a former Spotify and Netflix executive, joined Peloton in 2022.Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesIt is reducing its head count by 15 percent, or 400 workers, in an effort to cut its costs this year by $200 million. Peloton has had several other rounds of job cuts in the past couple of years, most recently in October 2022, when it laid off about 12 percent of employees, or about 500 people.“Hard as the decision has been to make additional head count cuts, Peloton simply had no other way to bring its spending in line with its revenue,” Mr. McCarthy said in a statement.Investors appeared optimistic about the news; Peloton’s stock price rose about 9 percent in premarket trading.The company said it was looking to reduce its retail footprint and instead invest in “software, hardware and content portfolio and in improvements” for paying subscribers. Mr. McCarthy, a former Spotify and Netflix executive, joined Peloton in February 2022, taking over from the company’s founder, John Foley. Two board members, Karen Boone and Chris Bruzzo, will serve as interim co-chief executives. More

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      The Worst Part of a Wall Street Career May Be Coming to an End

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      Artificial intelligence tools can replace much of Wall Street’s entry-level white-collar work, raising tough questions about the future of finance.Pulling all-nighters to assemble PowerPoint presentations. Punching numbers into Excel spreadsheets. Finessing the language on esoteric financial documents that may never be read by another soul.Such grunt work has long been a rite of passage in investment banking, an industry at the top of the corporate pyramid that lures thousands of young people every year with the promise of prestige and pay.Until now. Generative artificial intelligence — the technology upending many industries with its ability to produce and crunch new data — has landed on Wall Street. And investment banks, long inured to cultural change, are rapidly turning into Exhibit A on how the new technology could not only supplement but supplant entire ranks of workers.The jobs most immediately at risk are those performed by analysts at the bottom rung of the investment banking business, who put in endless hours to learn the building blocks of corporate finance, including the intricacies of mergers, public offerings and bond deals. Now, A.I. can do much of that work speedily and with considerably less whining.“The structure of these jobs has remained largely unchanged at least for a decade,” said Julia Dhar, head of BCG’s Behavioral Science Lab and a consultant to major banks experimenting with A.I. The inevitable question, as she put it, is “do you need fewer analysts?”The inevitable question, according to Julia Dhar, head of BCG’s Behavioral Science Lab, is “do you need fewer analysts?”John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia SummitWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside Amira Yahyaoui’s Claims about Mos, a Student Aid Start-Up

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      Amira Yahyaoui, a human rights activist, promoted the success of her student aid start-up, Mos. Some of her statements do not add up, according to internal data and people familiar with the company.As a Tunisian human rights activist in the 2000s, Amira Yahyaoui staged protests and blogged about government corruption. In interviews, she described being beaten by police. When she was 18, she said, she was kidnapped from the street, dropped off at the Algerian border and placed in exile for several years.Ms. Yahyaoui’s compelling background helped her stand out among entrepreneurs when she moved in 2018 to San Francisco, where she founded a student aid start-up called Mos. The app hit the top of Apple’s App Store and Ms. Yahyaoui raised $56 million from high-profile investors, including Sequoia Capital, John Doerr and Steph Curry, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups. Mos was valued at $400 million.In podcasts, TV interviews and other media, Ms. Yahyaoui, 39, frequently discussed Mos’s success.Among other things, she said the start-up had helped 400,000 students get financial aid. But internal company data viewed by The New York Times showed that as of early last year, only about 30,000 customers had paid for Mos’s student aid services. The rest of the 400,000 users included anyone who had signed up for a free account and may have gotten an email about applying for student aid, two people familiar with the situation said.After Mos expanded into online banking in September 2021, Ms. Yahyaoui told publications such as TechCrunch that the company had more than 100,000 bank accounts. But those accounts had very small amounts of money in them, according to the internal data. Less than 10 percent of Mos’s roughly 153,000 bank users had put their own money into their accounts, the data showed.Some employees tried to speak up about Ms. Yahyaoui’s claims, said Emi Tabb, who worked at Mos in operations and had roles such as head of financial aid before resigning in late 2022. But Ms. Yahyaoui dismissed and sometimes disparaged employees who tried pushing back against her public comments, five people who witnessed the incidents said.“She created a culture of fear,” Mx. Tabb said.Mos is among a class of tech start-ups that rose during the fast money era of the late 2010s and early in the pandemic, when young companies landed millions of dollars in funding with little more than promises. Now as the money has dried up and many tech start-ups grapple with a downturn, investors are pickier, customers are warier of bold claims and employees are more suspicious of founder pronouncements.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Aides, Taking Over RNC, Order Mass Layoffs

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      Days after allies took over the Republican National Committee, Donald J. Trump’s advisers are imposing mass layoffs on the party, with more than 60 officials, including senior staff members, laid off or asked to resign and then reapply for their jobs, according to two people familiar with the matter.The swift changes amount to a gutting of the party apparatus eight months before the November election, with one person familiar with the operations estimating that the R.N.C. had only about 200 people on payroll at the end of February, and about 120 at its headquarters near Capitol Hill. The heads of the communications, data and political departments were among those let go.On Friday, Michael Whatley, a close ally to Mr. Trump, and Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, were unanimously elected as the committee’s chair and co-chair. Mr. Trump had pushed out Ronna McDaniel, the committee’s leader since 2017, and endorsed Mr. Whatley and Ms. Trump to take the reins of the national party.Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s top campaign advisers, was tapped to serve as the chief operating officer, and he was at the party headquarters meeting with senior staff on Monday.The purge of R.N.C. staff members was first reported by Politico. It is not clear that Mr. Trump is done clearing house.One person with direct knowledge of the changes said the party’s full finance and digital teams were now planned to be moved to Palm Beach, Fla., where the Trump campaign is based. Another person described the party and Trump operations as being functionally fused into one.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.K. to Cut Taxes Again as Election Nears

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      The Conservative government, trailing badly in the polls, proposed the second tax cut in four months.Amid lackluster prospects for economic growth, the British government announced it would cut taxes for workers ahead of a general election this year.Jeremy Hunt, Britain’s top financial official, told lawmakers on Wednesday that he would cut National Insurance, a payroll tax paid by workers and employers that funds state pensions and some benefits, by two percentage points. It would take the rate for about 27 million employees down to 8 percent, and follows a two percentage point cut announced less than four months ago. Together, the cuts would save the average employee about 900 pounds ($1,145) a year, Mr. Hunt said. The rate was also cut for self-employed workers.“We can now help families not just with temporary cost-of-living support but with permanent cuts in taxation,” Mr. Hunt, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said in Parliament. “We do this to give much needed help in challenging times. But also because Conservatives know lower tax means higher growth.”Mr. Hunt also announced a sweep of smaller measures, including freezing taxes on alcohol and fuel, proposals to increase productivity in the public sector, and abolishing the tax advantages for foreign earnings of British residents living abroad.The chancellor has been under political pressure from the governing Conservative Party to lower taxes ahead of the general election, which is expected to take place this year, though a date has not been set yet. The party is substantially lagging the opposition Labour Party in the polls.But Mr. Hunt’s ability to offer sweeteners to voters has been constrained by the fact that the British economy is growing slowly — if at all. Stretched public services need money and there are calls to invest more in infrastructure. The chancellor also has to meet his self-imposed budget rules, which gave him even less fiscal room to maneuver.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More