At Least…[DOT 4/3/22]

man throwing paperwork in the air and quote "looks like it's fuck this shit o'clock"

…it’s the weekend!

I get to spend today driving for 6 hours to Cleveland. Got anything exciting on your weekend agenda?


Humanitarian costs mount as Russia pushes south; radiation levels stable after nuclear plant fire
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/04/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news/



Some crazy local news; my friend lives right across the street from this.

Silver Spring apartment explosion sends 10 to hospital, leaves others missing
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/03/03/laytonsville-fire-apartment-collapse/


Sprots!

Winter Paralympics set to get underway in Beijing following exclusion of Russia and Belarus
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/03/sport/winter-paralympics-preview-ukraine-russia-spt-intl/index.html


Stonks!

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has thrust crypto into the spotlight and raised 3 big questions
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/04/russia-ukraine-war-cryptocurrencies-and-sanctions-in-the-spotlight-.html


Today’s turtle content:


Have a great Friday Deadsplinters!

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24 Comments

      • And also, check out this article about WNYC. The management sounds like a mess.

        “Cooper built a reputation for fostering an environment, in the words of Eve Batey, who used to work with Cooper at the Chronicle, that was very middle school. (Others said, in fairness, that it was more like high school.) “Easily once a week, someone would be like, ‘Audrey said this about you,’” Batey said. ”

        https://www.cjr.org/special_report/audrey_cooper_wnyc_public_radio_merger.php

         

        • I am consistently amazed that shit like this keeps cropping up:

          Much of the advice was bland. But to journalists at the radio station, many of whom had planned to make entire careers at a place they loved, one line stood out. “Leadership and turnover,” it read, “are key ingredients in making acquisitions work over time.”

          I’m currently watching my former company beg people to apply for their open positions, thanks to new management that believes in “leadership and turnover.”

            • “Superficial” is correct. My old company’s new CEO is bizarre. He targeted successful departments (in terms of revenue) and completely ignored dysfunctional areas. In addition, overpaid and incompetent management was preserved, while staff (who performed all the actual work) were singled out.

              Then the strong-arm tactics started. Anyone who asked questions was terminated (me, for example). The result was a terrorized and cowed staff.

              I think your observation about “late 20th century” is spot-on. The reason this is backfiring now is:

              1. Better communication. I started getting texts, calls, and messages within hours of support and to find out what happened — I was, bizarrely to me, a pretty popular guy at work.

              2. Social media. The company is getting savaged on Glassdoor, to the point that it’s seriously impeding their recruiting ability — they’re literally begging people to apply on LinkedIn now and begging people who are quitting to reconsider.

              3. An excellent job market, in defiance or maybe because of the pandemic.

              Even those who weren’t targeted are so overworked and demoralized that they have been quitting in droves. The overpaid management can’t roll up their sleeves because they don’t know what to do. A lot of the stuff that we lower-level employees did was highly technical and it’s not something you can pick up during someone’s two-week notice. But management’s paychecks are big enough and their skills are so limited and outdated that they can’t leave.

        • I read that yesterday with great interest. I don’t listen to WYNC but I read Gothamist avidly. Gothamist, to me, is the saddest part.

          This CJR piece hasn’t been mentioned there, no surprise, but they recently ran another rah-rah piece about another NYC site trying to unionize, I think the REI in SoHo. One commenter mentioned the hypocrisy of Gothamist covering union efforts, given its history pre-WNYC. Two of the irngleaders who aided the then owner are still around.

          One of the commenters noted that the writers are obviously getting back by publishing Buzzfeed-level stories riddled with inaccuracies and typos. Upvotes galore.

          It’s true, though, about the quality of the content at least. They don’t put out that much content, so one proofreader doubling as a fact-checker (many do, to ensure accuracy of names, for example) could cover the whole site, but who cares, it’s the internet, the readers are assumed to be barely literate and it’ll all be forgotten in a couple of hours.

          • Gothamist seems like a weird acquisition by WNYC unless they were planning on leaving it as a solely independent operation. It would be like GM buying Kellogs in the hopes of integrating cereal technology into SUVs.

            • I can see the overlap, they both have a mission to cover NYC, and how hard can it be to convert (digital) text to audio and vice versa? As they’re all learning, at least hard, if not very hard. The day Gothamist “pivots to video” like Get/Out Media did so disastrously will be the day to run for the exits. At least WNYC won’t be able to junk up the Gothamist site with useless kinja deals and barely/badly presented spon con, but I can see lots of banners “thanking” their generous corporate sponsors, like PBS has been doing for a while now.

  1. I can think of many more that we could arrest for this!

    https://news.yahoo.com/former-fox-news-producer-sean-210134835.html?soc_src=community&soc_trk=tw

    This is a good sign.

    I love this man so much!

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