Cash is pouring in for staff impacted by Wednesday’s layoffs at The Washington Post.
As of Thursday morning, practically 3,000 supporters had donated greater than $340,000 mixed to a GoFundMe page arrange for let-go journalists.
The fundraising push, launched just some hours after firm executives started slicing staff, was arrange by Submit reporter Rachel Siegel and the newsroom’s union. One in all its high donors, tech journalist and former Submit worker Kara Swisher, gave $10,000.
Swisher, who not too long ago made a push to purchase the Submit from its billionaire proprietor, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, wrote on Threads that she had the means to “donate a good chunk of dough to those hardworking staff,” and urged others to observe.
Different high donors seemed to be former Washington Submit govt editor Martin Baron and ex-staffers like Eugene Robinson and Fred Barbash.
The Submit’s haul, and the velocity at which it drew in six figures, make it an outlier amongst media layoff fundraisers. Laid-off staffers at Vox Media pulled in about $7,000 of their January GoFundMe, whereas Teen Vogue acquired about $41,000 after November layoffs.
“Submit Guild members have come collectively to assist their colleagues with this GoFundMe,” stated a spokesperson for the Washington Baltimore Information Guild, which represents the paper’s union. The spokesperson blamed “inexcusable enterprise choices of high Submit management” for the cuts.
“The Washington Submit is taking numerous tough however decisive actions at this time for our future, in what quantities to a major restructuring throughout the corporate,” a Submit spokesperson stated in a press release on the layoffs. “These steps are designed to strengthen our footing and sharpen our deal with delivering the distinctive journalism that units The Submit aside and, most significantly, engages our clients.”
As donations flooded in, others within the media business provided profession assist. Executives on the platforms Substack and Beehiiv posted on X (previously Twitter) that they are providing payment waivers and coaching for any Submit reporters who took the leap to go impartial, for instance.
The Submit’s layoffs, which its newsroom union stated impacted tons of of staff, had been designed to trim prices and refocus its efforts round a smaller set of protection areas, govt editor Matt Murray instructed staff over Zoom on Wednesday morning.
The corporate is shutting down its podcast, “Submit Experiences,” and letting go of journalists targeted on sports activities, books, and overseas affairs. It is restructuring its D.C. metro protection, and investing in areas like politics and nationwide safety that “reveal authority, distinctiveness, and affect,” Murray wrote in a memo to employees, seen by Enterprise Insider.
“In the present day is about positioning ourselves to grow to be extra important to folks’s lives in what has grow to be a extra crowded, aggressive, and sophisticated media panorama,” Murray instructed staffers through the name. “For too lengthy, we have operated with a construction that is too rooted within the days once we had been a quasi-monopoly native newspaper.”
This story has been up to date with the newest figures on the quantity raised.
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