Media layoffs: Why journalists can lose their past work along with their jobs

On Thursday morning, a rumor started to circulate among media workers. “By wiping all of my work from the internet without warning, I’m basically relying on prospective employers to either ask me for clips or for colleagues at other publications and sources I’d built relationships with to vouch that I’d been decent at the job.” Joshua Keating, a former Messenger reporter who left for a job at Vox before the site shut down, said that multiple decisions by the company’s management have left him without valuable clips. “It would be expensive to maintain functionality: logins, membership programs, commenting systems, anything that has any kind of user input or interaction.” Lavallee suggested that media execs—or anyone looking to archive a defunct site—use the free, open-source project Webrecorder, which allows people to effectively download full archives of their sites and then host the archive instead of the original site: “You need to make a copy that’s frozen, but frozen in an intelligent manner.” The only cost would be for hosting the site. One executive at a major media company, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me it is “very, very cheap to host an archive of static pages for a large website—like a few hundred dollars a month, with the cost entirely dependent on how much traffic it gets.” Sure, a few hundred dollars a month is not nothing—and if you’re a media exec who has created a dumpster fire that you are trying to move on from, it’s probably really annoying! Most journalists aren’t paid like media executives: certainly not ones like Vice founder Shane Smith, who reportedly made off with $100 million; or former Vice CEO Nancy Dubuc, who collected a $1.5 million annual salary despite never successfully selling the company in five years of trying; or the five different Vice executives who each made more than $700,000 per year, as was disclosed as the company went bankrupt; or the Messenger’s owner Jimmy Finkelstein, who, despite being a literal billionaire, suggested he could save the startup $1 million per year in expenses by stepping down; or the Messenger’s editor-in-chief Dan Wakeford, who was given a $900,000 salary even though the company allegedly didn’t have enough money by the end of its $50 million run to even pay employees severance.