Here’s the beginning of the inevitable online video shakeout: Joost, the once-hyped video service that was supposed to rival Google’s YouTube, is restructuring to focus on “white label” services, i.e., a back end for other video players.
The site is laying off the majority of its 100-plus employees, and CEO Mike Volpi is out, replaced by Matt Zelesko, who had been SVP of engineering.
The music industry’s online forays have always inspired head-scratching, but this one is odd even by those standards: Project Playlist, the online music service currently being sued by Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, is bolstering its tech staff by buying the assets of… a music service owned by Universal Music Group. But the lawsuits have yet to be resolved. Confusing? Of course.
There are plenty of question marks surrounding Vevo, Universal Music Group’s new music video site that’s scheduled to launch later this year with a big assist from Google’s YouTube. But here’s one answer: The venture will be run by Rio Caraeff, who currently oversees UMG’s digital business.
The Boston Globe can keep printing. The New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, has reached an agreement with the Boston Newspaper Guild, the paper’s lone holdout union. A new deal involves pay cuts and “modifications to the lifetime job guarantee provisions,” but will allow the paper to stay afloat, for now.
Here comes the second round of layoffs at Microsoft, following a first round that started in January. Today’s cuts will likely end up costing about 3,000 workers their jobs. Microsoft had previously warned that it would cut up to 5,000 jobs by 2010. The good news, says CEO Steve Ballmer: The newest round means “we are mostly but not all done” with layoffs. Here’s Ballmer’s memo to the troops.
The New York Times, which had threatened to shut down the Boston Globe unless that paper’s unions agreed to major concessions, says it got what it needed from the Globe’s workers after all.
Once exception: The Globe’s unionized editorial employees, who have yet to come to terms with the paper’s owner. The Times make ominous sounds about what might happen–“evaluating our alternatives”–but nothing specific.
Question of the day: Did Apple somehow lay off 10 percent of its retail staff in the last quarter without anyone noticing until today? Answer: No. My bloggy brethren are hopped up about Apple’s disclosure, via its most recent quarterly filing with the SEC, that its retail group had “approximately 14,000 full-time equivalent employees” at the end of March. Three months earlier that number had been 15,600. Boring but important distinction: Cutting back hours is different than laying people off.
As predicted, Google saw its revenue decline from the last quarter of 2008 to the first three months of this year. The search giant said it generated net revenue of $4.07 billion, which is down from the 4.22 billion Google notched in the previous quarter, and it’s a tad shy of the $4.08 billion consensus. But investors are going to be pleased with the non-GAAP earnings number: $5.16 share, up from $5.10 per share in the previous quarter and way, way above the $4.90 per share consensus. Bottom line: Google has cut back on its expenditures and that’s boosted profits.
Google is laying off 200 people from its sales and marketing group, the company announced today in a blog posting. Google has some 20,000 employees, so the scale of the sackings isn’t earth-shaking news. But the fact that they come from the group that Tim Armstrong ran until he decamped for AOL is interesting.
Last year, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller told the newspaper’s newsroom that he would try very hard to not fire any of them. But he didn’t say anything about pay cuts. The Times today announced that it would be cutting salaries of its nonunion employees from 2.5 percent to 5 percent, and that it would be asking for “similar” cuts from its unionized newsroom workers “in a spirit of shared sacrifice and as a way to otherwise avoid layoffs in the newsroom.” It has also laid off 100 employees from its business operations.
CBS paid $1.8 billion for CNET last summer, and today it is dealing with the consequences: A re-org and layoffs. CBS execs won’t release a total for the number of people fired, so news will be coming out in piecemeal fashion for some time. In the meantime, here’s CBS Interactive’s new corporate structure, detailed in an internal memo distributed late today.
CBS has yet to announce any cuts or restructuring after acquiring CNET this summer for $1.8 billion. That changes today.
This may make it easier for Barack Obama to kick his well-publicized BlackBerry addiction: News that Verizon employees have been snooping through his phone records. The phone company says the handset in question is a “simple flip-phone,” and not a Berry, and that it has been inactive for several months. But the startling public admission should be enough to convince Obama, if he needed any more prompting, that he’s going to have to give up his prized gadget.
Time Inc. is cutting something like 600 employees, but for the past few weeks it has been doing so in small steps: 10 here, 30 there. That will change today when up to 250 people at Time Warner’s magazine unit are expected to get pink-slipped. Leaving the company along with them, executives from Cooking Light and Southern Progress.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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