there are LEVELS to this newsweek death spiral, man

This CJR report on the totally batshit downward spiral that Newsweek has been on since 2013 — AKA, when its former (and extremely scammy) owner IBT Media acquired the magazine — starts as the slow burn horror story that everyone in digital media knows pretty well...there’s the ghastly salaries, the clickview-based bonuses, the public Google sheet ranking everyone by traffic, and clickbait vs. everything else death match. Gruesome stuff, but nothing terribly shocking.

BUT THEN about 2/3 down (where it says “Things might be better if Newsweek had more money…”) it just…goes completely off the rails?? Both in terms of the actually reported egregious behavior by Newsweek’s ownership but also in how the whole article kind of turns into this kind of weird, disjointed laundry list of Everything Else They Did Bad???

It almost feels like this piece needed to be twice as long and reported out, because as much as it pains us in 2019 to have to be like okay, there’s Blink-182 pseudo-advertorial bad, and then there’s not-paying-your-freelancers-for-eight-months bad, but then there’s also Manhattan-DA-raided-your-offices (!!!!) bad??? And you can’t just give us all the finer details on the weird traffic bonuses but then skimp out on everything else??? There are LEVELS here, and it seems like we are missing a LOT, guys.

(h/t Tanner!)