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Pink Slips For A Dozen-Plus Daily News Staffers (Capital New York)
The New York Daily News is now undergoing what employees of the tabloid have been fearing for weeks: Multiple insiders tell Capital that layoffs hit the newsroom Wednesday. FishbowlNY Two veterans of the paper — Albor Ruiz and Joanna Molloy — were among those let go. Ruiz had been with the Daily News for 19 years; Molloy for 15. Other names in the bunch include Christina Boyle and Robert Gearty, both reporters. NY Observer Rumors have been circulating for some time that a round of pink slips was imminent at the Daily News. Although this is the most significant number of layoffs since editor-in-chief Colin Myler took over in November 2011, there has been a slow trickle of departures over the past months. Features editor John Oswald left in March and features reporter Jacob Osterhout vented his rage in a goodbye email after he was let go earlier this spring.

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Combine tasty treats, sleek design and the now famous ‘Sitting Cameramen of Astor Place’ and you get the latest episode of “Cubes.”

In this episode of “Cubes,” the MediabistroTV crew is invited into the New York Headquarters of AOL and The Huffington Post. Hosted by the founding editor of The Huffington Post and president of HuffPost Live, Roy Sekoff, the crew visits the cavernous Huffington Post newsroom where hundreds of writers sit keyboard to keyboard under the watchful gaze of Arianna Huffington herself who plays the always gracious hostess by offering up some tasty Greek Christmas cookies. After burning through the sugar high, the guys mingle with the ghosts of journalism past in the HuffPost Live newsroom where live news is served up eight hours a day by tables of writers, producers and editors who always know what time it is in Funkytown.

You can view our other MediabistroTV productions on our YouTube Channel.

When AOL acquired Huffington Post last year, Arianna Huffington was given editorial control of the company’s online properties, including Patch, MovieFone, PopEater, and TechCrunch. Since taking the reigns, Huffington has folded websites and eliminated journalists’ jobs while increasing the practice of utilizing unpaid bloggers leaving her with a critic or two.

Now it’s Huffington’s turn to face a downsizing, in the form of her job duties. She will now be solely in charge of the Huffington Post, according to a report by The Washington Post.

Huffington says the change was her idea. “What I asked for is for us to be more independent, to have technology, marketing and [business development] now into Huffington Post, so that we can accelerate all our growth, and for me to be freed up to just concentrate exclusively on HuffPost,” she stated at a conference Thursday.

The Huffington Post is continuing to grow, with a current focus on international expansion and the launch of a live video streaming network.

Full disclosure: This fishie blogs for the Huffington Post.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington certainly thinks so. Heather Harde, the “business brains” behind TechCrunch, is leaving the company she helped turn into a multi-million dollar business. Arrington, who was noisily fired by Huffington in September, contends this most recent departure at AOL is another casualty “of Arianna’s ego.” The CEO of one of AOL’s most profitable properties should’ve “been embraced and treasured,” he says on his blog, but instead had to deal “with constant verbal abuse from HuffPo execs” who “refer to her by the ‘c’ word.”

Aol needs to decide whether it exists for the benefit of stockholders, users and employees, or whether it exists for the greater glorification of Arianna Huffington. She’s waging this political power war inside of Aol against anyone who stands “against” her. But no one’s fighting back because that’s not how they see the world. Instead they just drift off, to create real value at other companies who actually value them.

Harde became TechCruch CEO in 2007, and helped broker last year’s sale of the company to AOL for $30 million. Since the acquisition, she has also served as general manager of AOL’s technology properties. Harde’s last day at the company will be December 31.

Former Cinematical freelancer Eric D. Snider thinks so. It was Snider who made the controversial email from Moviefone editor Patricia Chui public, but now he’s coming to her defense. In said email, Chui informs freelancers that most of them would no longer be working for AOL-owned websites Moviefone and Cinematical, but that they were welcome to continue to write for the site as unpaid bloggers.

Sure, it’s a slap in the face to hear that a source of income is drying up and being asked to work for free, but Snider insists that Chui was just the messenger. Some of his tweets on the subject, from oldest to newest:

The same editor who yesterday informed freelance contributors to AOL properties Moviefone and Cinematical that most of them were out of a job was herself let go today. Moviefone editor Patricia Chui has been taking heat in the media world for inviting the fired writers to continue writing for the websites — as unpaid bloggers. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital has the details:

Sources said Chui was terminated by John Montorio, the HuffPo Media Group’s culture, entertainment and lifestyle editor. Arianna Huffiington is head of all content at AOL, which recently paid $315 million to buy the Huffington Post.

This is the second time in as many months that Chui has come under fire for clumsy management. In March, she defended a Moviefone marketing employee who asked a TechCrunch writer to alter a published story because a film studio had complained.

Arianna Huffington‘s influence as editor of AOL content is being felt by Moviefone and Cinematical contributors. On Tuesday, freelance writers for the film websites received an email explaining that most of them were about to get dumped:

We will, indeed, be moving away from a freelancer model and toward one relying on full-time staffers. Sometime soon -– this week, I believe –- many of you will be receiving an email informing you that your services as a freelancer will no longer be required. You will be invited to contribute as part of our non-paid blogger system; and though I know that for many of you this will not be an option financially, I strongly encourage you to consider it if you’d like to keep writing for us, because we value all of your voices and input.

And by value, they mean undervalue.

You can read the email in its entirety here, thanks to former Cinematical contributor Eric D. Snider.

Oh, and those Moviefone employees that saw no problem with changing editorial content to please a film studio? They still have jobs. *Moviefone editor Patricia Chui, author of the controversial email above, was fired today.

Big smooches to @KarinaLongworth for the heads up!

The Medium Is The Message: Spin Magazine sees its subscription rates rise after giving away its product for free on MySpace. We have no idea how or why, but we really, really hope the nitwits who run newspapers don’t get any ideas.

Less Is More: And in related news, ad agency Secret Weapon attributes its success to having only three clients at any given time. Right now the agency has two: Honda and Jack-In-The-Box. It’s a very hands-on operation. In fact, one of the agency honchos sounds suspiciously like the voice of Jack.

Breaking Up Is Easy To Do: Time Warner Inc. is splitting AOL in two. The behemoth is eliminating 100 jobs at HQ, hinted it might also spin off its cable unit and threatened to “cut costs” at New Line Cinema, too. (Sorry for the lack of art with this item. This story didn’t come with a picture of two white guys sitting next to an interesting sign.)

If it’s all the same to you guys, we’re just going to cut and paste this press release from Fox Business Network, so that we don’t have to read Barry Diller’s remarks. It’s early. We’re tired. (And by the way, that’s not our typo. Fox apparently thinks there’s just one writer on the picket line.)

Here you go:

BARRY DILLER TELLS FOX BUSINESS NETWORK THAT THE WRITER’S STRIKE IS “STUPID”

In a broadcast interview with FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto, Barry Diller, CEO of the recently fragmented IAC, talks about the stupidity of the writer’s strike, his interest in AOL and the likelihood of a recession. Excerpts are below.

On the writer’s strike:

“I expect that it will probably be a long strike, which would be unfortunate because I don’t think it makes much sense.I think it’s stupid. I don’t think they should have gone out on strike. Both sides must have really mishandled this one. In order to have gotten to ‘strike moment’ everyone must have screwed up, which makes it difficult to get them back to some sort of sanity.”

“What this strike is about is not revenues from first usage. It’s about revenues from what happens in this digital age, of which right now there are none. What they want to do is strike so they’re protected for the future. The problem with that is right now it’s a future that no one can figure out. What they should have done is say, we’re going to take the next five year period — we want to know where all of these revenues are coming from. We want to freeze this area until we can understand the revenues, which aren’t going to develop for another few years. There are no profits for the work that writers do that is then digitized and distributed through the Internet.”

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TMZ got slapped with a lawsuit over the posting of the O.J. Simpson book. An excerpt from If I Did It appeared on the website (lifted straight from Pirate Bay) and the federal bankruptcy trustee filed an emergency motion, seeking to force the site to pull the book, which they did.

Jonathan Polak, a Goldman family attorney, said the web site

literally reached into the bankruptcy estate and stole this asset for its own profit.

Which is pretty much what we said.

What makes this even more contemptible is that TMZ is owned by AOL and Time-Warner. Just try pulling this stunt with any of their copyrighted materials.

Earlier:
O J Simpson Book Leaked Online–Will TMZ Share with Goldman Family?