Vox Media is cutting pay and furloughing 9% of employees(techcrunch.com) |
Vox Media is cutting pay and furloughing 9% of employees(techcrunch.com) |
NY Mag Union statement on the cuts: https://twitter.com/NYMagUnion/status/1251218401688772608
Vox media union on the cuts: https://twitter.com/vox_union/status/1251174537120616454
> While we appreciate Vox Media talking to us in good faith, we don’t agree with the company’s decision to furlough employees — especially after hundreds of us told the company we were willing to take wider pay cuts to save all jobs.
> We won a guarantee of no layoffs, no additional furloughs, and no additional pay cuts through July 31, along with enhanced severance for any layoffs that occur in August-December. The company also agreed to reduce the number of furloughs.
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248317812260499456
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248317824394653697
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248317820800086016
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248318363538837504
The same company that considerably increased the damage the virus did in their country is now in financial difficulty as a result. They mocked people for avoiding handshakes, repeatedly told people that masks were ineffective and dismissed the virus as just a flu.
It's also interesting their political opponents, including the president adopted their original positions a few weeks later.
It's mind-boggling that analysis of the severity of a virus became so highly politicized. I don't think the same could have happened in the US a generation ago.
Second tweet: Vox factually reporting the tech industry is eschewing handshakes. Tweet author editorialises that Vox is telling them not to.
Third Tweet: Vox factually reporting that tech companies are providing 9million masks. Factually states that it's not enough to solve the problem. Tweet author contends that's not true - but provides no evidence .
Fourth tweet: Author tries to claim Vox is responsible for Coronavirus.
I find this hilarious, because we all know perfectly well, if that tweeter had found a Vox contributer tweeting that 4th tweet he'd be apoplectic.
I'm sure this tweet thread has nothing to do with Vox's coverage of that tweeter and his previous attacks on the FDA: https://www.vox.com/2017/1/14/14276530/balaji-srinivasan-tru...
When you describe techies as terrified in the context of handshakes you make them sound terrified of handshakes which makes them look irrational to the average person.
When you immediately follow that up with “experts” saying everything is fine you cement the view in the readers mind that tech people are acting irrationally.
Also, please keep in mind that "that tweeter", as you call him, taught bioinformatics at Stanford, has published papers in the field of clinical/microbial genomics and founded a biotech startup that sold for 375M. He's considerably more informed about the topic than any of the reporters sparring with him. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1228752554022068226
And yes, he does have an axe to grind with Vox: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1228447944287932416
As someone watching the whole thing unfold for months, from far away in Taiwan, I think he's completely right on this one.
Far too much journalism is either weakly factual, where ideas like masks are taken prima facie and without much thought, or opinion pieces with an ideological bent.
What happened to investigating ideas, to see where they lead? To questioning everyone, no matter their credentials?
The role I would hope journalists would play is to hold people accountable, to question deeply the assumptions that "the mainstream view" entails. This Eric Weinstein tweet hit this home for me: https://twitter.com/ericrweinstein/status/124298155901717299..., which ends with:
> Bring us the heads of the incompetent for removal.
It was the mainstream view in the US because the media built the narrative that masks wouldn’t help...
Well, it was definitely mainstream after Vox reported on it.
Balaji is a crypto bro and epitome of technocrats who thinks just because they are (rich|famous|networked), they are experts on everything. Fact of the matter is, Balaji doesn't know any more about Covid than what is reported. He's using hindsight bias to claim that media reported was false.
Edit: Surgical masks vs respirators. Any advice omitting the distinction is suboptimal.
Surgical masks are still useless. Best case is they serve as sneeze guards and visual reinforcement.
N95 rated respirators are useful. And in short supply. Since healthcare workers desperately need them and most people don't, their use is currently weakly recommended.
Face shields plus respirators are good. I'm not sure about shields and surgical mask combo.
IMHO, Vox has been superior. Especially in comparison. They have explainers and podcasts dedicated to just coronavirus and COVID-19. Updated frequently. When the truth & reconciliation process starts, Vox is pretty far down the list of belligerents.
Turns out a valid epistemological basis becomes more valuable rather than less valuable in a crisis.
To see numbers go like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16... and react with "oh, this seems really bad" while everyone else is like "16 infected people among how many millions? that's nothing. flu kills more people".
Ezra Klein has a list of early stories when someone else accused them of the same: https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1241202132604162050
Vox is not a monolith. Matty Y, the "founder" mentioned, tweeted in February that the CDC mask guidance didn't make sense, right around the time he purchased the masks.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1233806758843383810?...
"I have never understood this message — are the masks ineffective or are they vital for health care workers? If it’s the latter shouldn’t we explicitly ration rather than trying to discourage purchases informally?" February 29, 2020.
he later wrote on March 30
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1245046686621327360?...
> I’m not sure how important the mask fiasco is, but the way public health officials did this is by (successfully!) manipulating media outlets that were trying to be responsible into amplifying misleading messages so I’m personally very angry about it.
So attacking Vox as a whole over this seems misleading. While they haven't been helpful on this issue, they were just repeating CDC and WHO guidance that dates back over 10 years - The CDC was telling people masks didn't work even during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t...
That's a bold claim! I've been following this since December and talked about it in my podcast before people in the US, my co-host included, were taking it very seriously.
Not only that, I was ordered by the Taiwanese CDC to wear a mask for 14 days back in February after taking a brief weekend trip to Japan.
I haven't put much faith in the WHO since experiencing their politically-driven incompetence during SARS 18 years ago when I was a student. In many ways, this entire experience has felt like a replay of SARS, but with a few new verses.
Not at all.
We are using what we know now to evaluate what tech people said vs what the media said - and the tech people were overwhelmingly right and the media overwhelmingly wrong.
Vox seems to me to be about as left-leaning as you can get, but they do it quite fairly. Example: Vox was one of the first left-side publications to run articles about Joe Biden's accuser. A lot of other publications stayed away from this story-- some still are-- but Vox bravely ran it. (From a far-left position, of course. If you go far enough left, you'll end up close to far-right.) They are the real deal, and for that I respect them.
I consider most media sources biased (right or left) and also consider them to have various degrees of integrity.
For integrity, I give Vox good credit for running a story that deserves attention but runs counter to their political leanings.
And yet it's all blown up. Because while sure: they offer a $15 wage and retraining and all that, what they don't have is a union organization on the other side of the table who they trust to act in mutual self interest.
So when Vox runs out of money, their unions are willing to accept that and broadly trust the management to do the right thing for everyone, Amazon's workers are faced with trying to Get Theirs before their employer runs out of cash, because they don't trust Bezos.
And this was all avoidable.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/8/21212928/voxs-audience-support-...
* Are masks ineffective in the sense that they don't reliably stop the spread of the coronavirus, or in the sense that they don't impact it in any way?
* Taiwan and South Korea believe masks are effective and are handing them out to their citizens. Why do they believe masks are effective, and if it's not true what do we know that they don't?
* Masks intuitively ought to work; I cough out the virus, but sometimes it'll get caught in the mask instead of going into someone's nose and mouth. What part of this story is flawed?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/health/candidate-who-dire...
"Vox factually reporting the tech industry is eschewing handshakes" Is this a fact, or a lie? Did Vox fabricate this, or did they misconstrue and mislead?
"“experts” saying everything is fine" Did "experts" say everything is fine, or did they not? Again, is Vox outright lying? Did they mislead by picking poor "experts"?
I think that Vox.com's "assertive contrarian" tone-of-voice might have created some posts that look poor in hindsight (erring on the side of "not killing people" is probably for the best), but lets a) actually define the assertions against Vox's journalistic integrity and b) acknowledge that health officials were not exactly clear, consistent, and eventually correct.
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1228447944287932416
But more importantly a week before the article came out, he said the article won't be about the very real risk of the coronavirus but about how tech guys are weird. And that's exactly the theme of the article.
Being a useful journalist is not profitable though, even when there isn't a pandemic.
Not according to the research I've been reading: https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1249698787666399235
Because worksmithing is hard, here's what I proposed to Vox's German Lopez:
"Wide spread mask usage greatly slows the spread of coronavirus.
The combination of masks, social distancing, wide spread testing, temperature screening, contact tracing, and quarantines works.
Everyone should wear masks to protect other people. If you are high risk, wear a N95 respirator to protect yourself. Because healthcare and first responders need more protection than you, please don’t use an N95 until we have a supply surplus.
To clarify the effective difference between respirators and masks: N95 rated respirators are form fitting with better filters, so all air goes thru the filter; while surgical and cloth masks still allow some unfiltered air, they do catch most exhaled airborne water droplets (moisture), effectively slowing the spread."
Thank you again for sharing your find.
Masks are very useful in preventing spread, thus useful for overall slowing the spread of the disease.
That review of the paper makes the distinction between protection and transmission. I admit I was only thinking about protection.
Since I'm immunocompromised, I will continue to wear N95 respirators whenever I'm around other people.
But per this paper, surgical masks are useful for "source control", at least partially thwarting infected people from spreading the virus. I'm super skeptical, because of old habits, but science is science.
So the rest of you should start wearing surgical (or cloth) masks. Thanks.
Useless at what? Be specific, this constant anti-mask reinforcement is bizarre.
This is definitely not correct.
Balaji taught bioinformatics at Stanford and has published papers in the fields of clinical/microbial genomics.
As for hindsight bias, Balaji was promoting the use of masks very early.
You re making the exact same remarks that tech hating journos did
If you re claiming the journos knew something he didnt, then it means they criminally misreported it
What law dictates that?
I'm fine talking about his qualifications, but I think it's unfair for you to talk about his biotech start up without talking about the fact that we're talking about a guy that basically wants to gut FDA regulations - regulations that, if they were in place in China, would have prevented this outbreak. And of course the fact that he was called out on that bullshit by... Vox media!
I want you to be honest in addressing what you disagree with. That's it.
> this guy who is literally arguing literally just about headlines of articles.
That's just not true. He's dug into the contents of the articles both in podcasts and threads like this one (very near what I just shared): https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1228447960008183808
So let's take your specific tweet here:
He claims recode said :
> "cases...have been contained to those who have recently traveled to Wuhan and their direct family members"
What recode actually said:
> "Public Health officials in the area have said there's currently a low risk to public health; the cases they say, have been contained to those who have recently traveled to Wuhan and their direct family members"
I don't want to accuse you of being disingenuous or what-not,but really? Pretending something is a direct claim of Vox, when actually it's a claim that they're reporting from public health officials in Silicon Valley is a dramatic mis-representation.
Ok, so let's lay aside what I think is mis-representation. The things that this tweeter seems to be claiming are counter points:
>"We're probably going to see human-to-human cases within the united states" Dr Robert Redfield said in an interview with stat.
A claim about the current situation within Silicon Valley cannot be countered with a forward looking statement about the entire US. It just can't. I just don't think this criticism is serious.
This is rather telling of the way you view things; perhaps it may be part of the problem? "Sparring"?
If journalism is just reporting what others say, and not questioning what they say and the underlying assumptions, then it is at best just a weak form of Wikipedia, and at worst a propaganda mechanism.
Journalists need to get some teeth back and challenge authorities rather than relying on what is said as gospel. Jounalists should have led the charge on all of this, starting with questioning Chinese numbers through to Masks and the assumptions of the modelling, rather than playing, to be kind, catch up and to be mean interference on people doing their job for them.
> U.S. Surgeon General @Surgeon_General Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
>They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
I completely agree that someone should be questioning when the CDC says "Masks don't help", but firstly, you need to be really damn sure if you're going to second guess the CDC on the eve of a pandemic, and secondly, it's not everyone's job to be writing that story. Someone should, but for every earth shattering pullitzer prize winner, there's going to be 1000 articles that just adhered to the status quo and that's not neccessarily a bad thing.
That's reporting. Which leads to this:
> WHO and CDC say masks ineffective. We investigated and found the one study they relied on was flawed, as these credible experts who disagree explain.
That you’re accusing GP of being disingenuous and claiming the tweeter is strawmanning Vox while you’re strawmanning him to prove that point is just the cherry on top.
And now you appear to be strawmanning him in attempt to defend strawmanning.
That is very different from GGP’s interpretation “Vox is responsible for the coronavirus”.
All you provided is further proof that GGP is strawmanning. Thanks
If I helped someone do something bad, then I bear some responsibility for the outcome. That is the definition of responsibility. What is your definition, considering it seems to differ from the dictionary definition?
That’s more than enough of a difference for this to matter. Especially if X is COVID-19. Traster is clearly strawmanning the tweets.