oct17.com Blog

Oxymoron of the day: the unaffected employee

Today I had to inform several coworkers in Louisville, KY that they were losing their jobs in a companywide layoff at CNET Networks. This was the rueful culmination of a short but intense period when we had to figure out how to make staff cuts and still produce three award-winning sites, figure out how and when to communicate to people, and generally not sleep very well. Having worked in online media before and during the dotcom bust, this was not my first experience of layoffs — not by a long shot — but practice doesn’t make this perfect. Not by a long shot.

In the vernacular of HR documents, people losing their jobs are “the affected employees,” and the 90% who are left are the “unaffected employees.” But in facing the whole staff today in an all-hands meeting, it struck me that, of course, there are no “unaffected” employees. There are just those who will be coming back into the office Monday, looking over at an empty cubicle, and wondering what happens next.

The great thing about working with pros is that they are professional when the shit hits the fan. Some saw it coming (we share a lot of info about the state of the business with the entire team), some were taken completely by surprise. But all dealt with the bad news with enormous character. It was impressive in a way that you never want to have to see.

If anyone reading this needs to hire some strong editorial or product management talent, I’ve got names for you.

• From the bitter-irony dept.: Hours before the cuts, a manager informed me that we had a previously scheduled ice cream social planned for that day. The ice cream guy could not shift it to the next day, because he had hired help to haul the gallons of frozen sweets into the office. I saw a lot of stress eating this afternoon, which I suppose was a comfort of sorts. But c’mon! An ice cream social?!

Henry Blodget mea culpa

From the do-you-really-think-anyone-cares dept.: I was a wrong about Henry Blodget. He’s a good blogger and a necessary read in the online media field.

Over year ago, some of my coworkers (includng my boss) were praising Blodget’s blog, Silicon Alley Insider, and suggesting we should get his stuff on the BNET blogs. I fussed and frumped, because of high-minded belief that someone booted from the securities industry for hyping stocks had no place in a serious business site. Not my site, anyway.

So while I was smugly ignoring the advice of people whom I usually trust, Blodget proceeded to blog his heart out on the business of the Internet and increasingly of the media. He did it well, and he’s gotten better. He’s recruited solid writers to back him up, and now the SAI gang is one of the few things I read every day to stay sharp on my industry. (You can see the feed of interesting stories I read the box to the right.)

• My latest SAI favorite: “Web Ads: Lots of Impressions, Little Value” by Michael Learmonth. I agree completely that theres’s a glut of of ad inventory and ad real estate on professional Web pages. (On CIO.com the other day, I counted more than a dozen graphical ads, sponsorship logos, or blocks of paid links.) The inexorable logic of ad networks will make this situation worse, except for sites that can create a stronger environment for fewer ads, and get paid more for that choice than for what Learmonth calls, “bombarding its users with low-value ad units.”

Hilton Head Island discoveries

Brij, Saloni and I spent the week on Hilton Head Island with Mom (and Jackie, and regular visits from Aunt Betsy and Uncle Ken). It was a great time-off week with a whole lot of nothing going on. Plus Dolphin sitings.

In going over family stories I was struck by one comparison that hadn’t come up before. Many years ago, in preparation for my father’s 40th birthday my family had a savings drive. We squirreled away spare dollars in a coffee can for months, saving up to surprise my father with something he’d never dreamed he would own: the complete, multi-volume set of the OED — the mythical, impressive Oxford English Dictionary.

This is a pricey gift today and was even moreso back in the 1970’s. He was surprised (or at least fooled his adolescent son) and we displayed that shelf-busting set of dictionaries in the living room for years and years.

For my 40th birthday present, I asked my family for… an XBOX 360. It’s also in our living room.

JANA and CNET: what’s up with that?

I’ve had to explain this many times to different family and friends so I thought I’d write it out once and for all, with updates as things change. Here’s the short version:

A hedge fund is trying to take over CNET Networks, my employer. They have until summer to convince CNET shareholders that the company should change strategy and stop expanding into non-technology areas, such as entertainment, lifestyle, and business. I’ve spent most of the last two years working on the business prong of CNET’s strategy, so if the hedgies win my future employment is up for grabs.

Here’s the long version:

A group of Wall Street hedge funds, high-tech venture capitalists, plus one Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, banded together to acquire a big chunk of CNET Networks. The big money outfit in this group is JANA Partners, but the former entrepreneur a guy named Paul Gardi, seems to be the visionary behind this move.

Their goal is to take over CNET’s board of directors, remove our current management, and change the strategy of the media company. Publicly they haven’t disclosed much about what they would change other than to refocus on technology content and improve the moneymaking operations of CNET.

JANA currently owns about 10% of CNET — an investment greater than $100 million — so by any fair-minded shareholder standard they deserve a hearing. Their partners in this effort control even more shares, so as a bloc they get a big say. Acquiring big chunks of a company and using that voting power to force changes in strategy or management is the formula for “activist shareholders,” which this group certainly is. (Similar activist-shareholder groups are taking a run at the New York Times, tried and failed to shift focus at Time Warner, and succeeded with disastrous results at Knight-Ridder.)

Their efforts started last fall and became public in January. The shareholder meeting where their efforts will succeed or fail is this summer, I believe in June. Between now and then, JANA must convince two-thirds of the CNET shareholders that their proposed changes are a good idea. Given that the JANA bloc controls about 20% of the shares, it seems to me they really just have to convince 50% of the other shareholders to join their cause. CNET’s executive management, on the other hand, must convince the shareholders that current strategy is right and current management is aggressive and profit-minded enough to raise the stock price.

I expect that between now and the shareholder meeting there will be an increasingly public airing of claims and counterclaims, promises and threats. I don’t know if this will be a formal proxy battle or just a broader hearts-and-minds campaign. Since CNET’s stock has performed poorly for the last two years, some shareholders may be inclined to try anything to change the status quo.