Volume 4, Issue 53: Jon Jay

"After all he'd done for this organization, it's hard to say goodbye."

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The first time I ever got laid off from a job was September 2000. I was 24 years old, working at a company called Novix Media. Novix Media was one of those late-’90s, 2000 dot-com-boom companies, back when Pets.com was advertising at the Super Bowl and Webvan and Kozmo.com were supposed to be the next big thing. (This is a very weird thing to say about the dot-com era, but, kids, ask your parents.) It was a media company co-founded by Michael Berman, who had started George magazine with John F. Kennedy Jr., back before he faked his death so he could go into hiding for 20 years in order to tell the truth about Hillary Clinton. Berman had no idea, and apparently no real interest in, how to run an internet company, so he just bought websites (and their staffs) that people had told him were cool and hired a bunch of 22-year-olds at the bottom of the masthead of “real” publications to fill in the gaps. One of the sites he bought was Ironminds, the site I’d launched with my friend Andy Wang when I still was working at The Sporting News in St. Louis in 1998, and we joined Novix’s editorial staff to create—and I am quoting Berman here—”the MTV for the Web generation.” I worked at the company for five months, got a free cross country journalism trip with my friend Eric Gillin (where we got to meet and smoke hash with Hunter S. Thompson) and wrote and edited constantly despite no corporate people ever launching a site where I could publish any of it. It was a complete disaster of an organization that only has escaped historical scrutiny because it collapsed before it ever actually produced anything. The only proof that Novix Media ever existed at all is this promotional teaser, which sums up the dot-com-boom era in all its ridiculous glory.

By the time the layoffs happened, no one was surprised. It was obvious where this was going. But we were still devastated. It’s truly, existentially shocking when you get laid off for the first time. Getting laid off, from my experience, is far worse than getting fired. When you get fired, your employer is essentially saying they believe someone can do your job better than you can. That hurts, no question, but at a certain level, there’s a clear resolution and a path forward. Maybe they were wrong to fire you, maybe they were right, but in the end the situation as it stood was unsustainable; both parties are surely better off by separating. But to get laid off means something much worse: It means nothing you did ever mattered. All that time you put it, all the energy, all the shit you had to eat at your job because it’s your job, none of it made a lick of difference: The whole position ended up being pointless. It is one thing to fail at a job; it is another to succeed and have them evaporate everything you did anyway. It’s quite another to have them decide they never needed you in the first place.

We were kids: It was the first time getting laid off for all of us. I did my exit interview while openly drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels; one of my co-workers went to our smoking area on the roof and peed “FUCK” on the asphalt; another put a sign on his computer that said, “Do not touch this computer until I get my files off it or I will hunt you down and destroy you—I will make it my new job, since I don’t have one anymore.” It really just flattened me. Everything up to that point in my life, in my head, had a clear upward trajectory: Editor of the Daily Illini, awesome magazine job in Los Angeles straight out of college, working my way up from logging box scores to writing daily baseball columns for The Sporting News in St. Louis, moving to New York City to work for The New York Times Online, then a hot-shot job at a hot-shot web company that paid for everybody’s lunch every day and let you bring your dog into the office. Then suddenly someone said, Yeah, turns out you’re nothing. You couldn’t help but feel like maybe they were right: I was a wreck for a good year afterward, even, at one point, moving back to Mattoon to live with my cousin Denny for a couple of months just to get my shit together. It kicks your ass to have your employer tell you they want you to go away, that your job doesn’t even exist anymore. It’ll mess with your head.

At least it does the first time.

***************

This month has been full of layoffs, particularly in the tech and media sectors. (Atlantic writer Derek Thompson did a great job of explaining why, with unemployment at record lows in the rest of the country, those sectors are getting hit so hard right now.) Many of the people getting laid off, if my various timelines can be trusted, are being laid off for the first time, and they, unlike me in September 2000, thanks to social media, are dealing with their shock in public, in real time. They are striking back with anger, and frustration, and befuddlement. I get this too. They are right to do so. I did the same thing back then. But then something happened: I kept getting laid off.

From January 2001 (when I moved back to New York City to try again) to September 2005 (when Deadspin launched), I was laid off a total of six times. (One job lasted exactly three weeks.) In the years since 2005, countless publications and media companies I have been involved with, from Sports On Earth to Bloomberg Politics to NBC News THINK to PLAY: The New York Times Sports Magazine to Ratter to Yahoo’s “The Projector” to “The Long Game With LZ and Leitch” to, ultimately, Deadspin itself, they have all folded and gone away. I cared about all of those things, and I was proud of the work I did there: I’m not sure, in the end, I could have done any better than I did. I poured all I had into all those entities. And they all fell apart anyway. They all went away.

They did not go away because I was not good at my job, or because my colleagues weren’t. They did not go away because we didn’t try hard enough. They did not go away because of the quality of the work anyone was doing at any of those places. They just went away because that’s what happens. There was nothing you could do. By signing up to work in a business like this—a business you aspired to be a part of because you believed that a job was supposed to be more than just a “job,” that you had a career passion and believed in it—you cursed yourself to it. It has happened before. It will happen again. This is how it works.

This is upsetting, obviously. But what I discovered, roughly around the third or fourth time I was laid off, is that it was also freeing. I could not control what happened at corporate levels five or six floors above me; I could only control what I did. This meant, at a certain level, I was powerless, entirely dependent the levers pushed and pulled by a bunch of people in suits I would never meet, people who were entirely dependent themselves on the levers pushed and pulled by a market that had no real logic that anyone could possibly understand. But who isn’t powerless and dependent on all that? Once I realized that the only thing I had any control over was the quality of work that I personally produced, I finally felt some autonomy and ownership over it. I did great work for Bloomberg Politics, and Sports On Earth, and The Projector, and Deadspin. Those things all went away because of things they did, not things I did. It was scary to get laid off, every time. Yahoo shuttered our site when I was on paternity leave, when my firstborn son was two weeks old—a layoff was certainly the last thing I wanted to be thinking about at that particularly time. But then again: Did I ever think that site was going to last forever? Did I think Yahoo was just going to keep writing me checks to do whatever the hell I wanted the rest of my life? I had known they’d pull the plug eventually. Everyone always does. This is media. This is how this works. If I’d have wanted stability, I would have done literally anything else in the world. But I didn’t. I chose this. This part sucks. But it is, alas, part of the deal. And it is not a referendum on anything but the industry itself.

There was a terrific thread about this, in the wake of Vox layoffs last week, by Phoebe Gavin, who had been executive director of talent and development at the company. (It is worth noting another change that’s happened since I first got laid off: Emerging media unions. I can only dream of us having any sort of collective bargaining power then, and it’s an endless credit to this new generation of young journalists that they’ve fought so hard to get some.) Gavin had a particularly eloquent phrase: “I'm not interested in building my house on rented land.” To quote:

Phoebe Gavin @phoebegavin

Whoever said it, it stuck with me. Media had staked its future on FB traffic they had no control over. Similarly, I'd staked my future on a company that I had no control over. FB will always choose itself. Companies will always choose themselves. I should choose myself too.

Phoebe Gavin @phoebegavin

So I kept working and never stopped choosing myself. I did each job at the highest level I could. But... 👉🏾 I was always putting money away for savings – even when it was painful. 👉🏾I was always growing and maintaining my network. 👉🏾And I was always working on a side thing.

Phoebe Gavin @phoebegavin

Am I anxious about being laid off today? Fuck yes, I am. But I also know I will be ok. Because I do not allow this industry to control my identity, my self-worth, or my future. Because I started preparing on Day 1. There is no unemployment insurance like preparation.

It is so scary to be laid off in the tech or media industry. I still fear it today, and I work, like, four jobs. I have the utmost sympathy for anyone who has lost their job, for the first time, or for any time. But it cannot be said enough: It has nothing to do with you. If you’d have wanted a more stable career, you could have chosen to be a banker, or a lawyer, or a doctor—all great, important jobs, done by smart people, certainly smarter people than me. But you didn’t choose that. You chose to work in media. So did I. And this is how it works. This is how it has worked since I entered the working world in 1997. I see no reason to think it will not always work this way.

But, alas, it is what I do. It is what we all do. I could do nothing else. Winston Churchill once said, “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms.” It’s a hard industry. But if you love it, and you can’t imagine doing anything else—like me, and surely like many of the people laid off, this week, this month, and forever—it is still the only option. The media industry is always shifting and reinventing and recalibrating and falling apart and building itself back up again. We are merely along for the ride. But I can’t think of any ride I’d rather take. To quote another old white man: We need the eggs.

Every time I talk to journalism students, the number one question I get is, “am I going to be able to get and keep a job?” They ask this question not because it’s foremost in their minds; they ask it because it’s foremost in their parents’. Now that I am a parent myself, I understand this: Every parent, for better or worse, wants their children to have a life that it as free of strife and struggle as possible—we just want them to be OK. If you told me that either of my sons would become a corporate lawyer and I’d never have to worry about them going hungry again, that would ease my mind. But that mindset is more about me than it is about them. What we should want for them is to be happy. To live a life that’s interesting and important to them. I generally tell these students some version of: What your parents want, deep down, even if they can’t admit it to themselves because they’re currently giving this college their entire savings account, is for their children to be happy and to be interesting. Right now, they’re spending all this money for college, so they’re worried about your career. But what they should be worried about is that you will end up doing something you hate the rest of your life just because back in college you made a decision that would make your parents happy rather than make you happy. I see that happening a lot more than I see college graduates starving to death, I’ll say that.

So yeah. If you want a profession where you have the same job for 40 years, in the same office, stable, normal, no sweat, just like your parents want, then media (and tech) is not the profession for you. But if you want to do cool shit, if you love this, then you have to do it. You have to. You’ll figure out the details along the way.

I can only hope that the students that remained awake at the end of that soliloquy absorbed at least a little of it.

It sucks getting laid off. It is the worst. But doing something you hate, or not following what you love, because you’re afraid someday you might get laid off, is a route to unhappiness. Getting laid off is never your fault. There can even be pride in it. It doesn’t feel that way at the time; it feels horrible. But once it happens to you a few times, you realize it’s not about you—it’s about them. All you can take care of is you. It’s all rented land. It’s where you live, it’s who you are, that matters. It’s the only thing that does. To quote one last old white man, it’s the only thing you can control.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Did This AI ChatBot Just Write a Better Opinion Piece Than Me? No, But It’s Closer Than I’d Like, Medium. This was a harrowing experience.

2. LeBron James’ Career Is a Rebuke of Michael Jordan’s, New York. This is the only LeBron-Jordan column I will write, I promise.

3. Best Picture Nominees, Ranked by Their Likelihood to Win, Medium. It sure looks like an Everything Everywhere All at Once year.

4. The Thirty: Your Hipster Jersey For Each MLB Team, MLB.com. A fun, totally silly piece I do every year.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, no show this week.

Seeing Red, no show this week.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Journey to the Doomsday Glacier,” David W. Brown, The New Yorker. I typically spend the period between Christmas and New Years digging through all my old copies of The New Yorker, catching up on the great pieces. This is was one of the best ones.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Superstition,” Stevie Wonder. It remains one of those wonders of the world that the definitive version of Stevie Wonder’s best song was done on “Sesame Street.” One of those kids dancing is super into it!

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Running a 10K with your mom on a cold Saturday morning in January is not a terrible way to spend a cold Saturday morning in January …

Have a great weekend, all …

Best,
Will