Social Justice Media Companies are failing. Univision has been buying out staffers and laying people off for a while now. Recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal says that Univision is trying to sell the Fusion media Group, which includes the former Gawker properties.So what is happening to cause this collapse and is regressive leftism the reason?Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
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The news for Univision and the Fusion Media Group is going from bad to worse.
There's a saying that goes around in the anti-social justice circles called, Get Woke, Go Broke.
And the idea is that when companies try to push into political correctness, they see problems.
They lose money.
Now, full disclosure, I worked at Fusion, the Univision subsidiary, for two years, and I personally witnessed a lot of these problems.
The news today is that Univision is trying to sell the Fusion Media Group.
And what's really interesting about this is that Fusion Media Group includes the Gizmodo Media Group, which is remnantsofgawker.com.
It would seem that trying to purchase up these woke brands didn't actually work and is resulting in layoffs and buyouts.
So let's explore this idea of get woke, go broke.
And the question that I want to ask is why is the Fusion Media Group doing poorly?
What caused them to fail?
And I'm gonna give you my personal experience on this one.
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Our first story is from Variety.com.
Univision looking to sell Fusion Media Group.
Univision Communications now wants to unload Fusion Media Group, coming two years after it bought a half-dozen websites from Gawker Media in a bid to boost its reach among younger audiences.
The Hispanic media giant is exploring a sale of Fusion Media Group, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Univision declined to comment.
The strategic about-face comes after Univision canceled its initial public offering plans earlier this year and has seen broad turnover among its senior executive ranks.
Univision last year tried to sell a 20% stake in Fusion Media Group for $200 million, but failed to find any investors willing to go in on the deal, the Journal reported.
According to the Wall Street Journal, potential partners were skittish about working with the Univision ownership group, which includes Haim Saban's Saban Capital Group, Televisa, and private equity firms Providence Equity Partners, Madison Dearborn Partners, Thomas H. Lee Partners, and TPG.
On June 28th, we saw this story from Adweek.
Gizmodo Media Group avoids layoffs after round of buyouts.
Parent company Univision said there would be budget cuts.
Gizmodo Media Group will not lay off people after enough staffers took voluntary buyouts, editorial director Susie Benakarim told employees in a memo today.
While that is the outcome for which we'd hoped, any relief is bittersweet because it comes with the loss of talented and valued colleagues whose countless contributions will be greatly missed.
We will allow them to share their news in their own time and in their own way.
The buyout comes amid an uncertain time for digital publishers, as others, including BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, and Mashable, have all had to lay off dozens of employees recently.
The Wall Street Journal reported in March that parent company Univision was considering extensive budget cuts, and an outside consulting group hired to review the company proposed cutting the budget of Fusion Media Group, which includes Gizmodo Media Group, by up to 35%.
So we've got some bad news.
These are companies that have all played the political correctness route, that have repeatedly hired people who are in the far left, and as much as this story was kind of a breath of relief to many people, saying they avoided the layoffs, it apparently wasn't enough.
From Deadline.com, layoffs looming over the onion as Univision reviews its operations.
Corporate parent Univision Communications is looking to reduce the staff by around 15% as the Spanish-language media giant implements cuts across the company, multiple sources confirm.
The privately held company is barely a month into the tenure of new CEO Vince Sadusky, who took the role after an eventful period during which it pulled plans for an IPO and retained a consultant to help it reassess its operations.
I worked for Fusion for two years, and I believe I know exactly what the problem is.
I really do.
Now, it's just my opinion, but before I tell you why I think they're failing, let's look at this concept of Get Woke, Go Broke.
From the Urban Dictionary, one of our greatest journalistic sources when trying to talk about concepts that float about the internet, Get Woke, Go Broke is a phrase coined by the internationally best-selling author John Ringo to express the opinion that when organizations get woke, meaning they embrace politically correct actions, those same actions usually result in a massive loss of income.
This is usually because the instigators calling for the company to get woke doesn't actually spend any money with the company.
And there are a few examples.
Get woke, go broke.
I went by Dick's last night and the place was empty.
They stopped selling modern sporting rifles and hired a gun control lobbyist in DC.
All of their actual spending customers went elsewhere.
Get woke, go broke.
Oh, hell yeah.
So much that the board got called out in a shareholders meeting.
And that's actually a reference to a real thing from The Blaze.
A conservative shareholder confronted Dick's Sporting Goods CEO Edward Stack during an investors meeting over the company's recent move to restrict gun sales in its stores.
So I don't want to get into too much detail on Dick's Sporting Goods, but let's just talk about the Fusion Media Group, and I'm gonna share with you my personal experience.
What we're seeing here are many companies that are considered to be woke.
They are far left.
They push this ideology.
Much of it is very dogmatic, where it doesn't matter if what they're doing is true or correct so much as it pushes an ideology.
And I know this, for a fact.
The reason being, the president of Fusion told me this as much.
In private meetings with him, as well as a few staff meetings, he said in no uncertain terms that we will quote, side with the audience.
I asked him personally, should we report facts?
And, If there is a story that would be offensive, does that mean we don't report it?
And he told me, yes, that was fair to say.
That the goal of Fusion was to side with the audience.
The problem is, they were a new company and they didn't really know who their audience was.
In a meeting on the political conventions, someone asked, are we going to play this left, right, center, nonpartisan?
And he reiterated, we are here to side with the audience.
And that's...
A call, basically, to be progressive.
Now, the reason they thought their audience was progressive was for a few reasons.
Very early on, Fusion made some very pro-left-wing ideology content that did moderately well.
And this said to a lot of people, this is what young people want.
I was also told, and I don't know how true this is, but I was told by some people in the company, that their consultants told them that young people are overwhelmingly progressive, and this is the kind of content they want.
So what happened was, the people at Fusion decided their audience was progressive, and that's who they're going to side with.
Now let me just say, when I worked there, my content did better than most other people's content, and I didn't make far-left content.
If you watch my videos, you know exactly who I am and where I am.
I'm a bit of a center-left libertarian.
Meaning, my content, when I talk about politics, is either not overtly one side or the other, or leans left.
I've made videos critical of the government.
I explored the drought issue in California.
I made a documentary about Fukushima.
All of these did remarkably well.
And not only that, I actually consulted on some content for Fusion that ended up going viral.
The conversations I had with the higher-ups was that I knew what content worked and why.
Having come from Vice, I know how we can better approach young people and produce content that will work.
However, they decided that their marketing people knew better.
In come the sycophants, people who just wanted to say, whatever you say boss, we'll just do your thing, and got paid a very fat penny to do it.
These people then started pushing far-left ideology and making content that nobody wanted to read.
And no matter how many times I said, listen, this is not going to work, I was told, this is what young people want and you're wrong.
Even in the face of my content doing better than everyone else's, even in the face of me pointing out content that would go viral and explaining why, they told me I was wrong.
They wanted to choose a political side and push an ideology because, in my opinion, The marketing people told them to do it.
The consultants told them to do it.
And they were all wrong.
Whatever polling is going on that we've seen in the past few years, it has been dead wrong time and time again.
They didn't think Trump was going to win, but he did.
And a lot of people that I interviewed during the campaign while working for Fusion said it was because they didn't like political correctness.
Many people said to me, how can we solve our problems if we can't talk about it?
Now, that wasn't the overwhelming majority.
That was most of the young people I was talking to.
And so every time I brought this up, I was told, no, you're wrong.
Young people are progressive.
And it may be true that young people are progressive, but many of them are not politically initiated.
They may be progressive, but they watch Casey Neistat and Jake Paul.
They don't want to go to a website that talks about being woke nonstop.
They don't want to go to a website that's nothing but videos of police brutality and complaints about the government.
They want to go to a website where they read about... Jake and Logan Paul!
And that was something that Fusion wasn't doing because they were trying to play politics.
Ultimately, this leads to where we are now.
Their Univision is trying to sell the company.
Gizmodo.
They bought the Gizmodo brand and many of the subsidiary companies because they were trying to bring an influx of young people into their portfolio.
But that's not going to work either.
And I have heard many people say, people from Gizmodo tell me that they're actually doing well, it's the problems at Univision that are screwing them up.
And I would also add that in my opinion, Univision, horribly mismanaged.
Fusion, horribly mismanaged.
But ultimately, it's this idea that you can produce content for a small subset of the market and somehow be financially successful in the long run.
If you want to make a small blog that targets less than a percent of the United States demographic, by all means go ahead and do so.
But that's where you're going to make your money.
If you want to make a news and media brand, something that's very large and can go far, you can lean left, you can lean right.
Personally, I think leaning left is a better option because so many young people do lean left.
But producing Garbage content that is overtly political is not what the average person is into.
Making snide, snarky content that insults people is not what most people are into, and they didn't want to listen.
But let's look at a couple other examples of going woke and then going broke.
As many people know, there is Solo.
From Quartz, Solo could be Disney's first Star Wars film to lose money.
And I've explained this before, I don't think Solo lost money because it was woke.
I think Solo lost money because The Last Jedi was just a bad movie.
And we can see that in the Tomatometer, 91% of critics really liked it, but only 46% of the audience liked it.
I think the reason we see good reviews on The Last Jedi, bad reviews on movies like Death Wish, even though the audience liked Death Wish, is because the media is saturated with people on the far left who are judging the movie based on their own personal politics.
This is marketing by morality.
We've seen it in video games, we see it in movies, we're seeing it in comics.
People want to create a product based on what they feel is moral good and not based on what is functional.
So what happens is you produce a product that people say, This is trash.
I don't like it.
But the critics, the far left, they say, this is exactly what we need, and they champion the product simply because it fits their moral ideology.
And many of these people, these critics, don't really understand what's going on, as exampled by this tweet from the man Luke Owen.
Luke Owen is a writer, presenter, and podcaster for WrestleTalk TV.
He's an author.
He has about 11,000 followers.
I don't think he's the most influential person in the world, but I think his tweet sets a good example.
He said, So I discovered via the comments on yesterday's news that
those who boycotted Solo because of The Last Jedi call the film Soylo.
I don't get it. Are they suggesting that only vegans like The Last Jedi?
Is it the same thing as soy boy being some sort of weird insult?
Many of these people don't even understand the soy reference.
You'd think that as a writer-presenter, as someone who was supposed to be paying attention to the news, you understand
what the soy meme is.
Personally, I think it's rather silly, people calling, you know, guys soy boys if they're on the left, if they're effeminate, because the idea is that soy has phytoestrogens, which makes men more effeminate, which... Look, you can google bodybuilders who eat soy protein and they're ripped big masculine dudes.
Ultimately, it's just a joke.
And the reason people are calling Solo Soylo is because they think Star Wars has gone full SJW.
The Last Jedi.
People call Admiral Holdo, Admiral Gender Studies, and they make jokes like that.
I don't think that The Last Jedi was a bad movie because of social justice.
I think it was poorly written and made no sense.
But there are a lot of people who criticize it for being woke, thus making it uninteresting.
And because of this, because The Last Jedi was bad, people were not enthusiastic about going to see another Star Wars movie.
Some people say it's Star Wars fatigue.
I also don't think that's true, because Marvel cranks out movies left and right and TV shows left and right, and it's all pretty much good.
And the last example I'm gonna give of get what go broke is from the Washington Times.
Enrollment drops at schools known for social justice warfare.
Universities known for being hotbeds of campus protest and liberal activism are struggling with declining enrollments and budget shortfalls.
Now, anyone can easily find examples of anything and then claim something to be true.
Declining enrollments have previously been observed at colleges and universities that
become notorious for chaotic campus activism, including the University of Missouri and Evergreen
State College.
Now, anyone can easily find examples of anything and then claim something to be true.
So, don't take any of this as me saying that by being politically correct, you will
fail.
There is an idea that when a company or institution decides to put diversity above meritocracy,
then their product will suffer.
And this is what I refer to as marketing by morality.
The idea that if you create a product that is socially good, it will do well, It's just not true.
While there are many anecdotes to suggest that getting woke will make you go broke, the plural of anecdote is not data.
So we hear these stories and a lot of people think it's true.
So if you were to ask my opinion, I would say these companies failing may or may not be about getting woke.
In the instance of the universities, I think that one's kind of clear-cut because it's only specific universities that are facing these shortfalls.
But at any rate, Fusion may be offloaded from Univision as, essentially, a failure.
So let me know what you think in the comments below.
Do you think Get Woke, Go Broke is a true statement, or is it just hyperbole?
That people are looking at these anecdotes and believing this must be the rule and not the exception.
Let me know what you think, we'll keep the conversation going.
