THIS WEEK, AS A LONG-PREDICTED collapse seemed to hit digital media, we saw a few of the tried-and-true ways managers use to explain to employees why they’re laying them off.
BuzzFeed chose the language of corporation-as-family, with founder Jonah Peretti telling staff that making the decision was “upsetting and disappointing.” Verizon went with meaningless corporate-speak. “Today marks a strategic step toward better execution of our plans for growth and innovation into the future,” a spokesperson said.
The results looked the same in the end: a 15 percent reduction in headcount at BuzzFeed, resulting in the layoffs of more than 200 people, and 800 cuts at Verizon Media Group, which includes HuffPost and Yahoo News.
On the morning of December 19th, the editors of Der Spiegel called a staff meeting in the lobby of its headquarters, in Hamburg. The magazine’s offices occupy an immense but elegant building, with rows of windows tinged by the emerald color of the city’s waterways. An inscription on the wall near the entrance offers an imploring quote from the magazine’s founder, Rudolf Augstein: “Sagen, was ist”—Say what is. At the meeting, the editors told the staff that Claas Relotius, one of the publication’s star reporters, had invented characters, conversations, and other details in many of the dozens of stories he published in the magazine in the past seven years. The weekly production of a magazine is intensively collaborative and necessarily collective. The reputation of Der Spiegel, perhaps the most prestigious magazine in Europe, rests in no small part on the esteem of its fact-checking department, which employs at least sixty people full time. Many of the staff members at the meeting, one Spiegel reporter told me later, were close to tears. “We were all shocked and sad,” the reporter said. “It went to the core of how we understood our work. How could one single person be so harmful to all that we have been working on and pride ourselves on?”
A month earlier, Relotius had e-mailed Juan Moreno, a freelancer he was working with on a story about immigration at the U.S. border. Relotius complained that Moreno’s sections of the piece, which followed a twenty-five year-old Honduran woman travelling to the U.S. with her daughter, sounded like a “bad movie.” Relotius’s contributions, on the other hand, were the stuff of Tarantino; he’d embedded with a group of vigilante patrollers from Arizona, who went by the aliases Pain, Luger, and Ghost, and who waited for migrants on the American side of the border, outfitted with bulletproof vests and night-vision devices. Moreno, for his part, thought that Relotius’s sections were “too shiny,” and noticed that certain facts seemed off-kilter.
The disappearance and alleged killing last week of dissident Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi while he was visiting the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul is only the latest challenge to a U.S.-Saudi relationship that both governments have diligently cultivated.
The Trump administration has said little beyond expressing public concern over Khashoggi’s fate, and the kingdom has sharply denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. In private, officials from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on down have been frustrated with the lack of a substantive response to direct high-level queries, according to administration officials.
Confirmation that Khashoggi was killed — as some senior Turkish officials have charged — or even his disappearance at Saudi hands is likely to spark a new round of congressional pressure to reassess the relationship with Riyadh.
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