Current TV began with a promise to be the great democratizer of media. Some four years into the experiment, it has a new chief executive who is shifting it away from short videos to more traditional cable programming.

In that transition, Current has cut shows and staff, with the most recent layoffs happening last week. The announcement has prompted questions about citizen journalism’s future, though Mark Rosenthal, Current’s CEO and a former president and operating chief at MTV Networks, said that it isn’t in doubt.

“Current’s mission has not changed one iota,” he said in an interview. “Citizen journalism is far from dead.”

The moves are among Current’s first big changes from Mr. Rosenthal, who helped take MTV from videos to reality and entertainment programming in the ’90s. And while he said the network is still committed to viewer-created content, the format still faces plenty of skepticism as a business model.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

When I was in San Francisco for ONA, a kind reader offered a blunt critique of my reporting: “You know, every time The New York Times (NYT) sneezes, it isn’t news.” He’s right, and yet, here’s another post in which the Gray Lady clears her nose: Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor who’s becoming a regular around here, delivered a newsroom address on Thursday that touched on layoffs, efficiency, and charging for NYTimes.com.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Public libraries have become substitute offices for the recently disenfranchised, so it wasn’t unusual that 40 bright, talented and unemployed people found themselves in a conference room on a dreary day at the Montclair Public Library last January.

But they had something else in common: They were all refugees from The Star-Ledger, which had required deep layoffs to stay in business.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Amid the profusion of job cuts at big tech firms, with the latest including Microsoft’s (MSFT) announcement on Tuesday that it would forge ahead with a second round of layoffs, a new executive survey sparks a glimmer of optimism about future hiring in the technology industry.

In a survey of 122 senior technology professionals, including 67 CEOs and company founders, 54 percent of respondents reported that their companies were currently hiring, or would be hiring new employees within the next three months.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Shifting U.S. jobs overseas is nothing new for technology giant International Business Machines Corp.–or the tech sector in general–but a brave new employee relocation strategy at Big Blue is raising some eyebrows.

Read the rest of this post

Alex Andon, 24, a graduate of Duke University in biology, was laid off from a biotech company last May. For months he sought new work. Then, frustrated with the hunt, he turned to jellyfish.

In an apartment he shares here with six roommates, Mr. Andon started a business in September building jellyfish aquariums, capitalizing on new technology that helps the fragile creatures survive in captivity. He has sold three tanks, one for $25,000 to a restaurant, and is starting a Web site to sell desktop versions for $350.

“I keep getting stung,” he said. And his crowded home office is filled with beakers and test tubes of jellyfish food. “But it beats looking for work. I hate looking for work.”

Read the rest of this post

Like Napoleon marching into an abandoned Moscow, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have led Google’s advance into traditional advertising only to find nothing to loot. Now begins Google’s long imperial retreat, starting with 40 layoffs.

Susan Wojcicki, the millionaire sister-in-law of Brin who also holds a management role in the company, announced the job cuts in a blog post, as she laid out plans for Google (GOOG) to exit the business of brokering radio ads, a business it entered in 2006 when it bought dMarc Broadcasting for $102 million.

Up to 40 Googlers will lose their jobs, a small percentage of the 20,000 remaining employees at the search giant. But the real cut here is to Google’s ambitions.

Read the rest of this post

The carnage in the Japanese consumer electronics industry rolls on.

This morning, Pioneer Corp. announced that it will cut 10,000 jobs and close its TV operations. The company said it now expects a loss for the March 2009 fiscal year of 130 billion yen, or $1.44 billion, far worse than its previous estimated loss of 78 billion yen. Pioneer said it will withdraw from the TV business by March 2010 and cut 16 percent of its full-time staff plus another 4,000 temporary workers, Bloomberg reports.

The company expects FY ’09 sales to be down 28 percent. This will be the company’s fifth straight money-losing year.

Read the rest of this post

There’s kind of a pattern to today’s very large batch of earnings from the semiconductor and semi equipment companies. The Q4 numbers in most cases were well telegraphed; many companies in the sector had already pre-announced rotten results. Many have cut heads, are cutting heads, or will cut heads. And the guidance for the March quarter is generally for double-digit sequential revenue declines.

At some point soon, the Street is going to start looking further out, to June quarter results. And right now, there is not a whole lot to go on. Barring a sudden pick-up in the economy–and I’m not sure why you’d be expecting to see that–you could see another round of estimate cuts as we move through the first quarter.

Read the rest of this post

Kodak (EK) this morning said it will cut its staff by 3,500-4,000 jobs in 2009, reducing its workforce by 14-18 percent. The company also said it will pay no executive bonuses in 2008 and that it will not issue pay increases this year.

They are doing this, of course, because the economy stinks and the company is struggling. In fact, Kodak also said it has opened talks with lenders to assure continued access to its revolving credit line.

For Q4, the company posted a GAAP loss from continuing operations of $133 million or 50 cents a share, including 42 cents a share in various one-time items; that still leaves the company with a pro forma loss for the quarter of eight cents a share, well below the Street consensus estimate of a profit of 21 cents.

Read the rest of this post

Texas Instruments (TXN) this afternoon said it will cut its staff by 12 percent, including 1,800 layoffs and 1,600 voluntary retirements and departures. The company will take about $300 million in related charges. TI said total saving from the latest cuts and the restructuring of its wireless business late last year will total about $700 million after all reductions are completed in Q3.

Meanwhile, the company posted slightly better than expected results for Q4, with revenues of $2.49 billion and non-GAAP profits of 21 cents a share, beating the Street at $2.37 billion and 12 cents.

For Q1, however, Texas Instruments sees revenue of $1.62 billion to $2.12 billion, which would be down 15 to 35 percent sequentially from Q4. The company sees EPS for the quarter ranging from a loss of 11 cents a share to a profit of three cents, including charges of three cents a share for restructuring. Back those out, and you get a range of loss of eight cents to a profit of six cents. The Street has been expecting $2.1 billion and four cents.

Read the rest of this post

The year of hope and change is certainly off to a grim start in the tech world. Last week alone saw layoff announcements from stalwarts like Intel (INTC) and Microsoft (MSFT), as well as Web 2.0 companies like Digg, just to name a few. If you’ve lost your job or had your salary frozen and are seriously tightening your belt, the (slightly) good news is that there are more options than ever to keep yourself entertained during these economic end times.

A few months ago, I defended the value of cable, writing that $70 a month wasn’t a bad deal for what you get. But as your wallet gets lighter, you may not want to spend $840 a year for service. Before you fire off a comment saying “Just watch Hulu!” yes, that is a good idea. Between Hulu and the network sites like ABC.com and CBS.com, you can watch just about any program you like for free. But then you’re watching on a small laptop screen while that big TV sits there, idle. You bought the big TV; you should use it.

Read the rest of this post

Americans, by nature, are an optimistic bunch. Even in tough times, there is something to be optimistic about. Where others see the glass half empty, we see it as half full. That is probably the only reasonable explanation for the findings of this survey conducted by Glassdoor, a Sausalito, Calif.-based start-up that ranks employers by taking anonymous feedback from their employees.

Read the rest of this post

When the Tribune Company announced that it was filing for bankruptcy, last Monday, Sam Zell, the man who bought the company a year ago, for $8.2 billion, said that its problems were the result of a “perfect storm.” You take readers and advertisers who were already migrating away from print, and add a steep recession, and you’ve got serious trouble. What Zell failed to mention was that his acquisition of the company had buried it beneath such a heavy pile of debt that any storm at all would likely have sunk it. But although Zell was making excuses for his own mismanagement, the perfect storm is real enough, and it is threatening to destroy newspapers as we know them. Layoffs and buyouts have become routine. The Miami Herald and the San Diego Union-Tribune are reportedly on the selling block, while lawmakers in Connecticut are trying to keep two newspapers there afloat. Even the New York Times Company has slashed its dividend and announced that it would borrow against its headquarters to avoid cash-flow problems.

Read the rest of this post

So, you just got laid off from the struggling portal. Congratulations. Ten years from now Steve Jobs’s iPhone will be just another obsolete gadget. Rob Bailey’s vitamin vodka, however, will still refresh. It never would have happened if Bailey hadn’t left his business-development job at Yahoo in 2006 to pursue alcoholic immortality.

Read the rest of this post