How to avoid getting laid off from your digital media job

By someone who just got laid off from his digital media job

The dream of the 2010s: an email job in a post-industrial open office. Photo by Israel Andrade on Unsplash

I rarely talked directly about my job on here, but I was the editor of Eater Seattle until earlier this month, when my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss sent me an email subject-lined “Important update about your role.” The update was that my role no longer existed.

This wasn’t a surprise — before this most recent round of layoffs there was one in August and one in December 2024. Eater had previously spent years building up a network of local food news websites, but as a result of cutbacks, it no longer had full-time, permanent editors in Chicago, Philadelphia, Austin, Houston, Las Vegas, or Portland. So why did it still have me covering Seattle, an arguably less important food city, for so long? I’ll tell you why: I’m good at not getting laid off.

I’ve been through a lot of layoff cycles in my career, which isn’t unusual among journalists. After my layoff I got a LinkedIn message from a guy who was laid off three times in 10 years. I know one journalist who was laid off from two different companies by the same manager, who was apparently following her around like a personal grim reaper. There were at least a half-dozen restructures and cullings at Vice in the second half of the 2010s that I survived; when I finally got cut loose in 2020, I was (I believe) the longest-tenured editorial employee left. At Eater, I slipped through two fairly aggressive reorgs that happened in the span of eight months. I occasionally have my doubts about my abilities as a writer, but I am clearly, indisputably talented at staying employed.

If avoiding being laid off is a talent, it’s not one to be particularly proud of. Maintaining your job while your company crumbles around you is not unlike being a Communist Party apparatchik in Stalin’s Soviet Union. You must be fatalistic, flexible, unobtrusive, savvy – the same set of skills that successful rats and cockroaches have. Arguably, there are times when you should want to leave a job at a failing brand behind, moments when the nobler thing to do is to resign before your website pivots into a content mill. What the below guide presupposes is, you are a digital media employee who wants to keep their paychecks coming for as long as possible. Here’s how you avoid getting laid off:

Work at a profitable media company

If you figure this one out, can you let me know? The economics of the media industry are famously brutal. The New York Times is profitable. Defector, the worker-owned website run by former Deadspinners, is also profitable (I think). It seems like some of these new Substack publications with small staffs and tiny overheads are probably making money? But profitable journalism is almost an oxymoron. And if your company isn’t profitable, it will inevitably cut costs, and you are a cost. If it is profitable, congrats on your job at the Times.

There isn’t much you can do if it’s clear your publication is in the red (or funding for your nonprofit newsroom is running low). Just start updating LinkedIn and browsing job sites. And don’t quit if you don’t have a better job lined up – that sweet severance money is coming soon.

Work on the stuff your bosses love

Any given media company will be putting out all kinds of content – audio, short-form and long-form video, written articles – likely across a bunch of different websites, which are now called “channels” or “brands” or “verticals.” Obviously, not all of this content is going to be equally successful, but you want to be working on the successful stuff.

“Successful,” in this context, means that it is driving a lot of traffic/impressions/subscriptions and it gets praised by your company’s higher-ups. So if every all-hands meeting seems to mostly be about all the great podcasts your company is producing, you want to be in the podcast game. If a new editorial director comes in and obviously loves one website more than the other ones on the network, that’s the website you want to work for. If the whole brand is pivoting toward social video and asking everyone for social video pitches, you want to be doing social video. If your company starts spiraling – and it will start spiraling, faster than you think – leadership will naturally try to preserve the core components of the business, meaning the things that can make it money.

Work for the numbers

Your company’s leadership is likely cynical, profit-motivated, and obsessed with metrics. If you want to keep your job, you should be too. Every article or video you create can be reduced to numbers – likes, engagements, time on site, whatever. Those numbers should be high. If you have goals pegged to some of those numbers, you should hit those goals. If you struggle to hit those goals, change what you’re doing¹.

This sounds like obvious advice, but in my experience it runs counter to journalists’ idealistic streak. We want stories to matter in an ineffable sense. We balk at the idea that a story’s impact can be crudely quantified, and tell ourselves that even if a feature got just a few thousand pageviews, it was really important and made an impact. Sometimes our managers will even tell us that these low numbers don’t mean a story wasn’t worth doing. Unfortunately, they are wrong. If almost no one reads your passion project that you poured months of reporting into, it was on some level a failure (I’ve had more than a few of these failures).

Think of your work from the perspective of your boss, and more importantly your boss’s boss. If they’re having a meeting about a reorg and deciding who to keep, is your manager sticking up for you by saying what a great journalist you are, in spite of your bad numbers? That makes you sound like a luxury a cash-strapped company can’t afford. Or is your boss just able to point to you on a spreadsheet and note how much traffic you bring in? The latter conversation seems a lot simpler.

Work quietly

Most journalists have a defiant streak. We got into this business to speak truth to power, and sometimes power comes in the form of our own incompetent management. You may believe the bosses are running a once-profitable business into the ground and that they are stifling your voice and stepping on your stories. They might have laid off your friends, and you may suspect that they will soon be handing you some news about your role.

So you get angry, righteously angry. You ask pointed questions at all-hands meetings, you express your dismay at your bosses’ strategies in Slack, you never miss a chance to note that this once great journalistic enterprise is sliding into a sea of slop.

You likely won’t get fired for this insubordination. Everyone in the journalism industry understands it comes with some fiery personalities, and managers usually tolerate open disagreement. But when layoff time comes around, being disagreeable won’t count in your favor.

To be clear: Yes, biting your tongue and keeping your head down is somewhat cowardly. Can I sell you on the idea that it is also strategic? If you want management to change what they’re doing, that requires you to persuade them they’re wrong, and insulting them publicly won’t help. Logging your objections to the way things are going in front of your entire company may give you a kind of defiant satisfaction — and win you some praise from coworkers — but it achieves nothing. If you need to let off steam, do it privately at the bar. If you’re convinced the company is cooked, spend your energy looking for other jobs.

This is not fun advice to impart. We all got into journalism because we want to tell important stories, stories that help people or enlighten them. We wanted to tell the truth. What my advice boils down to is to treat those higher purposes of journalism as secondary — instead, focus on the most metric-based, profit-oriented parts of your job, succeed on those narrow terms, and keep your mouth shut.

But look: You’re not making a fun ‘zine with your friends, you’re not donating your time to an underground newspaper. You’re employed to create a work product. Sometimes, lucky you, that work product will resemble the kind of important story you’ve always wanted to tell. Mostly, it will not. You may find a job that fulfills every creative and intellectual itch, but you probably won’t, and that’s fine. Most people don’t.

My advice on how to hold on to a job is cynical, and that’s not an accident. Idealism is used as a cudgel by the management class of creative industries. They’re counting on you being so passionate about your work that you’ll pour yourself into the job, overachieve, overlook the paltry paycheck. Part of the philosophy of keeping your job, paradoxically, is to take a step back, to treat it as merely a job rather than a calling. Put less of yourself in your day job, and aren’t all jobs day jobs? Get a hobby, have a kid, adopt a puppy, fall in love, start a blog. It probably counts as an old saying by now: The job will not save you.

If you liked reading this, please tell someone about it in real life.

1. This advice assumes you are actually good at your job on this fundamental, quantifiable level. If you are not, I can’t help you.