The News
Many staffers at Marketplace were displeased last week by layoffs at the financial news organization, and grew increasingly angry after a series of internal comments and communications that even the company’s management later said it regretted.
Last week, the business-focused public radio outlet Marketplace announced that it was shedding some staff.
Employees at the Los Angeles-based public media org were initially annoyed after its leadership announced the cuts and a new strategy in a LinkedIn post and in the press. But they grew even more frustrated following what some said were tone-deaf comments in a meeting last week by the CEO of Marketplace’s parent company, American Public Media Group.
During a meeting last week, APM Group CEO Jean Taylor seemed to jump between affirmative language about the organization and dark topics, including the need to reorganize and restructure staff.
Taylor announced that the organization was introducing a new membership role called a “VP of Friends,” and launched the meeting with a trailer for the Splendid Table podcast and asked, “Isn’t it fun to work for a media company?”
The CEO also advised Marketplace staff to take care of themselves in an unstable world, and explained how she, personally, was prioritizing joy.
“Take care of yourselves. It’s a lot, it’s a lot right now,” she said. “I think I’ve been really deliberate about finding joy and people in my life making space for that. I have been doing a really good job of accepting what I can’t control. There’s a whole lot of stuff that I don’t like right now that I can’t control. But I also have been really active in the places where I can control.”
In a subsequent meeting with Marketplace staff, employees expressed disbelief at Taylor’s remarks.
“To have Jean start with Splendid Table, and then spend 20 minutes talking about where her joy comes from — it’s really difficult,” one staffer said in last week’s Marketplace all-hands meeting.
One employee said, “The communication rollout was really disheartening.”
“It felt very tone-deaf and certainly did not land well across our team,” one staffer said. “That was just incredibly jarring — it felt like Marketplace was an afterthought.”
Marketplace General Manager Neal Scarborough acknowledged that he knew the news “may have been a little bit jarring,” and the company had “some regret” about how the news got out.
Still, both Marketplace and American Public Media executives said the recent cuts were necessary as the outlet pursues digital audiences.
Taylor said that the organization expected Congress to take a vote on cuts to federal funding for public media, and while she believed there was still a chance that those cuts wouldn’t take place, she said that the threat of them had already shaped the organization’s strategy moving forward.
“We are looking at and putting together plans for what will do if that funding goes away, and when we look at those plans, we are going to implement some of them whether the funding goes away or not,” she said. “We’re going to play offense here.”
She added that the organization was pursuing aggressive fundraising and philanthropic goals, including setting its largest fundraising goal ever.
In a meeting with Marketplace staff, General Manager Neal Scarborough said they needed to rapidly expand their audience, saying that their average listener was a 58-year-old white person.
“They’re on radio, and they keep us growing, and they love what we do. They love what public media is about, and we couldn’t move forward without them,” Scarborough said. “But if we’re really going to grow and be part of the future, the future is about having our content where the audiences that we want live and thrive.”
He continued: “Part of this vision is that we actually are creating more digital touch points, through social media, through quickly consumed content, through explainers, through filling the void of what people are trying to figure out. If we only do that on a radio, we’re not going to be here for 20 more years.”