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Friday, May 07, 2004 |
The layoff
Wired News: "TechTV to Lay Off 285"
News.com: "TechTV Lays Off San Francisco Staff"
And there were other stories, too. Just to comment on one little detail
in both of these: You'd think that Comcast gave us 60 days' notice out
of the goodness of its soft ol' cable heart. Witness the quote from the
G4 spokesguy (who is named David Shane in one of the linked pieces
above and David Shone in the other):
"Today we gave notice to 285 employees that they'll be impacted by the
merger. We wanted to give employees as much notice as
possible so that they can begin to make other plans."
Uh huh. As I noted yesterday, though, Comcast and G4 had no choice in
the matter. The 60-day notice is required by federal law because
shutting down a workplace of our size is considered a plant closing
(the company needs to do other things under the law, too, like
notifying the mayor of San Francisco that it's putting a bunch of
people on the street). So I can now consider myself the beneficiary of
one of the few labor-friendly laws to get through Congress in recent
memory.
The staff gets to meet with G4's CEO, Charles Hirschhorn, on Monday and hear what
else is in store for us (for instance, will we continue producing our
daily show all the way through July, when the 60 days is up?).
10:18:14 PM 
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More on torturegate (the word)
The number of Google references was at 13 on Thursday and is 31 this
evening (mostly on blogs, and counting my two earlier posts). Nexis
shows two mentions: One during "Hannity and Colmes" on Fox News on
Thursday and one in a short news item in a paper somewhere. Google News
shows one reference, Yahoo! News shows zero, and Google's search of
Usenet groups shows three (all Thursday). "Torturegate" doesn't appear
at all on two select indexes of blog content, Daypop and Blogdex.
OK, so that's today's unscientific take on one new word. However, some
people are trying to be a little more scientific about how new words
and ideas spread in cyberspace. Wired News has a story today called "How the Word Gets Around," on an experiment to follow the spread of a new meme
online. After reading the article, I'm not sure what the project
proves, because it started out as and invited people to participate as
a sort of self-conscious exercise. It'd be more interesting to trace an
idea that just sort of gets thrown into the collective consciousness.
Like "torturegate."
9:55:17 PM
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© Copyright 2004 Dan Brekke.
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