"But the site started to show signs of struggle earlier this year when the Atlantic laid off CityLab’s dedicated business staff. “The writing’s been on the wall for a long time,” one of the staffers said about CityLab’s future with the Atlantic. Another staffer said that during the meeting Atlantic management had announcing its sale to Bloomberg Media, the management made it clear “that the company is really focusing on the Atlantic and that they just feel that they can’t focus and invest in CityLab to make it robust.”"
That's in the second to last paragraph in the article, which really makes this feel unfairly biased. If those jobs were doomed anyway, it's plausible that Bloomberg's saving several jobs that would be lost, instead of causing the loss of jobs as this title implies.
I think one issue I had as an occasional reader is that they were too invested in one perspective only.
Surely we need to study and be curious for things which can improve city life. There is a lot of good in that.
The one peeve I had is that "city-first PoV" made them a bit myopic and only wanted to see things though the lens of city life to the neglect of alternatives.
I agree with that and don’t have a problem with that but their attitude is “we’re right and they’re wrong and we'll make them”. CountryLife I would say wouldn’t be as ideological about how people should live their lives.
Not just city first, but young healthy people of a particular sociotype first. If everyone is just super healthy and rides bikes or scooters in the rain or 100 degree heat then we'll have amazing car free roads!
It's far saner to assume that all for-profit companies are in it to make money first and foremost, or will be eventually when they start to fail or have less scrupulous competition. From this starting point, and if you care to, you can then evaluate a company to get an informed opinion of whether or not they're doing "noble deeds", aligning with your interests, what you believe are societies interests, etc.
Assume your neighbours are noble by all means, but assuming all or even most large corporations are will lead to inevitable disappointment (or lessons learned).
I see a lot of the same with PE firms buying companies - "<PE firm> buys <beloved company that was failing> and lays off half the workers! Evil, evil PE firm!" Now obviously there's a fair amount of the time when PE firms do dividend recaps and other financial engineering that harm the companies, but there's plenty of time when they trim the fat from a failing company and save a lot of jobs. That doesn't make for a nice clickbaity headline, though.
That's in the second to last paragraph in the article, which really makes this feel unfairly biased. If those jobs were doomed anyway, it's plausible that Bloomberg's saving several jobs that would be lost, instead of causing the loss of jobs as this title implies.