In recent months there have been several cases of mass dismissal of workers through video calls. Without further ado, the company Better.com Zoom has laid off 900 workers. This is the first case that went viral not only because of the form, but also because of the content of the message delivered by the CEO in the communication, “If you are on this video call, you are fired. .”
A short time later, a company that buys and sells second-hand cars lays off about 2,500 employees. Another famous case Caravan A few months ago he held Zoom calls to say goodbye to 2,000 people.
Why is Gizmodo shutting down in Spanish?
We learned the Spanish version of the tech blog Gizmodo Closes its doors. As we already know, Gizmodo is one of the most read tech pages of all time, with a presence in many countries. However, the media crisis and falling advertising revenue put an end to the company’s plans in our country.
Gizmodo was founded in 2002 Peter Rojas, so we are talking about one of the veterans of the field. In 2005, VNU and Gawker Media partnered to launch the website across Europe, translating its content into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, although each country also had a local team to write news of interest.
Later, in 2016, it was acquired by Gizmodo Univision Communications Acquired Gawker Media after bankruptcy. Already in 2019 it was sold to Great Hill Partners. Now, after a few years, they have taken the drastic decision to abandon the Spanish version, and therefore, the entire local team that worked in our country.
The truth is that news is important because it is a powerful group within the media, but knowing all the employees in our country takes on another dimension. They were fired with a single video call. One might expect more from a company with a long history and experience in the publishing world.
Currently, the website continues to operate by using Automatic translation Contents in English. At the end of each output we can read the message: „This content was automatically translated from the original material. Due to the subtleties of machine translation, slight differences may occur». The big problem with this system is that the texts are often written with a specific audience (American) and reader (Spanish) in mind, so they often don’t make sense.
Another relevant point in this case is that it reveals Difficulties in the field of technology Usually this affects the media covering their news and analysis. As governments seem more busy with other types of websites, we cannot forget the little institutional support for this type of media.
