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The phrase “pivot to video” has become a joke, shorthand for a media company’s last-ditch effort to turn things around before the layoffs begin.
“Today’s metrics are tomorrow’s punchlines, and yesterday’s pivot is today’s clumsy tumble,” Vice’s union tweeted on August 26, following the company’s elimination of 17 staffers across Vice and Refinery 29.
The layoffs were preceded, just a month earlier, by an announcement from Vice that it would “reduce the number of old-fashioned text articles on Vice.com, Refinery29 and another Vice-owned site, i-D, by 40 to 50 percent,” while increasing videos and visual stories on Instagram and YouTube “by the same amount.”
It all feels very five years ago. As we’ve documented, starting around 2016, Facebook executives including Mark Zuckerberg...