Cheese Went Bad: Cheddar’s Terrible PR and Worse Vibes from the New Boss
This one is no longer the rock bottom of the recent of media layoffs (thanks to The Messenger), but it is still cruel.
It is nothing new these days when you hear about media acquisitions, layoffs, and cost cutting measures (especially this month), but the news about the acquisition of Cheddar by PE-backed media company Archetype in early January caught my attention. I first thought it was odd that a publishing company most well-known for the publication Military Times would be interested in Cheddar, but what really struck me was what happened next. Less than a week after Archetype’s PE daddy Regent acquired the network from Altice, they began furloughing the staff. I was a fan of the original Cheddar format and like other media watchers had been saddened by the long, slow goodbye happening with the network for some time. But this news seemed like a new low and a bad PR move/look by their new corporate overlords.
Thanks to Alden Capital, the media business is familiar with the myriad of ways PE firms introduce “efficiencies” to the newsroom and by the looks of it, the furloughs were something planned long before the ink dried on the contract. But was it really in Regent/Archetype’s best PR interest to announce furloughs so quickly after the acquisition, especially during the transition from the holiday season to the New Year? That doing something like this only reinforces the perception that PE firms have no heart, are all bottom line, and don’t care about destroying media properties? I want to give their corp. comms person the benefit of the doubt, that they may have raised this issue when the timing was decided, but I can’t confirm if they even have one (researched, couldn’t find a press release on the announcement).
More importantly, what does a move like this mean for media employers (PE backed or otherwise) who treat their employees with this kind of callousness – especially ones they don’t even know so well? This may just be a harbinger of things to come when you have more people interested in journo jobs than those available and the looming threat of AI (ChatGPT generated TV anchors!) lingering in the air. It means that meeting the needs of the newsroom will continue take a backseat to efficiency.
Or perhaps investing in newsroom capital, human or otherwise, will still matter when and if the promise of new technology comes up embarrassingly short of editorial goals (cough, SI, cough)? Perhaps as more content/talent is computer generated, it will make the truly talented reporters stand out even more, thus making it harder to attract them to your publication if your company is known for treating its employees terribly.
I guess we’ll know soon enough when we start reading updates in Talking Biz News about the cool new jobs the soon-to-be former staff of Cheddar garnered.
First off—congrats on your first article for Goldmine, Scott!
Archetype's acquisition and swift furloughs of Cheddar staff is less about synergizing assets and more about showcasing the PE playbook's classic move: Profit over people. It's a harsh reminder that in the media chess game, employees are pawns, and AI's looming shadow might just replace the chessboard altogether.