Insider’s top editor warned staff at the clickbait news site of a “perfect storm trying to sink us” — just days after he was caught in a viral video that showed him tearing down pro-union posters that had targeted him during a punishing labor strike.
Editor in chief Nicholas Carlson — who last week was caught bicycling around his Brooklyn neighborhood ripping down posters that pictured him with the headline, “Have you seen this millionaire?” — told staffers in an internal memo on Thursday that he didn’t “want to bullsh-t you about where we are right now.”
“Traffic is down. Subs are down. Video views are down. That was true two weeks ago and has been for months,” Carlson wrote in the companywide message, which was leaked by a Semafor reporter on Twitter.
Carlson — who this week drawn mockery over the 56-second video that showed him wearing a bike helmet while frantically tearing down union flyers — also cited “giant forces beyond our control [that] have formed a perfect storm trying to sink us.”
Carlson pointed to Facebook “no longer sharing links,” a “sunk” Snapchat and people not “hanging on Trump’s every word anymore.” There is also “no more pandemic to demand you read the news everyday,” according to Carlson.
In the memo — which came one day after Insider resolved a nearly two-week strike over changes to health benefits — Carlson failed to mention how editors and even CEO Henry Blodget were forced to crank out clickbait during the writers’ strike in effort to shore up page views that dropped 19% month-over-month.
Carlson also moved to reconcile with disgruntled staffers, who on Wednesday were joined in protests outside Insider’s offices by Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, who was wearing a T-shirt saying, “Henry Blodget is a crook.”
“The last few weeks have been hard,” his message began in a clear nod to the strike that kicked off on June 2.
“The first step toward that is always remembering that our colleagues are humans and deserve to be treated with respect, even when you disagree with them,” he added.
During the strike, new subscriptions — a metric reporters are evaluated by — also fell from 985 new sign ups in the first five days in June from 1,291 for the first five days in May.
However, Carlson instead blamed external factors as reason for Insider’s declining statistics, noting that the newsroom is “in for a fight to earn our audience and earn our existence into the future.”
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He also expressed excitement about implementing a “smart paywall, which will ask people to pay only if a very smart algorithm thinks they are likely to pay,.”
Carlson thanked staffers who continued working despite the strike, and congratulated union members for landing the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) they wanted.
“Congratulations to those of you with an amazing CBA. You fought hard for it, and you deserve it,” he wrote.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
