BNB

Dan Leahul

Ouch, this one hits a little close to home. Reporting media redundancies is becoming a wearisome task, one has to ask where the bottom is? However, news out of the US that the excellent digital website Ars Technica is slashing nearly 50% of its staff is like pouring scalding lemon juice on a salty, open wound.

Part of the media empire that is Conde Nast, which is seriously, seriously in trouble, ad revenue down 30% in Q1 '09 and seemingly cutting staff every other day (folding its hip-hop rag King just yesterday), Ars Technica appeared to be immune from such shenanigans, simply for the high quality of its content.

Seven of Ars Technica's 17 staff were sent packing yesterday, unfortunately not a cruel April Fool's day joke, but a harsh reminder that the digital media's crooks and crannies are as open for perversion as those poor saps still working in print.

The layoffs were buffered with an unknown number of cuts from Wired's digital team too, although rumours say the Wired.com layoffs were limited to about three.

Is quality not enough anymore? Surely the cuts will have a dramatic effect on the website's editorial output, and what does it say for the highly anticipated launch of Wired UK when they are shuddering employees stateside?

Conde Nast's digital arm, CondeNet, purchased Ars Technica for $25m last May and merged it with its Wired digital business, which also included popular aggregator website Reddit.

Seemed like a decisive move for Conde at the time, for in 2008 Ars Technica was pulling in about 4m unique visitors every month.

It's assumed the acquisition resulted in some sort of redundant titles, and Conde Nast made its intentions clear in January that it was planning to drastically streamline its digital business, even consolidating the long-standing CondeNet, which had impressively remained independent since its launch in 1996.

The new entity, Conde Nast Digital, had an impressive roster and over 50m unique users, but represented an unproportionately small amount of big brother's revenue, less than 5%.

It appear Conde Nast was intent on 'waiting-out' the recession before making any drastic cost cutting measures... well the wait is over.

And it's a damn shame, because Ars Technica is a quality publication, and as Conde Nast makes it's moves, it's now us in the digital community who play the waiting game, to see how badly staff cuts like these effect editorial content.

Sound the bugle, is that Taps I hear lilting along the warm Spring air?