In the news: Digiday.com examines how media professionals feel about returning to their physical offices.

With vaccination rates climbing, case numbers falling, and pandemic restrictions easing to varying degrees across the US, how do editors and publishers feel about returning to in-person work? Jessica Davies reports that “Digiday surveyed 329 people from across publishers, brand marketers, agencies and platforms, with the majority of respondents coming from publishers and agencies,” and the survey turned up a spectrum of feelings on the subject. Per the survey results, Davies says, “4% said they felt happy at the prospect, 31% said excited and 19% relieved. But 43% said they felt anxious, 9% said they were scared and 27% said they felt stressed by the prospect.”

Davies says that publishing and advertising professionals are likely to experience more uncertainty in the coming months as businesses solidify their visions for a post-pandemic future. And although 54% percent were happy, excited, or relieved at the idea of returning, Davies says that 55% are concerned that colleagues won’t follow masking and sanitizing protocols, and 50% are nervous about working alongside unvaccinated coworkers.

On top of all that, it can’t be ignored that the American concept of working life has changed, in some respects irreversibly. Companies that try to go back to total in-office work without any flexibility or remote work options will lose talent to companies with more flexible options. Read more about the Digiday survey results here.

Also Notable

AP Journalists Pushing Back against Firing

The firing this week of journalist Emily Wilder has sparked a lot of controversy online. After only a few weeks working for the Associated Press, she was fired for social media violations. Tom Jones of Poynter.org reports: “Wilder says she is being punished for past pro-Palestinian activism while in college and for the pushback against her hiring by conservative media and even Sen. Tom Cotton.” The firing was controversial enough to prompt AP journalists to write a joint statement calling out their employer on the firing itself and the AP’s lack of transparency regarding the decision. Read more here, and see the Columbia Journalism Review’s coverage here.

The Fragile Worldwide Web

Hyperlinks are an important component of online content. But, as John Bowers, Clare Stanton, and Jonathan Zittrain discuss in a recent CJR.org piece, web content can be volatile” “The fragility of the Web poses an issue for any area of work or interest that is reliant on written records,” they write. “Loss of reference material, negative SEO impacts, and malicious hijacking of valuable outlinks are among the adverse effects of a broken URL. More fundamentally, it leaves articles from decades past as shells of their former selves, cut off from their original sourcing and context.” And the problem goes far beyond broken URLs; as the writers point out, “returning a valid page isn’t the same thing as returning the page as seen by the author who originally included the link in an article,” an issue known as content drift. Bowers, Stanton, and Zittrain discuss their ideas for minimizing the impact of these web issues and others here.

Rumor: Condé Nast Moving to New Jersey?

Reportedly, publisher Condé Nast’s parent company is scouting out office options in Newe Jersey. Kathryn Hopkins of WWD.com says: “Advance Publications, the owner of Condé Nast, owes its landlord at One World Trade Center almost $10 million in rent, according to a new document by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.” Rent is significantly cheaper in Jersey, and the high price tag of Manhattan rent is tougher for publishers to justify in a post-pandemic world. “Condé Nast’s global chief of people, Stan Duncan, has informed employees in a memo that remote working will be “a larger part of our future workforce strategy,’” reports Hopkins. Read more here.

Add your comment.