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The Implosion of Doubledown Media: A Media Destruction Tale
By Nick | February 6, 2009
For those perhaps too lazy to click over to the ‘About Nick’ page: I worked at Doubledown Media to within a week of its well-publicized demise. It let me travel to exotic destinations (Cuba, Capri, etc.), pick up a few mildly noxious habits (Cuban cigars, single-malt scotch, etc.) and desperately try to piece together a few drunken celebrities’ thoroughly inebriated ramblings.
But the magazines were also targeted towards a highly monetized Wall Street audience that played hard and spent hard, and a hefty chunk of that demographic is now shaking a change cup at the Union Square subway station.
The end did not come quickly. In late November, they laid off a chunk of the editorial department, and then called the rest of us into a windowless conference room. We were informed that our salaries from that point forward would be chopped in half. However, we would also be allowed to use the office space to freelance to our ink-stained wretches’ hearts’ content.
The reaction on the part of the ink-stained wretches, to say the least, was un-pretty.
After about two weeks of this “part-time work, part-time salary, full-time benefits,” I began to realize in an intellectual way what the crew of the Bounty felt right before they decided a change of management was in order; even for someone like me, whose lifestyle tends towards the minimalist, half-salary is a hard road to plod down. Even with the freelancing, the ghostwriting projects, and the book-writin’, the stray thought starts to intrude:
Should I really have another beer?
Can I actually bike to work?
Should I seriously consider growing my own food?
Of course, all of this was infinitely better than being outright unemployed, but the effect on office morale was crippling. It’s a testament to the professionalism of Doubledown’s editorial department – and I’m sure some version of this scenario has been replicated all over town, with every salary slash and outright magazine deletion – that everyone came in and did their jobs, and did them well.
You spend your life playing the office game. You come in early, and take on extra work, and stay late, on the belief that somehow the corporation will reciprocate – that the system will pay you back, someday, in exchange for the labor you expended in order to help build it. In a company like Doubledown, which ran like a string-and-duct-tape startup even as it expanded, that feeling is multiplied; you feel a queer sort of loyalty because, if you fail at whatever task, you’re affecting people you sit next to, and drink with, as opposed to some other drone half a planet away.
But then something happens, and the corporation – or the government, or whatever monolithic super-entity you want to plug into that slot – reveals its true nature: when the chips are down, it’ll be content to step back and let you bleed.
Vendors and freelancers started calling because they had gone unpaid for too many weeks; our accounting department was no longer picking up their ever-ringing phones or ever-flooded email boxes, and so they came to us. We had nothing to tell them.
I would come into the office at quarter of eight and the office would remain nearly empty until 10am. I worked on a lot of freelancing, churning though projects with my headphones blasting rock or orchestra-of-hundreds classical. I played YouTube clips from John Woo action movies with impunity in one corner of my screen and at six p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays, right when it was rolling around quitting time, I pulled a Mad Men and uncorked one of the bottles on my desk to celebrate the end of another slow, grinding week. Doubledown work got done, because with “only four issues coming out in 2009,” it wasn’t exactly that hard to churn out a work-piece every other day.
Christmas rolled around. The office Christmas tree was a dead branch shoved into a pot, and strung with sorry lights. The office Holiday Party took place in the conference room, with liquor and swag purloined from a cabinet somewhere; it was like some dictator’s final desperate, sweaty fete in a bunker, right before the invading force’s bombs come in.
At least I won the prize watch in the Holiday Party poker game. I won’t wear it, though; it sits in my desk drawer, like some blackmail photo you can’t keep around but can’t quite find the impetus to burn.
As the weeks rumbled by, nobody seemed to know what was going on. People who’d been laid off were brought back, on a freelance basis, to do spot-work on projects; then they were gone again. Financial told us that our expenses would be paid by X or Y date, and then those dates came and went with no check.
“Who wants to head in there and throw [our CFO] off a roof?” someone opined cheerily one morning; a sentiment held by many.
Then I left. I came back on the final day, after the story broke about Doubledown going under. It wasn’t the riot of looting that I expected, although one of the editorial assistants had cleaned the remaining cigar-boxes out of the humidors around my desk. Maybe they sold them on the street. Considering the company never paid them, that was sort of okay.
I did take a few bottles of high-priced liquor, though, and extra copies of those magazines with my cover interviews, and a box of La Flor Dominicana cigars that someone had overlooked. I left for the last time and trudged through the white static of New York snowfall back to my new office. Saved from my bulletin board, a photo of the Tuscan hills at dawn, snapped from the balcony of the Machiavelli family villa: vineyards, rising red sun, morning mist, peace.
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