We're surprised HX Media has any employees left to fire. They just canned long-time expo producer, Steven Levenberg and gave four other employees the pink slip at the beginning of the year.
Now we hear that Matthew Bank has yet again sacked three more underlings: online editor Martyn Dunn, advertising director Brandon Schultz and graphic designer Christian Jensen. For those of you keeping count, that's eight this year. So, what the hell's going on over there? We don't know, but it can't be good.
What is good, however, is this week's interview between assistant editor Mark Peikert and Wilson Cruz, in which Cruz gabs about his role opposite Debbie Deborah Gibson in the new movie, Coffee Date. We won't give away what went down, but we will congratulate Peikert for having the best interview opener ever:
HX: I have to apologize because I’m sick and will be hacking in your ear.
Wilson Cruz: Babe, we’re gonna be hacking together, because I’m getting over a cold, too.
What a perfect addition to the rag's Valentine's issue – which, incidentally, also has a gift guide from another contributor, Jono.
(Note: We erroneously credited Ryan Doyle with the Cruz interview. It was actually Mark Peikert who hacked it up. Sorry, Mark. We love you.)
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Hey! I was NOT fired. Yes, Matthew wanted to lose some more heads, but i voluntarily resigned in order to save Ryan his job, or else he would have been the one to go (being the most junior, not because he'd done anything wrong). It was a noble and heroic act, thank you. Nothing to do with the fact that I'm moving to San Francisco and (hopefully) working for a gay porn company.
Martyn/HX/XX
Dudes chill with the HX hate. You don't like them. We get it, we get it, we get it. Besides, you don't mention that Jerry Beersdorf was RE-HIRED by the company this week.
The company is trying to make itself profitable because quite obviously the people who were doing sales in January weren't doing their jobs. With the graphics/editorial crew, they own publications in three cities with three separate staffs. You would think that they would consolidate them down to remove any double work and take advantage of skill sets across all three cities.
The wheels are definitely coming off this wannabe media empire. Consider this:
1) The Philly paper is bleeding cash
2) The parent company needs money so desparately that they recently accepted 80 cents on the dollar if their largest advertisers paid up their outstanding balances.
3) The Boston paper is in shambles with staff unrest, and the paper itself is 12 pages smaller than it was 3 months ago, and those are almost all ad pages.