The parts of the C-suite that oversee actual day-to-day operations of the sites - a small group, maybe two to four people - are impulse, paranoid, and never tell anyone under them anything until they've already made a decision, leading a lot of editors to have to react to writers angry at decisions made about their paygrade without their knowledge. These two-to-four people are power hungry, resent giving anyone an ounce of autonomy, want to micromanage everything, and yet never coming to meetings remotely prepared for an ounce of pushback. (No joke, they'll have meetings about what will generate better traffic and not have any traffic data ready.) They're also penny pinchers of the highest order. They regularly make promises they refuse to keep -- promoting someone without pay with the promise that good performance will see a raise, only for the raise to never come due to corporate buzzword BS, or not give you an annual bonus because they only gives those to people who worked a full year (even if you worked 51 weeks) or moving people out of positions they're good at because they don't meet some never-agreed-upon mysterious metrics and just letting them rot despite promises to find somewhere for them. This is a company that will deny you a promised raise AND demand that you do even more work on literally the same day. And then after they cost you money or break promises or make your job harder, they expect you to just get over it and never address it directly. They frequently ask you to do large tasks, up to and including shifting hours and job titles, and offer literally no incentive besides "the company will like it." About 99% of requests will go up to those same two to four people, and almost all of them come back down "no." It can take months to get answers from the higher ups - not even straight answers, just any kind of answer, about anything. Every editor spent months banging the drum that the company was hiring too much, and the second ad rates got shaky, they found a way to blame the writers and fire a bunch of them. It's also nearly impossible to take them seriously when they say "we're over budget" or "we need to cut writer and editor hours" when every few months, they magically find the money to acquire another site. It's also clear that the company is weirdly defensive about the hiring team and the video team, because they mess up constantly and never face any consequences. And frankly, as long as the company is still functionally run by these same two to four people, I expect it to get worse and more paranoid, not better... but I don't see them being held accountable for their lies and manipulation any time soon.
