Yahoo Closes Online Magazines, a Costly Experiment by Marissa Mayer GOEL, VINDU . New York Times (Online) , New York: New York Times Company. Feb 17, 2016. ProQuest document link ABSTRACT Yahoo told dozens of employees at 15 digital publications that they were losing their jobs, part of a larger plan to cut the work force by 15 percent. FULL TEXT SAN FRANCISCO — Marissa Mayer , the embattled chief executive of Yahoo , is gutting one of her signature projects : A cluster of digital magazines devoted to topics like food, autos, real estate, travel and technology. Yahoo notified dozens of writers and editors at the 15 publications on Wednesday that they were losing their jobs as part of the Internet company’s broader plan, announced last month, to cut 15 percent of its work force . Some of the topics that the magazines had covered will be folded into Yahoo News. Yahoo will still produce some original content in areas like tech and fashion. But articles on topics like food and autos, whose publications lost all of their staff, will be republished from other websites. “It’s kind of a blood bath over here,” said one employee who was laid off, who requested anonymity because talking to the media could jeopardize her severance package. “Only a handful of people are staying.” Ms. Mayer bet heavily on the magazines as a key to reinventing Yahoo as a premium destination for readers and advertisers. She devoted significant engineering resources to adapt Tumblr, Yahoo’s blogging network, to host the magazines. She also spent millions of dollars hiring celebrity talent like Bobbi Brown, founder of the cosmetics line that bears her name; Joe Zee, formerly the creative director of Elle; and David Pogue, a best-selling author of personal technology books and a former columnist for The New York Times. Ms. Brown is leaving the company, but Mr. Zee and Mr. Pogue are staying, according to a Yahoo spokeswoman. In a 2014 interview , Ms. Mayer laid out her vision for the magazines as a rich medium for storytelling and advertising. “You can layer in video. You can change the content. You can bring in the social aspect. You can tell someone, ‘Oh, by the way, your friend also read this article and thought it was interesting,’ ” she said. “A magazine, all 10 million copies have to be the same. Digitally, you can personalize it. You can put different advertisements that are more meaningful to the users in each one.” In reality, Yahoo’s personalization technology never reached that level of sophistication. The editors of the magazines were constantly fighting with the people who ran Yahoo’s home page to get prominent display for their work. The home page editors, relying on reader data and computer algorithms, preferred to run articles licensed by Yahoo from other sites because they drew more traffic. The magazines also struggled to draw in relevant advertising. Virtually none of them were profitable, according to a person with knowledge of their finances, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the company considers that data to be confidential. Martha Nelson, global editor in chief of Yahoo and head of its media properties, declined an interview request. PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 1 of 4 But in a blog post on Tumblr , she said that Yahoo was closing its magazines on food, health, parenting, crafts, travel, autos and real estate. Some of the cuts were effective immediately; others are being phased in. “As we make these changes, we acknowledge the talent and dedication of an extraordinary group of journalists who brought new and newsworthy content to Yahoo,” she wrote. “While these digital magazines will no longer be published, you will continue to find the topics they covered, as well as style, celebrity, entertainment, politics, tech and much more across our network.” Yahoo Tech, introduced with great fanfare by Ms. Mayer at the International CES Show two years ago, will continue to exist for the moment with a smaller staff, including Mr. Pogue, although its content will eventually be folded into Yahoo News. In a farewell note to the Yahoo Tech staff that was published by Politico , its editor, Dan Tynan, said, “I am sure that bigger and better things await all of us. As for Yahoo, I am sure it will continue to be Yahoo, for better or worse. And some day we’ll all have a good laugh about it. Just not this week.” Source URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/technology/yahoo-closes-online-magazines-a-costlyexperiment-by-marissa-mayer.html?partner=bloomberg Credit: VINDU GOEL DETAILS Subject: Print advertising; Magazines; Celebrities; Writers; Consumer electronics; Electronic periodicals Identifier / keyword: Yahoo! Inc Layoffs and Job Reductions Magazines News and News Media Mayer, Marissa URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/technology/yahoo-closes-online-magazines-acostly-experiment-by-marissa-mayer.html?partner=bloomberg Publication title: New York Times (Online); New York Publication year: 2016 Publication date: Feb 17, 2016 Section: technology Publisher: New York Times Company Place of publication: New York Country of publication: United States, New York Publication subject: General Interest Periodicals–United States Source type: Blogs, Podcasts, &Websites Language of publication: English Document type: Blogs, Podcasts &Websites PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 2 of 4 ProQuest document ID: 1765712940 Document URL: https://search.proquest.com/docview/1765712940?accountid=36783 Copyright: Copyright 2016 The New York Times Company Last updated: 2016-02-19 Database: ProQuest Central PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 3 of 4 Bibliography Citation style: APA 6th – American Psychological Association, 6th Edition GOEL, V. (2016). Yahoo closes online magazines, a costly experiment by marissa mayer. Database copyright ? 2019 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Terms and Conditions Contact ProQuest PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 4 of 4 Women’s magazines are dying. Will we miss them when they’re gone? Ramanathan, Lavanya . The Washington Post (Online) , Washington, D.C.: WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post. Dec 31, 2018. ProQuest document link FULL TEXT In late November, Glamour came to the same conclusion reached by so many other women’s magazines these days: After 80 years in mailboxes and grocery store checkouts, it will stop publishing its glossy monthly, ending with the January issue. For Glamour, print is officially dead, the inexorable “pivot to digital” now complete. Teen Vogue, a junior version of the fashion bible, was already there. Self, purveyor of 1,000 ways to say goodbye to your back fat, disappeared from the racks in 2017. Seventeen, once a lifestyle primer for high school girls everywhere, now will publish only special issues, and Redbook, one of the “Seven Sisters” of magazines for suburban housewives, is high-tailing it to the Web as well. The magazine industry as a whole has been belt-tightening for years thanks to a print advertising famine, eliminating costly paper copies while trying to establish a beachhead on the Internet. Yet women’s publications somehow feel much more endangered than the rest, especially now that even the woke online upstarts that once aimed to replace them —sites such as the Hairpin, Rookie and the Toast —are themselves turning off the lights. From Ladies’ Home Journal (still hanging in there, but downgraded to a quarterly) to email-based Lenny Letter (extinguished this fall, after a wild three years), these publications helped mold tastes, define mainstream feminism (as well as femininity) and give talented female journalists a leg up into highflying media careers. Their demise feels like a loss —but is it? For generations, women’s magazines filled a complex cultural niche, adopting the voice of a concerned big sister to chide women into keeping up with the current hemlines —but also the current headlines. One Sassy cover touted a piece explaining why Israelis and Palestinians would never achieve peace and another on why women really ought to pout more. Jane told women how to wear jeans to work without getting fired. You could read a somber article about abusive boyfriends, or kill time with a quiz about your flirting style. The glossies were relatable, visually pleasing and useful all at once —a tactile, addictive habit. “You could tear out the page and say, ‘This is the haircut I’m going to bring to my hairdresser,’ ” says Lisa PecotHébert, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School. “There was just something about a glossy, to read and engage with.” Even if you didn’t subscribe, dog-eared copies of Marie Claire and Good Housekeeping and Seventeen found their way to you —at the doctor’s office, at a friend’s apartment, in a middle-school classroom. For every copy of a thick glossy that landed in a mailbox, there was usually not one but several readers. It was the homemaking magazines, beginning with McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal in the late 1800s, that spurred the craze for women’s tips and advice. Glamour, initially a Hollywood gossip rag, followed in 1939. Seventeen, which offered the same formula for the not-quite-yet-a-woman set, dispatched its first issue in 1944. Cosmopolitan homed in on a female audience in 1965, when Helen Gurley Brown took the helm of the dusty literary magazine and unveiled a brand intertwined with sex and feminism; among the first stories she edited was one about the pill. “At a time when mainstream media didn’t pay attention to issues that mattered to women, they were a place that PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 1 of 5 could bring attention to those things,” says Harriet Brown, a Syracuse University magazine journalism professor whose own career took her, briefly, to Redbook. In 1966, Glamour was the first fashion magazine to feature a black woman, Katiti Kironde, as the cover model, a gesture toward inclusion amid the civil rights movement. In 1976, dozens of editors of women’s and teen magazines agreed to cover the Equal Rights Amendment, with stories that would reach their collective 60 million readers. In the 1990s, Self launched the now-ubiquitous pink ribbon campaign to raise awareness of breast cancer. And back when you could still clutch the miniature Teen Vogue in your hands, the magazine delivered one of the most talked-about op-eds of the 2016 election, titled “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.” In their heyday, these publications also offered a pipeline for the nation’s best female journalists. Joan Didion worked for Vogue in the 1960s. Susan Orlean and Gloria Steinem wrote for Glamour. Good Housekeeping published Betty Friedan, who used her word count to . . . not-so-subtly eviscerate women’s magazines. These publications gave us iconic editors such as Brown and Anna Wintour, not to mention a sea of lesser-known ladybosses. Thumb through old issues of women’s magazines, says Katie Sanders, a freelance journalist who writes for several women’s magazines, “and you see how a woman’s role in history is not only changing, but how Glamour and some of the other women’s magazines were driving that change.” Still, these magazines battled a sense that they were somehow lesser. “A lot of it was sexism, and people not taking them seriously because they were meant for women,” says Andrea Bartz, a novelist who worked at five such magazines, all of which have folded their print editions. “But men’s magazines —they were allowed to have a grooming section and a clothing section, and that was fine.” Plenty of the criticism leveled at the magazines came from women themselves. In 1990, Gloria Steinem announced that Ms. magazine would part company with all of its advertisers; she also took a swipe at what she saw as the cynical mission of other women’s magazines: “to create a desire for products, teach how to use products, and make products a crucial part of gaining social approval, pleasing a husband, and performing as a homemaker.” On one 1959 cover, Glamour trumpeted that “9 out of 10 American women can be more beautiful.” Cosmopolitan in 1966 offered its readers a “Poor Girl’s Guide to America’s Rich Young Men” and “New, Kooky (but Workable) Cures for Frigidity.” But the rise of feminism in the ’70s and the have-it-all aspirations of the ’80s hardly changed a thing. A 2016 Marie Claire cover still hawked Brazilian secrets for better hair and Korean solutions for skin care. Many critics believe women’s magazines clung far too long to the problematic formula Steinem described, pummeling readers with messages that their bodies were less than desirable and that their boyfriend’s eyes probably wandered and that only products could fill the void. They are much more diverse now, Pecot-Hébert says, but through the ’80s and ’90s, “You still had that Westernized, ‘beautiful’ person on the cover of the magazine. Whether that person was discussing recipes or that person was selling a bathing suit, there was that same kind of woman that I don’t know if most women could identify with.” They also often felt the same. Most of the widest-read titles shared the same publishers —Condé Nast, Meredith and Hearst. Writers and editors, too, seemed to shuffle from one glossy to another, in a great big game of ladymedia musical chairs. The magazines’ insistence on the status quo, even as womanhood changed dramatically, led them to irrelevance, Brown says. In an era of radical body acceptance and umpteenth-wave feminism, “I don’t want to read 2,500 articles a year on how to lose 10 pounds or get rid of my love handles. It’s reductive, and it’s superficial.” Their formula is also everywhere these days. What women’s magazines once delivered to readers from New York to Topeka to Sacramento —the girlfriend-style advice, the gospels of orgasms and equal pay, the reminders to always be dieting —can now be found many places online, from the #fitspo posts on Instagram to junior-feminist sites such as Jezebel, which has elbowed in on coverage of pop culture, #MeToo and the workplace. Makeup bloggers and YouTube influencers now dictate the Next Big Lipstick Color and how to get that no-makeup makeup look. Culinary sites such as Food52 have cornered what the lady rags used to call “cookery,” with none of the gendered notions about who does the cooking. And lowPDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 2 of 5 stakes, cheerfully unscientific personality quizzes? Now, there’s BuzzFeed for that. And, of course, some of stuff you once loved can be found online under the same old banners of yore, as legacy titles try to find new life as Web products. Cosmo’s website lures more than 19 million unique visitors a month, according to Comscore, and Glamour can attract more than 6 million. The old brands are drawing YouTube followers with original videos, and with the viral success of pieces such as Teen Vogue’s gaslighting essay, embracing anew the brisk, women-focused political reporting that made them must-reads a couple decades ago. Their mystique certainly lives on: “The Bold Type,” a TV dramedy inspired by the life of former Cosmo editor Joanna Coles, just taped its third season. But some fear for what will be lost in the transition. The old magazines “had fact-checkers on staff,” Bartz says. “They had a team of people whose job was to verify every detail in the magazine. . . . Everything those magazines were telling me about at the time —nutrition or sexual assault statistics or mental health —it was coming from legitimate sources, and it was verified by the staff there.” Even if they could still afford that level of rigor, the time when the glossies were one of the most influential resources in women’s lives has come and gone. “This whole industry is on a wild roller-coaster ride,” Syracuse’s Brown says. She’s skeptical of the assumption that print magazines are doomed. But titles in the women’s sector —a Better Homes and Gardens vs. a Good Housekeeping, say —have always struggled to differentiate from each other. “I guess in the stock market they call it ‘a correction,’ ” she says. “There’s a lot of overlap. In a different media climate, maybe they could survive, but this one won’t support it.” •avanya.ramanathan @washpost.com Credit: By Lavanya Ramanathan DETAILS Subject: Journalism; Feminism; Women; Sex crimes; Magazines People: Steinem, Gloria Company / organization: Name: Good Housekeeping; NAICS: 511120; Name: Redbook; NAICS: 511120; Name: Teen Vogue; NAICS: 511120; Name: YouTube Inc; NAICS: 519130 Publication title: The Washington Post (Online); Washington, D.C. Publication year: 2018 Publication date: Dec 31, 2018 Dateline: 2018123123000400 Section: STYLE Publisher: WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post Place of publication: Washington, D.C. Country of publication: United States, Washington, D.C. PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 3 of 5 Publication subject: General Interest Periodicals–United States ISSN: 26419599 Source type: Blogs, Podcasts, &Websites Language of publication: English Document type: News ProQuest document ID: 2162377283 Document URL: https://search.proquest.com/docview/2162377283?accountid=36783 Copyright: Copyright WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washing ton Post Dec 31, 2018 Last updated: 2019-01-02 Database: ProQuest Central PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 4 of 5 Bibliography Citation style: APA 6th – American Psychological Association, 6th Edition Ramanathan, L. (2018). Women’s magazines are dying. will we miss them when they’re gone? Database copyright ? 2019 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Terms and Conditions Contact ProQuest PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 5 of 5 Purchase answer to see full attachment

Mastering the Art of Online Learning: Your Guide to Acing Online Courses

Introduction

In recent years, the popularity of online courses has skyrocketed, offering learners the flexibility to acquire new skills and knowledge from the comfort of their homes. However, succeeding in online courses requires a different approach compared to traditional classroom settings. To help you make the most of your online learning experience, this article presents essential strategies and tips to ace your online courses.

1. Set Clear Goals and Plan Ahead

Before embarking on an online course, establish clear goals and objectives. Determine what you hope to achieve by the end of the course and break down your goals into manageable milestones. Create a study schedule that aligns with your other commitments, ensuring you allocate dedicated time for coursework, assignments, and revision.

2. Create a Productive Study Environment

Establishing a conducive study environment is crucial for online learning success. Find a quiet, well-lit space where you can concentrate without distractions. Remove any potential interruptions, such as notifications from social media or email. Organize your study materials and have a reliable internet connection to ensure seamless access to course materials.

3. Actively Engage in the Course

Active participation is key to mastering online courses. Engage with course materials, including videos, readings, and interactive components. Take comprehensive notes, highlighting key concepts and ideas. Participate in discussion boards, forums, and virtual meetings to interact with instructors and peers, fostering a sense of community and enhancing your understanding of the subject matter.

4. Manage Your Time Effectively

Online courses offer flexibility, but it’s essential to manage your time wisely to avoid falling behind. Create a detailed schedule, allocating specific time slots for coursework, assignments, and studying. Break down larger tasks into smaller, manageable segments to prevent procrastination. Prioritize tasks based on deadlines and dedicate focused time to each one, ensuring consistent progress throughout the course.

5. Develop Effective Communication Skills

Online courses often rely on written communication, making it crucial to hone your skills in this area. Be concise and clear in your written responses, paying attention to grammar and spelling. Actively participate in discussions, asking thoughtful questions and providing constructive feedback to your peers. Regularly check your course emails and notifications, ensuring you stay updated with any important announcements or changes.

6. Utilize Available Resources

Take full advantage of the resources provided by your online course platform and instructors. Familiarize yourself with the learning management system (LMS) and explore its features. Access supplementary materials, such as textbooks, lecture slides, and external resources recommended by instructors. Utilize online libraries, research databases, and tutorial services to deepen your understanding of the subject matter.

7. Stay Motivated and Engaged

Maintaining motivation throughout an online course can be challenging, particularly when faced with competing priorities or a lack of face-to-face interaction. Set short-term goals and reward yourself upon their completion. Connect with fellow learners through virtual study groups or online forums to foster a sense of camaraderie. Regularly remind yourself of the benefits and personal growth associated with completing the course successfully.

8. Seek Support and Clarification

Don’t hesitate to seek support or clarification when needed. Reach out to your instructors for guidance or clarification on course material. Utilize online discussion forums to ask questions or engage in collaborative problem-solving. Leverage the support services provided by your course platform or institution, such as technical support or academic advising.

Conclusion

Online courses present unique opportunities for self-paced learning and personal growth. By setting clear goals, creating a productive study environment, actively engaging with course materials, and managing your time effectively, you can maximize your chances of acing online courses. Remember to stay motivated, seek support when needed, and make the most of the available resources. Embrace the flexibility and adaptability of online learning to achieve your educational goals.