• Vox Media laid off at least 12 staffers at Vox.com, in the company's second round of cuts in about a month.
• The company also announced expanded duties for some top leaders.
• Vox Media faces challenges as advertisers move toward Big Tech platforms over news sites.

Vox Media laid off staff on Thursday for the second time in just over a month, this time at its general news and politics site Vox.com.

Vox Media didn't specify the number of people let go but said several teams were impacted in what was a "difficult but necessary step as the industry evolves." The Writers Guild of America, East, which represents the Vox newsroom, said the layoffs included 12 of its members. The Vox Media Union had 256 members across Vox Media sites before the new cuts.

Vox Media also announced a raft of leadership changes Wednesday, expanding duties for two top leaders as it looks to diversify its business. Pam Wasserstein was named copresident and vice chair of Vox Media and will serve as CEO Jim Bankoff's "strategic partner." She'll continue to oversee New York, Vox, and Vox Media Studios.

Revenue head Ryan Pauley also added responsibilities. He was named copresident, adding oversight of the lifestyle brands and the podcast business and production. He continues to oversee advertising, commerce, consumer revenue, and marketing.

"These changes will create clearer focus, faster decision making, and increased executive capacity for tackling larger strategic questions," Jim Bankoff wrote in a company email viewed by Business Insider. "This is particularly important given our complex, multi-brand environment."

In December, Vox Media laid off staff at its lifestyle titles Thrillist, PS (formerly Pop Sugar), and Eater and said that Thrillist would be operated by Eater going forward.

At the time, Bankoff said the company would focus on areas where it saw the most opportunity, including building direct audiences and its Vox Media Podcast Network. Vox Media also recently put its tech-focused property, The Verge, behind a paywall.

Vox Media grew out of the boom in digital media, raising more than $400 million from investors, including NBCUniversal and General Atlantic. It styled itself as the Condé Nast of digital, with a collection of websites devoted to news and lifestyle topics. Its last funding round was in 2023 when it raised $100 million from Penske Media in a deal that made Penske the biggest shareholder with 20%, The New York Times reported.

As investor interest in digital media soured generally, Vox Media rolled up other properties, including New York Magazine, Group Nine Media, and NowThis (which it later spun off).

Vox Media, along with many of its digital-media contemporaries, has faced challenges as digital advertisers flock to Big Tech platforms.

Here's Wednesday's full memo from Bankoff:

Team,

I hope that you all had restful time off over the holidays and were able to recharge. First, my thoughts are with everyone affected by the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles - please stay safe and vigilant as conditions develop. If you need support, please reach out to your People BP.

I'm writing to share an update on new responsibilities for Pam Wasserstein and Ryan Pauley. These changes are focused only at the leadership level, and do not impact any day-to-day operations.

Pam Wasserstein will expand her scope and grow our leadership capacity by serving as my strategic partner, as co-president and vice chair of Vox Media, working directly with me on strategic initiatives and areas of opportunity to best position our company in the changing and tumultuous media environment. In this role she will also work closely with Shyra Smart, our chief development and strategy officer, Sean Macnew, our CFO, and our general counsel Brian Leung, all of whom will continue reporting to me.

Already our company president and a member of our board since we merged with New York Media in 2019, Pam is also being elevated to vice chair. New York Magazine, Vox, and Vox Media Studios will continue to report up to Pam.

Ryan Pauley will also grow his responsibilities in the new position of co-president of Vox Media. Ryan is adding oversight of our lifestyle brands (Eater, Thrillist, PS), The Verge, Polygon, SB Nation, and The Dodo to his remit. Their group publishers will report to him. He will work closely with these leaders to continue to build industry-leading editorial brands.

The podcast business team led by Ray Chao, and the podcast production team led by Nishat Kurwa, will also report to Ryan. The advertising, commerce, and consumer revenue business lines, as well as marketing, will continue to separately report to Ryan.

Pam and Ryan have been invaluable partners to me as we've built this business in a rapidly shifting climate, and they both have a deep understanding and immense appreciation of our work. These changes will create clearer focus, faster decision making, and increased executive capacity for tackling larger strategic questions. This is particularly important given our complex, multi-brand environment. I believe that these expanded roles will best leverage Pam and Ryan's unique strengths and areas of expertise.

I look forward to working together this year to produce more outstanding work and achieve our ambitious goals. I am grateful, as always, for your contributions.

Jim

Here's a tasty little offer for the audiobook buffs (or would-be audiobook buffs) out there. Newcomers to Audible can get three months of access to the Premium Plus plan for $1 per month, or a total of $3. Given that the subscription typically costs $14.95 per month, you can save nearly $42 compared with the regular price.

This is a reprise of Audible's Black Friday deal. It's available until January 21.

This is a solid deal for either yourself or someone special in your life who loves books. The Audible Premium Plus plan gives you one credit a month to unlock any audiobook of your choosing. You'll retain access to those audiobooks even after your subscription lapses.

Along with that, Premium Plus subscribers get access to a library of other audiobooks they can listen to while their plan remains active. The service also includes a string of Audible Originals as well as podcasts. That's not bad at all for a buck a month. If, after a couple of months, you decide Premium Plus isn't for you, you can always cancel the plan before the price jumps up.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Most scientific literature is published in for-profit journals that rely on subscriptions and paywalls to turn a profit. But that trend has been shifting as various governments and funding agencies are requiring that the science they fund be published in open-access journals. The transition is happening gradually, though, and a lot of the historical literature remains locked behind paywalls.

These paywalls can pose a problem for researchers who aren't at well-funded universities, including many in the Global South, which may not be able to access the research they need to understand in order to pursue their own studies. One solution has been Sci-Hub, a site where people can upload PDFs of published papers so they can be shared with anyone who can access the site. Despite losses in publishing industry lawsuits and attempts to block access, Sci-Hub continues to serve up research papers that would otherwise be protected by paywalls.

But what it's serving up may not always be the latest and greatest. Generally, when a paper is retracted for being invalid, publishers issue an updated version of its PDF with clear indications that the research it contains should no longer be considered valid. Unfortunately, it appears that once Sci-Hub has a copy of a paper, it doesn't necessarily have the ability to ensure it's kept up to date. Based on a scan of its content done by researchers from India, about 85 percent of the invalid papers they checked had no indication that the paper had been retracted.

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Gather ‘round and let me tell you a story about the dark sky that makes mid-afternoon feel like midnight, and the light source that makes it at all bearable. Once a year, winter appears with a quick chill of the ears and sudden craving for a vat of hot chocolate. It brings all things beautiful: holiday lights, white blankets of snow in the park and thoughtful gifts. But it also invites in the cold and heaping amounts of darkness. I came of age in upstate New York, where sunlight is gone by half past four in the afternoon the entirety of December and January. That’s to say this isn’t a new phenomenon for me, but that hasn’t made it any less painful. In fact, it has caused a feeling of dread that starts popping up come late September.

But when I moved to Scotland, 4:30PM became nearly 3PM and the sun didn’t fully rise until well after I’d woken up. Even in London where I’m now based, it’s easily dark by 4PM on the shortest days. Like most people, the darkness leaves me exhausted while taking a serious toll on my mental health.

Now to the hero of this story: my SAD lamp. SAD stands for seasonal affective disorder, a depressive disorder triggered by the change of seasons (usually the darker days, though some people experience it in the summer). You by no means need to receive a SAD diagnosis to use a SAD lamp, bright light therapy lamp or wake-up lamp — all names for the same thing.

I bought Lumie’s Vitamin L bright light therapy lamp a few years ago ahead of my first Scottish winter and have used it every year since. The Vitamin L lamp is a slim rectangle that provides 5,000 lux at a foot away or 2,500 lux at about an arm’s length. The latter is the recommended distance for use and more or less how far it sits from me. It’s just shy of eight inches wide with a length of 11 inches and a depth of just over three inches. It can stand in portrait or landscape orientation, too, though I find it doesn’t balance very well in the latter. The light makes up the entire front panel and has a simple power button on the back.

The lamp lives on the floor next to my kitchen table, where I’ll prop it up nearly every morning while having breakfast or starting work. As a big fan of sleeping in, I rarely use it on the weekends unless I’m getting up early to run somewhere and I typically forget or get busy in the morning at least one workday. But when I do have it on, I’ll keep it shining at me from an angle for 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how much time I have.

Sarah Fielding / Engadget

This light is far from an extra table lamp to add a little glow. It’s a very — I repeat for good measure — very bright light. And yet, despite it practically being imitation sunlight, there’s no UV rays to worry about. It really does wake me up just from how bright it is and the daily routine adds a nice structure to busy, cold mornings.

I’ve never received a SAD diagnosis but I do have a panic disorder that causes anxiety and bouts of depression, the latter of which is more prominent during these cold, dark days. I don’t know how much of it is the lamp and how much is a placebo, but it really does help keep my negative feelings at bay and makes the dark days — a bit — more bearable.

Overall, if you dread the darkness of the winter months as much as I do, I highly recommend trying this Lumie lamp or exploring one of the other options on the market. Just the habit of turning it on most days makes me feel like I’m doing something to combat the dreariness. Plus, it really is hard to be tired when there’s a bright light shining near you.

We may be a bit technology-obsessed here, but the Engadget team does occasionally get around to low-tech activities, like reading. Well, some of us read on ereaders or our smartphones, but you get the point — books are great, and we read some exceptional ones this year that each deserve a shoutout. These are some of the best books we read in 2024.

The publisher of a high-profile, now-corrected study on black plastics has been removed from a critical index of academic journals after failing to meet quality criteria, according to a report by Retraction Watch.

On December 16, Clarivate—a scholarly publication analytics company—removed the journal Chemosphere from its platform, the Web of Science, which is a key index for academic journals. The indexing platform tracks citations and calculates journal "impact factors," a proxy for relevance in its field. It's a critical metric not only for the journals but for the academic authors of the journal's articles, who use the score in their pursuit of promotions and research funding.

To be included in the Web of Science, Clarivate requires journals to follow editorial quality criteria. In an email to Ars Technica, Clarivate confirmed that Chemosphere was removed for "not meeting one or more of the quality criteria." According to Retraction Watch, Chemosphere has retracted eight articles this month and published 60 expressions of concern since April.

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• Taylor Swift released "The Eras Tour Book" at Target on Friday.
• It instantly became Target's best-selling book of the year.
• The book had some issues, from typos to printing mistakes.

Black Friday was a Swiftie holiday this year — though it didn't bring every fan holiday cheer.

Taylor Swift released "The Eras Tour Book" along with a vinyl and CD version of "The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology" on Friday.

Eager fans lined up in the wee hours of the morning to get a copy. Business Insider spoke to shoppers who arrived at a Lynchburg, Virginia, store at 3 a.m. to ensure they could secure the book and vinyl album.

Amid the excitement of a new Swift product, some fans quickly pointed out that the book had multiple printing and layout errors. Publishing experts told Business Insider that Swift's decision to self-publish might have contributed to the hiccups.

Representatives for Swift, Target, and ST8MNT, the brand agency credited with art direction, design, and illustration, did not respond to requests for comment.

The 'Errors' Tour Book

Swift sidestepped traditional publishers for her 256-page coffee table book, publishing it through Taylor Swift Publications and selling it exclusively at Target for $39.99. It features over 500 images, some of which fans had never seen, and Swift's musings on the tour.

Following the book's release, some Swifties posted on social media about issues they noticed in their copies of "The Eras Tour Book" — or as they called it, "The Errors Tour Book," a nod to an inside joke between Swifties to refer to mistakes the singer made on the tour.

Some of these problems seemingly appear in multiple copies, like the "Folklore" song "This Is Me Trying" being listed as "This Is Me Rying" in a section about surprise songs. The same section lists "Gold Rush," a track from "Evermore," as one word, even though the song is two words.

Likewise, the book listed Swift's stop in Toronto as "November 14-16, 22-23," but she also played in the city on November 21.

Shoppers also questioned the book's layout and photos. A handful of pictures of Swift were arranged in a two-page spread with the singer in the center, which fans said made it difficult to see her.

Others said images in the book appeared slightly blurry, which made them wonder if they were stills from "The Eras Tour" film instead of high-resolution shots.

Aside from typos, Swift's written sections — including notes to the fans, paragraphs about each era of the tour, and information about her pre-show rituals — garnered mixed responses, with some expecting more insights from Swift herself despite it being largely marketed as a photo book.

Eryn Kieffer, a 23-year-old content creator and longtime Swiftie from Los Angeles, told BI she loved the sections Swift wrote but had anticipated more behind-the-scenes content.

"I thought there would be a lot more little blurbs about the making of the show," she said. "Not full essays, but like, 'Oh, here's me behind stage,' you know, little things and a few more behind-the-scenes pictures."

Still, Kieffer said she would have wanted the book even if she had known there wouldn't be as much behind-the-scenes content.

Many other fans also shared how much they loved the book on social media in the days after the book's release, regardless of production missteps.

Printing problems

The biggest problem with the book appeared to be printing issues in certain copies of Swift's book. The text was bleeding off the pages in some — though it's unclear if that was a stylistic choice — and others said they had books printed entirely upside down or with folds on random pages.

Erik Hane, the founder of Headwater Literary Management, told BI that working with a traditional publisher may have helped Swift avoid the typos and misprints.

"The errors being described are ones that a competent production department — or honestly, most production departments of any quality — at a traditional publisher would have caught and corrected before printing," he said.

"This is especially true for the quality and caliber of publishers that would have been available to Taylor Swift had she chosen to traditionally publish," Hane added.

Jessika Hazelton, manager and creative director at The Troy Book Makers, a book publisher based in Schodack Landing, New York, told BI that a rushed timeline could also have contributed to the errors.

"We often tell our clients there is no such thing as a perfect book," Hazelton said. "Even if the copy was well-edited, and everything was reviewed carefully before the book goes to print, it is possible for mistakes to slip through."

"For something like this 'Eras Tour Book,' I suspect there was a tight deadline to get the book out in time for the holidays, and it was not looked over as thoroughly as it might have been," she said.

Hane told BI that Swift's business reasons for self-publishing — like saving money and having total creative control — made sense. Still, the errors might be a side effect of that decision.

"This is one of the drawbacks of that choice: You don't get the production expertise that would have caught and corrected these mistakes and perhaps would have even added value to the physical package of the book in other ways we'll never know about," he said.

Traditionally published books can have errors, too

Traditionally published books aren't always error-free.

For instance, when Red Tower published Rebecca Yarros' "Iron Flame" in November 2023, readers said they received misprinted copies, sharing photos and videos of books printed backward or crooked.

Likewise, social media users shared that they received misprinted copies of Sally Rooney's "Intermezzo," published by the Macmillan imprint Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September.

Red Tower and Macmillan did not respond to requests for comment from BI.

Despite the misprints, Swift's decision to self-publish seemed to pay off from a business perspective.

A Target representative told BI that by 10 a.m. ET on Friday, just hours after it became available, "The Eras Tour Book" had become Target's highest-selling book of 2024. On Sunday, Swift also released a second stock of "The Tortured Poet's Department: The Anthology" vinyl at Target to meet fans' demand.

Spotify is expanding its audiobook selection thanks to a deal with publisher Bloomsbury, adding over 1,000 books from authors like Sarah J Maas, Alan Moore and Ann Patchett. The new titles are arriving just a day after Spotify introduced new tools for audiobooks, like playlists, visual accompaniments and a sleep timer. 

Some of the new audiobooks include fantasies for adults like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke), award winners including Cuddy by Benjamin Myers and kids adventure books like Katherine Rundell's Impossible Creatures. The new collection also includes non-fiction titles by historians like Peter Frankopan and Want, an anthology collected by Gillian Anderson. Narration will be performed by high-end talent like Meryl Streep, Emilia Clarke, Adjoa Andoh, and Jamie Lee Curtis. 

Spotify started offering audiobooks in the US a year ago, with Premium subscribers gaining access to 15 hours of content per month (that can be topped up with an additional 10 hours for $12.99). With the average audiobook being about 8-12 hours, subscribers to the $11 Premium tier will be able to listen to about a book per month. Spotify said today that it has paid "hundreds of millions of dollars to publishers on an annualized basis." 

Bloomsbury already offers its audiobooks on Amazon's Audible, with many of the titles mentioned above already available on that platform (Want, Cuddy and others). Depending on the audiobook, it may be cheaper to just buy it outright than topping up your Spotify account, if want to listen to multiple titles in a month. 

The Spotify audiobook experience has been lacking when compared to rivals like Audible, but it looks like that’s beginning to change. The streaming platform just announced a bevy of updates for audiobook listeners and some are downright useful.

Perhaps the biggest one for me is the addition of a sleep timer. Audiobooks are great for lulling people to sleep, but it sucks when you sleep through a hundred pages and can’t remember where you left off. The built-in sleep timer lets users set how long the content will play. This sleep timer already exists for podcasts and music.

Spotify users can also now make audiobook-specific playlists, helping people keep track of what they want to read or, uh, listen to. The platform says this tool will “help you keep your library organized” and that playlists will “be a place for you to aggregate the audiobooks on your reading list.” In addition to traditional playlists, the streamer will publish curated playlists from the audiobook editorial team.

There are new Countdown Pages, which are splash pages for forthcoming audiobooks. These let people save a book prior to the release date, making it easy to find once it actually comes out. Spotify says this feature can be used by authors, publishers, and narrators” to “help promote their upcoming titles ahead of launch.”

Spotify

Speaking of promotions, Spotify’s new Author Pages display biographical information on specific writers and will allow perusal of their entire catalogs. This is in a pilot program for now, with only a “select number of authors” having access to the tool. There’s also a new video player specifically for audiobooks, that lets "select authors and publishers submit a short video about a specific title.” The platform likens this to a book’s jacket, offering a “taste of an audiobook before pressing play.”

Finally, some audiobooks are getting a follow-along feature. This is described as an “immersive visual experience” akin to a music video that displays illustrations, photos and graphics as the audiobook is being read. Look for this in the “extras” section of eligible audiobooks.

Last year, Spotify began offering 15 hours of audiobook listening to Premium subscribers. There’s also a subscription specifically for audiobooks that costs $10 per month that provides 15 hours of listening. The Premium subscription, however, costs $12 per month and adds ad-free music to the mix. It’s good to know that humanity’s collective musical output is worth $2 per month.