Former Ozy staffers say that founder and CEO Carlos Watson’s demands, expectations, and plans were often detached from reality, yet were enforced with an intensity that some felt bordered on cruelty. ManvBrain reports
Photo: Kimberly White/Getty Images In the end, Ozy got the attention it always craved. The digital media site was founded in 2013 with the intention of breaking the mold of conventional media. But few of its stories ever got traction, and the site itself was rarely talked about.
It wasn’t fancy, but Ozy seemed an oasis in a media industry that for years had been shedding jobs by the thousands. Compared to other digital media outlets, salaries were fairly generous, and Ozy attracted a roster of veteran editors that included, albeit briefly, Jonathan Dahl of the Wall Street Journal and Fay Schlesinger of the Times of London.
Once a new employee was in the door, however, the rules had a way of changing. Crane was told during the application process that she could work remotely, but once she accepted the job, Ozy demanded that she get on a plane the next day and relocate to Mountain View. Another employee was told that she’d been hired to work on an editorial podcast, only to find after she’d completed the project that it was actually advertising.
Numerous former employees describe the environment as abusive and cultlike. A big part of that characterization is Ozy made it very hard for its workers to sleep. Editors were expected to turn out eight or nine pieces a week and have their stories polished and filed two weeks in advance. But it wasn’t enough to simply get one’s work done. Ozy wanted its employees to work long hours. Crane says that she would routinely start working at 7:30 a.m. and go until 1 a.m.
Even as Watson was running around telling advertisers and investors that Ozy had tens of millions of readers, staffers knew the truth. Each story had a counter at the bottom showing how many people had read it. “You work your ass off on a thing, and then it gets like 60 readers, you know?” says the former editor. “There was just no one there. It’s crickets.”For the publication’s editors and writers, it was demoralizing to work so hard and feel that their work was having no impact.
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