Good morning. 🗣️ Top talker: "How the Pandemic Will End," by The Atlantic's Ed Yong: "The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world," he writes. "This is how it’s going to play out."

• Barack Obama calls the article "a useful overview of the likely scenarios that the world will be facing in the coming months."

Join the Market: 🗞️ Newsletter | 🎙️ Podcast

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State of the Media

Journalists, brace for pay cuts

Moving the Market: BuzzFeed chief Jonah Peretti told employees on Wednesday that they will be forced to take pay cuts through May as the company suffers revenue losses because of the coronavirus pandemic. Peretti said he will forego his own salary entirely.

• What's next: BuzzFeed's move is likely a harbinger of what's to come for other major news organizations, especially those that were already struggling to turn a profit before the pandemic.

• "Sadly, I think Jonah’s ahead of the curve," Ben Smith, the former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief, who recently left to become the media columnist at The New York Times, told me.

• He's "doing something prudent that I fear a lot of newsrooms dependent on ad revenue will have to do."

The big picture: The economic uncertainty brought about by the pandemic is forcing businesses and brands to cut their advertising budgets, as I wrote yesterday. News outlets that rely on ad revenue are thus poised to take a major financial hit.

• The local news industry has already endured layoffs, and several papers have been forced to suspend publication. BuzzFeed's move suggests those cuts could be coming to national news sites as well.

By the numbers: BuzzFeed employees who are making less than $125,000 a year — roughly 70 percent of staff — will see a pay cut of less than 10 percent, per Peretti's memo to staff. Executives will take pay cuts between 14 and 25 percent of their current salaries.

• In the memo, Peretti said the company was "acting quickly now to avoid having to take even more painful measures later." BuzzFeed's union later commended him for "taking a proactive approach" to avoid future job losses." (Peretti declined an interview request.)

Bonus: Smith and I also talked about the coming trouble for media companies on the latest episode of The Byers Market Podcast: "If you’re in the advertising business, which both of our companies are... it’s going to be a horrible year," Smith said.

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Brave New World

Laid off en masse, by Zoom

Nightmare scenario: "On Tuesday morning, around 100 TripActions customer support and customer success team members dialed into a Zoom call. Many joined the call happily smiling, expecting another team meeting or bonding activity amid the new work from home culture," Protocol's Biz Carson reports.

• "Instead, according to people on the call... their boss launched into a spiel about the economy and coronavirus. Then she announced that everyone on the call was being laid off. 'People were crying and people were panicking,' said one employee. ... 'It was like 100 different videos of just chaos.'"

💻 Tele-Interview 💻

Speaking of teleconferencing, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri talks to my former CNN colleague Donie O'Sullivan about what it's like to manage one of the world's biggest social networks from a garage.

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Life Sans Sports

What is 'The Athletic' now?

Identity crisis: The Athletic co-founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann are facing "an unprecedented — and unthinkable — challenge" now that the coronavirus pandemic has cancelled virtually every major sport across the world, FT's Patricia Nilsson reports.

• The backstory: The subscription-based sports news site "was riding high" before the outbreak. It "had just been valued at about $500m after raising an additional $50m to hire more overseas reporters following its UK launch last August."

What's next: "Hansmann said he expected revenue growth to slow over the next few months and that readership numbers had fallen in recent days. ... But he added that he was 'cautiously optimistic' about The Athletic’s prospects, saying it had a 'clear line of sight to profitability.'"

Market Links

• Jensen Huang rides out the pandemic (Bloomberg)

• Daniel Ek raises up to $20M in coronavirus relief (Variety)

• Tony Hall suspends 450 job cuts at BBC to cover COVID-19 (BBC)

• Reed Hastings suffers a temporary Netflix outage (Recode)

• Vince McMahon may be forced to tap out (Bloomberg)

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Bad Content

Jack Dorsey pulls a tweet

Big in the Bay: Twitter chief Jack Dorsey pulled a tweet by The Federalist, a conservative online media outlet, for suggesting people should infect themselves with COVID-19 intentionally.

• Twitter prohibits tweets "that 'could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19," TechCrunch's Zack Whittaker writes.

The big picture: Social media companies have been aggressive and decisive in combating misinformation around the coronavirus, despite past struggles to combat misinformation generally.

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Misinformation Watch

TV news grapples with Trump

Big in the Beltway: News networks are wrestling with whether or not to broadcast President Donald Trump's media briefings on the coronavirus pandemic since much of his information is "ill informed, misleading or downright wrong," NYT's Michael Grynbaum writes.

• The challenge: The briefings are a "ratings hit," given widespread concern about the virus. "On Monday, nearly 12.2 million people watched Mr. Trump’s briefing on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, according to Nielsen — 'Monday Night Football' numbers."

• The tension has forced "internal debate about whether to carry the president’s appearances live and unfiltered."

The latest: Both CNN and MSNBC cut away from the final part of Trump's comments on Monday and were criticized by a White House spokesperson

• MSNBC, which is owned by NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News, said it cut away “because the information no longer appeared to be valuable to the important ongoing discussion around public health." CNN said it makes its "own editorial decisions.”

😷 What's next: Read NYT's Ed Lee on the nurses who are sharing their coronavirus stories in an anonymous online document.

See you tomorrow.