Costco Wholesale Corporation Reports July Sales Results

Meredith Kopit Levien, president and chief executive officer, The New York Times Company, said, “It was a strong second quarter for The Times – one in which we made further progress on the path to grow our subscriber base and become the essential subscription for every curious person seeking to understand and engage with the world. The combination of our world-class news destination plus market-leading lifestyle products means we have complementary offerings in big spaces, each with multiple growth levers fueling multiple revenue streams. Together we believe these make The Times resilient in a changing media landscape and well positioned for continued value creation.”

The era of white-collar organized labor is fully upon us: the editorial staff of The New Yorker wants to unionize. This morning, organizers sent a letter to the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, asking that the institution and its corporate owner, Condé Nast, voluntarily recognize their membership in the NewsGuild of New York. (Publications ranging from the New York Times to Jacobin have bargaining units with the NewsGuild.) Organizers say that of the 115 or so union-eligible employees, nearly 90 percent have signed union cards. The group includes copy editors, web producers, fact-checkers, photo and design staff, the social-media and publicity teams, editorial assistants, and assistant editors. Management and senior-level employees are excluded, as are staff writers, whose job title would not escape the red pen of the magazine’s fact department: Writers at The New Yorker are nearly all independent contractors, rather than staff, and thus do not receive health care or other benefits, despite being largely prevented from writing for other outlets. The relatively few editorial staffers who’ve expressed concerns with the unionizing effort say they are worried about retaliation in an industry where reputation is the coin of the realm. Click Read More below for additional information.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), announced that Shutterfly, Inc. is moving its infrastructure to AWS—going all-in on the world’s leading cloud to power its Cloud Transformation initiative. Shutterfly chose AWS for its reliability, scale, and breadth of services that are already helping the company be more agile and flexible in meeting the needs of millions of consumers. Shutterfly is migrating all of its core production applications and its more than 75-petabyte image library to AWS, and is continually building new cloud-based applications. Shutterfly’s next-generation platform is also being developed on AWS, where it can leverage a wide range of AWS services, including machine learning and analytics, to deliver a more streamlined customer experience. “We evaluated all the major cloud providers, and chose AWS for its unmatched security, reliability, and breadth of services which allowed us to quickly migrate key assets, build cloud-based applications, and run our core services with ease,” said Satish Menon, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Shutterfly, Inc. “We are especially excited about using AWS’s machine learning services. For example, we are currently experimenting with Amazon Rekognition for image classifications and metadata enrichment and Amazon Cognito for identity services. The cost savings we expect to see by running on AWS will enable us to put more resources towards innovation and developing our next-generation platform.” Click Read More below for additional information.