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People walk past the New York Times building on October 14, 2019 in New York City.
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For about 16 months, the U.S. and U.K. news industries have predominantly operated out of people’s living rooms, home offices and bedrooms. Now, they’re deciding what post-pandemic life should look like for their employees.

Since the pandemic shutdowns in early 2020, reporters have adjusted techniques to break stories, shifting from in-person lunches and coffees to phone calls and zoom meetings. Editors and team leaders have managed remotely, relying on Slack, Microsoft Teams and content management systems for workflow and communication. Unlike many industries that have been crippled by the pandemic, newsrooms have adjusted and pumped out stories without much of a hitch.

That’s led to a quandary among newsroom executives and human resource leaders in charge of getting employees back to the office. How much flexibility should be given to employees who have demonstrated they can produce stories while not in the office? Do newsrooms want everyone back in the office? Is a hybrid approach more appropriate? Or should employees be given total flexibility to work from home whenever they want?

“For knowledge workers, there’s no putting this back in the box,” said Matt Martin, CEO and co-founder of Clockwise, a software company that has developed dynamic calendar assistant tools for office workers. “Full 100% in office, 40 hours a week, that’s out the window. I don’t see a world where it comes back.”

Newsroom leaders are beginning to make decisions based on internal employee surveys and conversations, but they’re not all making the same choices. The decisions companies make could have major implications for how future employees select between potential employers. They’ll also be an industry-wide test for whether more flexible work arrangements can be long lasting.

Among organizations with national scope, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, USA Today and Vox Media are all handling back to work plans differently, providing a natural science experiment for the future or journalism.

Get back to the office: The Bloomberg Way

Bloomberg LP is among the most aggressive organizations in getting its employees back to work. Bloomberg owns offices around the world, spending millions of dollars to decorate them with fish tanks, transparent walls, curved escalators and digital signs that show reporter headlines and real-time market movements. Bloomberg has journalists and analysts in more than 120 countries.

According to a Bloomberg spokesperson, the company’s post-pandemic goal is to recreate a pre-pandemic environment. Employees will come back to the office once they can safely do so.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg addresses the virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, livestreamed online and viewed by laptop from the United Kingdom in the early hours of August 21, 2020, in London, United Kingdom.
David Cliff | NurPhoto | Getty Images

“As a firm, we remain committed to making our offices the safest environment for everyone to come together and collaborate,” Bloomberg LP founder and CEO Mike Bloomberg wrote to all employees in an internal February memo obtained by CNBC. “That way of working is central to who we are at Bloomberg, and the buzz in our buildings will resume and grow stronger each day into 2021. After all, it’s our people who make Bloomberg such a great place to work.”

Bloomberg noted that special circumstances based on family situations would be accommodated, but he also stressed workers should get vaccinated as soon as possible.

“As vaccines become available, we expect people to take advantage of the safety they provide and return to the office,” Bloomberg wrote.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Bloomberg’s approach is similar to Wall Street firms, which also are approaching post-pandemic life with a “back to before” vibe. Bloomberg LP makes the majority of its revenue from selling its proprietary software to financial institutions and is more a financial services company than a traditional media firm. Only some of Bloomberg’s employees are affiliated with the media side of the business.

“We want people back to work and my view is that sometime in September, October it will look just like it did before,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in May. “And everyone is going to be happy with it, and yes, the commute, you know people don’t like commuting, but so what.”

Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman echoed Dimon’s thoughts.

James Gorman, chief executive officer and chairman of Morgan Stanley, speaks during the International Economic Forum Of The Americas (IEFA) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on Wednesday June 12, 2019. Photographer: Christinne Muschi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg

“If you can go to a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office,” Gorman said. “And we want you in the office.”

Still, bankers and Bloomberg employees may push for individual flexibility with their individual team leaders — especially if they see other co-workers better able to balance work and family life. Citigroup said in March it will build in more hybrid and remote working environments for employees that are equally or more productive from home.

Firms in industries that aren’t offering flexible work schedules will have to make that up with additional compensation or other perks to entice talent, Clockwork’s Martin said.

“Deviations from what’s going to become standardized will hurt the marketability of companies,” said Martin.

The Times’s, they are a-changin’ (somewhat)

The New York Times and The Financial Times are among the news organizations embracing change — to some degree.

The New York Times will begin welcoming back maskless employees to company headquarters on 620 8th Avenue in Manhattan on Monday, July 12 if they submit proof of vaccination. Most employees will come back to the office the week after Labor Day (Sept. 6), with flexible one- or two-day-a-week returns throughout September, according to an internal memo from Chief Human Resources Officer and Executive Vice President Jacqueline Welch obtained by CNBC.

The New York Times will then change its “normal” routine to three days working in the office, two days working remotely. Employees who want to be in the office five days a week will be welcomed to do so. Those who want full-time at-home arrangements may not have that choice.

“While most employees will have much more flexibility in how they work, we expect that for most teams, full-time remote work will be the exception, rather than the norm,” Welch wrote in the memo.

The Financial Times is also instituting a hybrid approach, according to spokesperson Sophie Knight. The news organization hasn’t yet decided specifics around the remote-office balance.

“News is a fast-paced business and there is huge benefit in working together on site,” Knight said. “That said, we have mastered remote working in the past year and plan to build the lessons learned into a more flexible model.”

Gannett-USA Today headquarters building in McLean, Virginia.
Paul J. Richards | AFP | Getty Images

Gannett, which owns USA Today and many local newspapers, is planning to have employees return to the office in October. It’s considering different options for adding flexibility for employees and has opened about 200 of its 300 offices throughout the country so far. Dow Jones, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, hasn’t told employees specifics around its hybrid approach, but it plans to offer employees additional flexibility to work from home part-time, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to speak on the record because the details haven’t become public.

“A number of our offices around the world have begun a phased return to the workplace,” a Dow Jones spokesperson told CNBC. “Here in the States, we will have more to share with our colleagues in the coming weeks as we review input from our employees and put finishing touches on our plans.”

Digital media companies, such as Vox Media and Group Nine, which have long offered many employees the ability to work from home, are also adopting a hybrid approach. Vox Media began a phased reopening of its offices on July 6 at 10% capacity for vaccinated employees and plans to resume full office operations in September.

About two-thirds of all companies with predominantly knowledge workers are taking a hybrid approach, according to Kevin Delaney, co-founder of Charter, a media and services company focused on the future of work. Delaney was also a former journalist, working as a writer and editor for The Wall Street Journal before co-founding Quartz, a business news website. Google, Apple and Uber are among the large technology companies that have instituted specific hybrid policies allowing for a combination of in-office and remote days each week.

“It’s very clear that hybrid work is a really good scenario for both organizations and workers,” said Delaney. “On net, it’s a positive. But there are complications. The key is that organizations deal with those drawbacks and minimize the extent to which they’re detrimental.”

Proximity bias

Some news organizations have chosen all-remote options. Quartz CEO Zach Seward wrote a post earlier this month explaining what he’s learned from allowing workers to have the flexibility to shun the office completely.

Dennis Publishing, which owns a suite of publishing brands including “The Week,” “PC Pro,” and “Minecraft World,” has considered all-remote options for some of its employees, according to people familiar with the matter. But employees at “The Week” pushed back on the concept, arguing three days a week in the office would better serve the product and its employees, said the people. A Dennis spokesperson wasn’t immediately available to respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Going fully remote could eat away at company culture and may alienate future talent who want at least some office environment, said Martin. Still, it may be more equitable than hybrid environments, which could test facetime and proximity biases that have already been established to be real in workplaces, said Delaney.

Stanford professor Nick Bloom, who studies remote work, recommends that companies specifically choose certain days for remote work for fairness reasons. If everyone is at the office for the same amount of time, people won’t be penalized for failing to put in face time with bosses or missing work outings because they’re not available.

Proximity bias — the idea that workers get more raises and promotions by being close to bosses in the office — is unquestionably real through decades of research, Delaney said. Companies will have to conduct their own internal audits to ensure that hybrid standards don’t penalize workers that choose to spend some time away from the office, he said.

“Many leaders of companies that are baby boomers struggle to believe people can be productive if they’re not at the office,” said Delaney, noting that the largest Wall Street firms are run by men in their late 50s and 60s. “They need to make the shift to focus on outcomes instead of hours.”

Hybrid environments may also have adverse diversity effects. Surveys suggest women and people of color tend to want more out-of-office flexibility than Caucasian men, Delaney said.

Still, if companies remain attuned to these drawbacks, hybrid environments shouldn’t tilt back toward office-only situations with time, Delaney said.

“It would be a mistake for organizations to treat this as a moment in time where they’re unwillingly being dragged into offering hybrid work,” Delaney said. “Hybrid work setups are the configuration that suit our modern knowledge workers much better than how we operated previously.”

Disclosure: NBCUniversal, CNBC’s parent company, is an investor in Vox Media.

WATCH: Returning to work post-pandemic: Stanford professor

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French fintech Pennylane doubles valuation to $2.2 billion as Alphabet’s venture capital arm takes stake

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French fintech Pennylane doubles valuation to .2 billion as Alphabet's venture capital arm takes stake

Seksan Mongkhonkhamsao | Moment | Getty Images

French accounting software firm Pennylane has doubled its valuation to 2 billion euros ($2.16 billion) in a new 75 million euro funding round.

Pennylane told CNBC that it raised the fresh funds from a host of venture funds, with Sequoia Capital leading the round and Alphabet’s CapitalG, Meritech and DST Global also participating.

Founded in 2020, Pennylane sells what it calls an “all-in-one” accounting platform that’s used by accountants and other financial professionals.

The platform is primarily targeted toward small to medium-sized firms, offering tools for functions spanning expensing, invoicing, cash flow management and financial forecasting.

“We came in tailoring a product that looks a bit like [Intuit’s] QuickBooks or Xero but adapting it to the needs of continental accountants, starting with France,” Pennylane’s CEO and co-founder Arthur Waller told CNBC.

Pennylane currently serves around 4,500 accounting firms and more than 350,000 small and medium-sized enterprises. The startup was previously valued at 1 billion euros in a 2024 investment round.

European expansion

For now, Pennylane only operates in France. However, after the new fundraise, the startup now plans to expand its services across Europe — starting with Germany in the summer.

“It’s going to be a lot of work. It took us approximately five years to have a product mature in France,” Waller said, adding that he hopes to reach product maturity in Germany in a shorter time period of two years.

Pennylane plans to end the year on about 100 million euros of annual recurring revenue — a measure of annual revenue generated from subscriptions that renew each year.

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“We are going to get breakeven by end of the year,” Waller said, adding that Pennylane runs on lower customer acquisition costs than other fintechs. “75% of our costs are R&D [research and development],” he added.

Pennylane also plans to boost hiring after the new funding round. It is looking to grow to 800 employees by the end of 2025, up from 550 currently.

‘Co-pilot’ for accountants

Like many other fintechs, Pennylane is embracing artificial intelligence. Waller said the startup is using the technology to help clients automate bookkeeping and free up time for other things like advisory services.

“Because we have a modern tech stack, we’re able to embed all kinds of AI, but also GenAI, into the product,” Waller told CNBC. “We’re really trying to build a ‘co-pilot’ for the accountant.”

We are seeing a rebound in fintech valuations, says N26 CEO

He added that new electronic invoicing regulations coming into force across Europe are pushing more and more firms to consider new digital products to serve their accounting needs.

“Every business in France within a year from now will have to chose a product operator to issue and receive invoices,” Waller said, calling e-invoicing a “huge market.”

Luciana Lixandru, a partner at Sequoia who sits on the board of Pennylane, said the reforms represent a “massive market opportunity” as the accounting industry is still catching up in terms of digitization.

“The reality is the market is very fragmented,” Lixandru told CNBC via email. “In each country there are one or two decades-old incumbents, and few options that serve both SMBs and their accountants.”

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TikTok reportedly stays on App Store after assurance from Attorney General Pam Bondi

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TikTok reportedly stays on App Store after assurance from Attorney General Pam Bondi

In this photo illustration, the logo of TikTok is displayed on a smartphone screen on April 5, 2025 in Shanghai, China. 

Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images

Apple will keep ByteDance-owned TikTok on its App Store for at least 75 more days after receiving assurances from Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to a report from Bloomberg News.

This comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday to extend the TikTok ban deadline for the second time. TikTok will be banned in the U.S. unless China’s ByteDance sells its U.S. operations under a national security law signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024.

AG Bondi wrote in a letter to Apple that the company should act in accordance with Trump’s deadline extension and that it would not be penalized for hosting the platform, according to unnamed sources cited in the report.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

After TikTok went briefly offline for U.S. users in January following the initial ban deadline, it remained unavailable for download in the App Store until Feb. 13. Apple had reinstated TikTok to its app store after receiving a similar letter of assurance from Bondi.

The extension comes days after Trump announced cumulative tariffs of 54% on China. Prior to the additional tariff rollout on April 2, the president said he could reduce duties on the country to help facilitate a deal for ByteDance to sell its U.S. operations of TikTok.

“Maybe I’ll give them a little reduction in tariffs or something to get it done,” Trump said during a press conference in March. “TikTok is big, but every point in tariffs is worth more than TikTok.”

WATCH: TikTok deal reportedly halted after China said it would reject it due to tariffs

TikTok deal reportedly halted after China said it would reject it due to tariffs

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For bitcoin bulls who self-custody crypto, the global risks are growing

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For bitcoin bulls who self-custody crypto, the global risks are growing

Whether to buy cryptocurrency as a long-term holding may be the biggest decision an investor interested in digital assets has to make, but where to store crypto like bitcoin can become the most consequential.

Following the wildfires earlier this year in California, social media posts began to appear with claims of bitcoin losses, with some users showing metal plates intended to protect seed phrases burnt up and illegible or describing the complexity of recovering crypto keys stored in a safety deposit box in a bank impacted by the fires. While impossible to verify individual claims about fires consuming hard drives, laptops and other storage devices containing so-called hard and cold storage crypto wallets and seed phrases, what is certain is that bitcoin self-custody presents a unique set of security issues. And those risks are growing.

Holders of crypto typically use some form of what can be called a “wallet,” and there are a few main features – whether that wallet is connected to the internet, and how much control is directly embedded in the wallet for trades and transfers. There is also the underlying issue of whether a crypto investor uses a third party for custody at all, or maintains total custody and trading control over their holdings.

The standard third-party platform “hot wallet” – think of an offering from a Coinbase or Blockchain.com – is constantly connected to the internet. Cold storage and “cold wallets,” on the other hand, include hardware devices (like a USB stick) that holds private keys offline, or even just a seed phrase (a master recovery code, a collection of 12 to 24 words used to recover access to a crypto wallet) on paper/metal. Hardware wallets or offline backups of seed phrases can be used to access crypto when connected to the internet through another device.

With third-party custodial options, there are steps to help owners remain vigilant against the threat posed by cybercriminals who can gain access to an internet-connected platform, including the use of two-factor authentication, and strong passwords. The U.S. Marshals Service within the Department of Justice, which is responsible for asset forfeiture from U.S. law enforcement, uses Coinbase Prime to provide custody for its seized digital assets.

Many crypto bulls prefer to self-custody digital assets like bitcoin for some of the same reasons they are interested in cryptocurrencies to begin with: lack of faith in some forms of institutional control. Custodial wallets from crypto brokers trade convenience for the risk of exchange hacks, shutdowns, or fraud, as in the case of the high-profile implosion of FTX. And the wildfires are just one example in a recent string of global events that raise more questions about shifts in the crypto custody debate. There is the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine war, which has led crypto bulls from overseas to re-think their approach to self-custody.

Nick Neuman, co-founder and CEO of self-custody company Casa, said physical risks in the world like a natural disaster are an opportunity to revisit how bitcoin security works, and the common security lapses folded into most peoples’ practices. “Most people secure their bitcoin with one private key. If that key is on a single device or written down on paper as a seed phrase, it’s a single point of failure. If you lose that key, your bitcoin is gone,” he said.

It should be obvious that keeping seed phrases on paper offers the lowest level of protection against fire, yet it is common practice, Neuman said. Slipping these pieces of paper into fireproof bags or safes offer some protection, but not much, and even going the extra steps to have the seed phrases on “indestructible” metal storage plates presents a few failure points. For one, they might prove to be not so indestructible, and second, they may be impossible to locate amid the rubble. 

“Logically, given the location of the fires in California and the stories being shared on X, it’s highly likely bitcoin was lost,” said Neuman. “Some of them are pretty convincing,” he said.

Casa performs annual stress tests on seed phrase backups.

Some self-custody services, like Casa, offer multi-signature setups that reduce the risks of single-point failure. A multi-key crypto “vault” can include mobile phone keys, multiple hardware keys, and a recovery key that a company likes Casa holds on an owner’s behalf.

The multi-sig custody approach allows an owner to hold a majority of keys while a trusted partner holds a minority of keys. John Haar, managing director at Swan Bitcoin, says that in such a setup, the owner would need to lose all the physical devices and all copies of the seed phrases at the same time. As long as the owner can access at least one device or one seed phrase, they would be able to recover their bitcoin. This approach should significantly limit the potential for all of the devices to be lost in an event like a natural disaster, Haar said.

“You can spread these keys across multiple regions or even countries, and you need any three of the five keys to approve a bitcoin transaction,” Neuman said of Casa’s five-key approach.

Jordan Baltazor, chief administrative officer at Fortress Trust, a regulated crypto custodian, says best practices that we use in other areas of personal life should apply to cryptocurrency. For one, diversification of storage approach and weighing of risks. Digital assets are no different, he says, when it comes to backing up personal and sensitive data on the cloud to ensure data against loss or corruption.

Companies including Coinbase and Jack Dorsey’s Block offer products that try to merge some of these ideas, creating a more secure version of a crypto wallet that remains convenient to use. There is Coinbase Vault, which includes enhanced security steps before a user can access crypto holdings for trading. And there is Coinbase Wallet and Block’s Bitkey, which have mobile apps that work like a traditional wallet making moving bitcoin around easy, but with the ability to pair with hardware wallets and added security more commonly associated with cold storage.

Bitkey hardware requires multiple authorizations for transactions for added security, similar to “multi-sig wallets.” Bitkey also offers recovery tools so one of the biggest risks of self-custody — losing codes or phrases needed to recover a cold wallet — is less of an issue.

Solutions like Dorsey’s may help to solve the tension between convenience and security; at minimum, they underline that this tension exists and will likely be something of a roadblock to more widespread crypto adoption. Beyond the risks out there in the form of wildfires, all kinds of natural disasters, and wars, bitcoin self-custody can be vulnerable to the biggest personal risk of all: unexpected death of the bitcoin owner. There is arguably nothing more complicated than inheritance when it comes to unlocking the crypto chain of custody.

Coinbase requires probate court documents and specific will designations before releasing funds from custody, while physical wallets offer little to no support, potentially leaving all that digital value stuck on a private key. Bitkey rolled out its inheritance solution in February for what a Bitkey executive called, “kind of a multibillion-dollar problem waiting to happen.”

“People who have a material investment in bitcoin absolutely need to be thinking differently about how to protect it,” Neuman said. He says that after disasters like the California wildfires, or when exchanges go bust like FTX, the industry does see more crypto holders taking action to move to more secure storage setups. “I suppose it’s human nature to wait until ‘bad things happen’ to spur action to improve your own personal situation,” he said. “But I think people would be better off if they were more proactive. Otherwise, they risk having that ‘bad thing’ happen to them, and then it’s too late,” he said.

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