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People walk past the New York Times building on October 14, 2019 in New York City.
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez | VIEW press | Corbis | Getty Images

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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Apple releases fix for overheating iPhone 15

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Apple releases fix for overheating iPhone 15

Apple iPhone 15 series devices are displayed for sale at The Grove Apple retail store on release day in Los Angeles on Sept. 22, 2023.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Apple released iOS 17.0.3 on Wednesday, including a fix for an issue that caused Apple’s latest iPhone 15 models to run hot.

“This update provides important bug fixes, security updates, and addresses an issue that may cause iPhone to run warmer than expected,” according to the software’s change log.

Over the weekend, Apple confirmed reports on social media that its new iPhones had a tendency to get warm. Apple said the problem was a combination of some apps that weren’t properly configured, bugs in iOS and an expected set-up period that requires extra processing and heat generation.

Wednesday’s update addresses the issues in iOS, the iPhone’s operating system. App developers are also pushing updates with fixes to their apps.

Apple said the heat issue was unrelated to a new titanium and aluminum frame design on the higher-end Pro models, and also said that it wasn’t related to the USB-C charging port on the new phones either.

Apple’s website says all iPhones may feel warmer when they’re being restored from a backup, when they’re wirelessly charging, using graphics-heavy apps or games or streaming high-quality video. Apple says iPhones are safe to use unless they display an explicit temperature warning.

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Google’s latest Pixel phones have new camera AI tricks

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Google's latest Pixel phones have new camera AI tricks

Google’s new Pixel lineup including the Pixel 8, the Pixel 8 Pro, the Pixel Watch 2, and the Pixel Buds Pro.

Google

Google announced two new Pixel phones and its latest Pixel smartwatch on Wednesday during its Made by Google event in New York City. The new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro are Google’s latest attempts to capture a fraction of the market share from Apple’s iPhone.

The Pixel 8 starts at $699, while the Pixel 8 Pro starts at $999. That’s a $100 increase from last year’s Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. The Pixel brand has a small but growing market share, and Google’s hardware business doesn’t drive significant revenue for parent company Alphabet. Of the $74.6 billion in revenue Alphabet reported for the second quarter, for example, $58.14 billion came from Google ads. Another $8 billion was generated by Google Cloud.

The Pixel 8 phones and Pixel Watch 2, which starts at $349, are available to order beginning Wednesday and will hit store shelves on Oct. 12

Here are some of the best new features in Google’s new products.

Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro

Google Pixel 8 Pro

Google

The new Pixel 8 and 8 Pro have rounder corners and a flatter display compared to last year’s models. The entry-level Pixel 8 has a better screen with refresh speeds as fast as the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, which means scrolling through websites or playing games will look smoother.

Both the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro run on Google’s new Tensor G3 chip. The G3 is Google’s in-house chip, which allows the company to leverage its artificial intelligence and machine-learning resources in areas like the phone’s camera.

Google Pixel 8 Rose

Courtesy: Google

The Pixel 8 Pro includes new AI-powered editing tools. It still has the popular Magic Eraser tool, which allows you to remove unwanted images in photos, but it also has a new photo tool called Best Take. Let’s say you take a series of group photos, Best Take lets you combine similar pictures into one where everyone is looking at the camera and smiling. Google also says it’s improved its Real Tone photography feature to help better represent the nuances of different skin tones.

Audio Magic Eraser allows users to remove unwanted sounds from videos. So, if you’re capturing your kid riding a bike for the first time and a pesky truck is reversing in the background, Audio Magic Eraser allows users to remove that distracting beeping noise.

Google Pixel 8 Pro

Courtesy: Google

The Pixel 8 Pro also has a built-in thermometer. It’s marketed as a tool to get the temperature of beverages and cookware by scanning them. It’s not immediately clear what other purpose it might serve.

Google says its G3 Tensor chip will improve call quality and help the phone detect and filter out more spam calls.

The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro are the first smartphones to launch with Android 14 out of the box.

Pixel Watch 2

Google Pixel Watch 2 

Courtesy: Google

Google also unveiled its Pixel Watch 2. Like the first Pixel Watch, the Watch 2 incorporates the Fitbit platform which Alphabet acquired in 2021.

One of the most interesting new features is stress tracking. The watch gathers data like your heart rate variability and skin temperature to help detect when you’re under pressure. The device will then make healthy suggestions for you: like going for a walk or trying a guided breathing exercise.

Google Pixel Watch 2

Courtesy: Google

The Pixel Watch 2 also includes improved heart rate tracking and workout detection. It has the same battery life as the original — Google promises up to 24 hours using the always-on display.

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Veterans from Tesla, Northvolt hatch plan to mass-produce huge batteries to store solar and wind energy

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Veterans from Tesla, Northvolt hatch plan to mass-produce huge batteries to store solar and wind energy

Cameron Dales (L), president and chief commercial officer of Peak Energy, and Landon Mossburg, the CEO of Peak Energy, on a hike in the earliest days of the company. The mountains of Colorado in the background inspired the name of the company, Peak Energy.

Photo courtesy Peak Energy

Battery industry veterans are coming together to launch Peak Energy, which aims to mass-produce giant batteries to even out production fluctuations from renewable energy sources, like wind and solar power generators.

Because Peak Energy is focused on scaling up production of battery technology that already exists, they don’t think of themselves as a traditional “startup.”

“A normal Silicon Valley startup is 10 years in the lab, come up with a better mousetrap and go to market. We’re completely the opposite,” Cameron Dales, president and chief commercial officer of Peak Energy, told CNBC in a video interview Friday.

Peak Energy hopes to partner with a technology company (yet to be selected) that is already an expert in battery technology but does not have the capacity to scale manufacturing.

“In the battery market it turns out the rarest commodity is not the technology — there are many excellent ideas out there at academic labs and startups — but rather the ability to scale to manufacturing,” CEO Landon Mossburg told CNBC. “The difficulty of manufacturing scale up is one of the reasons you see so many ‘breakthrough battery technology’ announcements but very very few companies who actually reach market.”  

Peak Energy launched in June and is coming out of stealth on Wednesday, announcing a $10 million funding round lead by Greg Reichow at Eclipse, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Before joining Eclipse, Reichow worked at Tesla for more than five years, where he was responsible for battery, motor and electronics manufacturing and then led global manufacturing. Also joining the funding raise is TDK Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of the Tokyo-headquartered multinational electronics company TDK.

“The No. 1 issue we face as it relates to expanding renewable energy sources is storage,” Reichow told CNBC. “This problem must be solved, but the existing approaches using lithium-ion and other technologies are not yet at a price point that enables the kind of scaling that society needs across sectors.”

Demand for grid-scale storage will continue to grow. The United States Energy Information Administration has projected that battery storage capacity will grow from 9 gigawatts in 2022 to 49 gigawatts in 2030 and then to 247 gigawatts in 2050. That’s a baseline projection that includes the Inflation Reduction Act and assumes no additional changes in U.S. policy throughout the projection period.

(L to R) Ryan Gibson, Eclipse Venture partner; Landon Mossburg, Peak Energy CEO; Aidan Madigan-Curtis, Eclipse partner and Cameron Dales, Peak Energy president and chief commercial officer, in protective gear at a battery factory clean room.

Photo courtesy Peak Energy

A stacked team with aggressive growth goals

Cameron Dales and US Representative Rho Kana in 2021 at the Enovix battery factory in Fremont, Calif.

Photo courtesy Cameron Dales

Of course, Peak Energy will have to raise more money to fund this kind of expansion. A lot more.

We’re running a playbook which I and the rest of the executive team initially demonstrated and deployed at Northvolt,” Mossburg told CNBC. Northvolt also started with a small seed round of funding and ended up raising more than $9 billion in a combination of equity and debt. Mossburg was involved with securing all of that financing except for the most recent $1.2 billion announced in August.

Dales has similar experience. He was an early employee and co-founder of the equipment business Symyx Tools at material sciences innovation company, Symyx Technologies, which went public in 1999, and in 2009 joined the battery company Enovix.

“I thought naively, ‘Well, how hard could batteries be? It’s just a plus and a minus, everybody has a Duracell. How hard could it be?’ Little did I know, 14 years later, I would still be there,” Dales told CNBC. Enovix was making very high energy density batteries at a battery factory in Fremont, California, and is building another one in Penang, Malaysia. The company went public in a billion-dollar-plus SPAC deal in 2021.

“Peak Energy’s team comprises of two industry veteran leaders who have scaled a battery company before,” Anil Achyuta, who lead the investment for TDK Ventures, said in a written statement shared with CNBC.

So, too, for Eclipse.

“Landon and I worked together at Tesla and I know what he’s capable of delivering,” Reichow told CNBC. “After leaving Tesla, he went on to build a battery company as an executive at Northvolt. Similarly, Cam was a core part of the founding team at Enovix and was instrumental in helping them build the business. These are proven executives that have built battery companies in some of the hardest spaces and that makes them unique.”

Why Peak Energy is focusing on sodium ion

Peak Energy is focused on making large sodium-ion battery systems to pair with wind and solar energy production facilities. Large grid-scale batteries can capture the energy generated from renewable sources, then hold that energy and dispatch it later when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.

Peak Energy will make individual battery cells, about the size of a loaf of bread, says Dales. Then those loaf of bread battery cells get wired together to make modules, which would be about the size of a filing cabinet. Then those filing cabinets will be assembled into a battery the size of the back of a tractor trailer truck, then deployed near a solar or wind farm, 50 to 100 at a time.

One hundred blocks can power 62,500 homes for four hours, Mossburg told CNBC.

An artist rendering of the Peak Energy battery system.

Rendering courtesy Peak Energy.

The most typical battery technology right now is lithium ion, used in cellphones and electric vehicles, and they are prized for their energy density. Sodium-ion batteries are less energy dense and heavier — bad for mobile devices or cars, but less relevant when it comes to grid-scale batteries.

“Weight, and therefore energy density, is much less important in a stationary storage system. The fact that these batteries are less energy dense isn’t really a big consideration for this application,” Reichow told CNBC.

What does matter when you are talking about storing huge quantities of energy is the cost.

“A much more important consideration is the cost per unit energy that you’re able to store and that is where sodium ion, we believe, will have a big advantage over lithium ion in the future,” Reichow told CNBC.

It’s too early for Peak Energy to commit to a specific price for its battery systems, but a Tesla Megapack battery system costs about $1.3 million without installation, and Mossburg says he thinks Peak Energy can be at roughly half of that cost with its system.

In addition, lithium-ion batteries can be a fire hazard and the electric vehicle makers are eating up all available supply, Dales told CNBC. The problem utilities have is “the minute Ford or GM needs more batteries, basically their contracts for lithium ion just get canceled and the suppliers just go for the car, because it’s today the largest market,” Dales told CNBC.

Also, China dominates the battery market and supply chains right now. “They’re the dominant player in batteries generally — by far — they are massive in terms of battery production,” Mossburg told CNBC. “And they’re positioning to do the same with sodium.”

Alun Thomas, Head of Manufacturing Engineering at Peak Energy, inside a battery production machine.

Photo courtesy Peak Energy

While Mossburg says he thinks it is a benefit for the world for the United States and China to continue to trade, and Peak Energy is willing to work with Chinese partners, there are geopolitical risks associated with depending on China completely. Peak Energy’s plan to manufacture in the United States is a geopolitical advantage, he says. (It’s also more climate-conscious to make these giant batteries in the U.S. as opposed to making them in China and shipping them to the U.S.)

“You don’t want to be in a situation where a critical component of the energy infrastructure of your entire economy, which batteries are increasingly becoming, is principally sourced from a party that you can’t be sure you’re going to be friends with,” Mossburg told CNBC. “If the U.S. wants to continue to have a robust economy, especially an economy that can make things like cars or even like high-tech things, ceding an entire industry that’s this important to any other player — doesn’t matter if it’s China or anyone else — is a dangerous prospect.”

The first real gigantic battery factory in the world was the Tesla/Panasonic Gigafactory in Nevada, and Reichow led the development of that, Dales said. The second generation “arguably” was the factories that Mossburg built with Northvolt and that Dales helped build at Enovix, Dales said. Peak Energy is “taking that learning and the people who developed those factories and we are going after the third generation of factory design,” Dales told CNBC.

How sodium-ion technology will compete with lithium-ion batteries

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