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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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Super Micro plans to ramp up manufacturing in Europe to capitalize on AI demand

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Super Micro plans to ramp up manufacturing in Europe to capitalize on AI demand

CEO of Supermicro Charles Liang speaks during the Reuters NEXT conference in New York City, U.S., December 10, 2024. 

Mike Segar | Reuters

PARIS — Super Micro plans to increase its investment in Europe, including ramping up manufacturing of its AI servers in the region, CEO Charles Liang told CNBC in an interview that aired on Wednesday.

The company sells servers which are packed with Nvidia chips and are key for training and implementing huge AI models. It has manufacturing facilities in the Netherlands, but could expand to other places.

“But because the demand in Europe is growing very fast, so I already decided, indeed, [there’s] already a plan to invest more in Europe, including manufacturing,” Liang told CNBC at the Raise Summit in Paris, France.

“The demand is global, and the demand will continue to improve in [the] next many years,” Liang added.

Liang’s comments come less than a month after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited various parts of Europe, signing infrastructure deals and urging the region to ramp up its computing capacity.

Growth to be ‘strong’

Super Micro rode the growth wave after OpenAI’s ChatGPT boom boosted demand for Nvidia’s chips, which underpin big AI models. The server maker’s stock hit a record high in March 2024. However, the stock is around 60% off that all-time high over concerns about its accounting and financial reporting. But the company in February filed its delayed financial report for its 2024 fiscal year, assuaging those fears.

In May, the company reported weaker-than-expected guidance for the current quarter, raising concerns about demand for its product.

However, Liang dismissed those fears. “Our growth rate continues to be strong, because we continue to grow our fundamental technology, and we [are] also expanding our business scope,” Liang said.

“So the room … to grow will be still very tremendous, very big.”

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Apple says COO Jeff Williams will retire from company later this year

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Apple says COO Jeff Williams will retire from company later this year

Jeff Williams, chief operating officer of Apple Inc., during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, US, on Monday, June 9, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Apple said on Tuesday that Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, a 27-year company veteran, will be retiring later this year.

Current operations leader Sabih Khan will take over much of the COO role later this month, Apple said in a press release. For his remaining time with the comapny, Williams will continue to head up Apple’s design team, Apple Watch, and health initiatives, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.

Williams becomes the latest longtime Apple executive to step down as key employees, who were active in the company’s hyper-growth years, reach retirement age. Williams, 62, previously headed Apple’s formidable operations division, which is in charge of manufacturing millions of complicated devices like iPhones, while keeping costs down.

He also led important teams inside Apple, including the company’s fabled industrial design team, after longtime leader Jony Ive retired in 2019. When Williams retires, Apple’s design team will report to CEO Tim Cook, Apple said.

“He’s helped to create one of the most respected global supply chains in the world; launched Apple Watch and overseen its development; architected Apple’s health strategy; and led our world class team of designers with great wisdom, heart, and dedication,” Cook said in the statement.

Williams said he plans to spend more time with friends and family.

“June marked my 27th anniversary with Apple, and my 40th in the industry,” Williams said in the release.

Williams is leaving Apple at a time when its famous supply chain is under significant pressure, as the U.S. imposes tariffs on many of the countries where Apple sources its devices, and White House officials publicly pressure Apple to move more production to the U.S.

Khan was added to Apple’s executive team in 2019, taking an executive vice president title. Apple said on Tuesday that he will lead supply chain, product quality, planning, procurement, and fulfillment at Apple.

The operations leader joined Apple’s procurement group in 1995, and before that worked as an engineer and technical leader at GE Plastics. He has a bachelor’s degree from Tufts University and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York.

Khan has worked closely with Cook. Once, during a meeting when Cook said that a manufacturing problem was “really bad,” Khan stood up and drove to the airport, and immediately booked a flight to China to fix it, according to an anecdote published in Fortune.

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Elon Musk lashes out at Tesla bull Dan Ives over board proposals: ‘Shut up’

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Elon Musk lashes out at Tesla bull Dan Ives over board proposals: 'Shut up'

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, June 16, 2023.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives to “Shut up” on Tuesday after the analyst offered three recommendations to the electric vehicle company’s board in a post on X.

Ives has been one of the most bullish Tesla observers on Wall Street. With a $500 price target on the stock, he has the highest projection of any analyst tracked by FactSet.

But on Tuesday, Ives took to X with critical remarks about Musk’s political activity after the world’s richest person said over the weekend that he was creating a new political party called the America Party to challenge Republican candidates who voted for the spending bill that was backed by President Donald Trump.

Ives’ post followed a nearly 7% slide in Tesla’s stock Monday, which wiped out $68 billion in market cap. Ives called for Tesla’s board to create a new pay package for Musk that would get him 25% voting control and clear a path to merge with xAI, establish “guardrails” for how much time Musk has to spend at Tesla, and provide “oversight on political endeavors.”

Ives published a lengthier note with other analysts from his firm headlined, “The Tesla board MUST Act and Create Ground Rules For Musk; Soap Opera Must End.” The analysts said that Musk’s launching of a new political party created a “tipping point in the Tesla story,” necessitating action by the company’s board to rein in the CEO.

Still, Wedbush maintained its price target and its buy recommendation on the stock.

“Shut up, Dan,” Musk wrote in response on X, even though the first suggestion would hand the CEO the voting control he has long sought at Tesla.

In an email to CNBC, Ives wrote, “Elon has his opinion and I get it, but we stand by what the right course of action is for the Board.”

Musk’s historic 2018 CEO pay package, which had been worth around $56 billion and has since gone up in value, was voided last year by the Delaware Court of Chancery. Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled that Tesla’s board members had lacked independence from Musk and failed to properly negotiate at arm’s length with the CEO.

Elon Musk can't continue to go down this political path, says Wedbush's Dan Ives

Tesla has appealed that case to the Delaware state Supreme Court and is trying to determine what Musk’s next pay package should entail.

Ives isn’t the only Tesla bull to criticize Musk’s continued political activism.

Analysts at William Blair downgraded the stock to the equivalent of a hold from a buy on Monday, because of Musk’s political plans and rhetoric as well as the negative impacts that the spending bill passed by Congress could have on Tesla’s margins and EV sales.

“We expect that investors are growing tired of the distraction at a point when the business needs Musk’s attention the most and only see downside from his dip back into politics,” the analysts wrote. “We would prefer this effort to be channeled towards the robotaxi rollout at this critical juncture.”

Trump supporter James Fishback, CEO of hedge fund Azoria Partners, said Saturday that his firm postponed the listing of an exchange-traded fund, the Azoria Tesla Convexity ETF, that would invest in the EV company’s shares and options. He began his post on X saying, “Elon has gone too far.”

“I encourage the Board to meet immediately and ask Elon to clarify his political ambitions and evaluate whether they are compatible with his full-time obligations to Tesla as CEO,” Fishback wrote.

Musk said Saturday that he has formed the America Party, which he claimed will give Americans “back your freedom.” He hasn’t shared formal details, including where the party may be registered, how much funding he will provide for it and which candidates he will back.

Tesla’s stock is now down about 25% this year, badly underperforming U.S. indexes and by far the worst performance among tech’s megacaps.

Musk spent much of the first half of the year working with the Trump administration and leading an effort to massively downsize the federal government. His official work with the administration wrapped up at the end of May, and his exit preceded a public spat between Musk and Trump over the spending bill and other matters.

Musk, Tesla’s board chair Robyn Denholm and investor relations representative Travis Axelrod didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

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