Valence Media, the corporate owner of the Hollywood Reporter and Billboard magazine, laid off several writers, editors, and its entire IT staff on Tuesday. But some workers apparently still had access to the company’s websites on Tuesday night. Billboard magazine’s website was vandalized with an image from the movie Animal House and a sarcastic message about the layoffs.
“In the wake of Covid19 pandemic, Valence Media has decided to lay off their entire web IT staff. Effective today,” the Billboard website read in a post credited to “devops.”
“The online Billboard Charts are essentially perfect, so IT staff are no longer needed. Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life…
#SavingABuckAtYourExpense”
The line about being fat, drunk, and stupid is a reference to the 1978 movie Animal House starring John Belushi. The photo accompanying the text shows a character named Kent “Flounder” Dorfman who was played by Stephen Furst in the classic slobs-versus-snobs comedy. Flounder, who has a 0.2 grade point average in the film, is told, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
The offending content has since been removed, but it’s still available to view via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which periodically scans the internet to save copies of webpages. It’s not clear how long the Flounder content was up at Billboard, but it was gone by early Wednesday morning.
Valence Media made news earlier this month after the Hollywood Reporter’s editorial director, Matthew Belloni, left over a dispute with management about its coverage. Belloni reportedly butted heads with executives at Valence who wanted a heads up anytime the Hollywood Reporter covered a “sensitive” person or company. In one particularly egregious instance, executives tried to kill a profile of actress Louise Linton, according to the New York Times.
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