Says one former reporter: “I don’t think I’ve ever worked somewhere where people so systematically disliked the person in charge.”The social-media policy Ellis instituted for reporters in September 2015 helped nurture that frustration. And each day we delayed taking this painful action was another day in which we failed to best position FiscalNote to ensure our own durability through this evolving health and macroeconomic crisis.Before I go into more detail, I want to make two things very clear: They say he created a spreadsheet to track reporters’ weekly ratio of tweets to articles, and that he would approach reporters individually to chastise them if he found their ratio too lopsided. 20-30 staffers were fired at CQ Roll Call on Thursday.FiscalNote, a Washington, D.C.-based tech firm, laid off 30 staffers today at CQ Roll Call, a news organization that has long been a staple of reporting in the nation’s capital.Three staffers with knowledge of the layoffs told Adweek the layoffs came mostly from the editorial department. But that’s not the world we live in now.”Henneberger’s fate may have been sealed by another thing that separates old-school newsroom types from the telegenic variety who play to a national audience: Colleagues complained that she was often absent from the newsroom. I'm the editor of CQ Magazine, CQ Roll Call's 75-year-old publication on Congress, and host of the "CQ on Congress" podcast. She cut Congress-centric features such as the Hill Navigator, a workplace advice column for congressional staffers, and brought in opinion columnists to write on a cluster of different topics. I was very fond of that year. Hire me.” Podcast producer Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, staffers at CQ Roll Call are working remotely and managers broke the news to fired employees over videoconference, sources said. He asked, “Where’s Melinda?” They responded, “No idea.” McHale, two sources say in recounting the event, was visibly angry. Staffers said that layoffs targeted the multimedia, data and investigative teams along with the print magazine. It mandated that reporters tweet any breaking news items to the @CQnow or @rollcall Twitter feeds, so that tweets would link to the corporate accounts and bolster their followings. “Everyone got the sense that, as soon as Christina left, Ellis felt he could start micromanaging in the way he had always wanted to,” says one former political editor.Following Bellantoni’s departure, Ellis initiated a slew of highly publicized layoffs.

Henneberger complained to higher-ups about the tech deficit. Roll Call’ s parent company, Britain’s Economist Group, bought Congressional Quarterly in 2009 and merged the two newsrooms in 2011. At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, CQ Roll Call president reporters working together in the convention center. “People may not have seen it coming the moment it happened,” says one source familiar with the mood of the newsroom, “but weren’t surprised a change was made.”The news broke quietly, with conversations largely between staff and management. Ellis credits the paper’s reimagined website, launched in March, for the recent upward trend in online traffic recorded by comScore. spoke with more than a dozen current and former staffers for this story. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. Henneberger was often absent from the newsroom, working erratic hours the days she was there at all. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retribution. Later on Thursday, the online masthead was updated with the names of 16 editorial staffers removed. Billing inquiries A transplant from the Economist Group’s corporate headquarters in London, he defines ’s mission as reporting news that members of Congress and their staffers “must know.” (Asked to cite a Roll Call piece in the last year that he feels lived up to that standard, he says: “I’m not the on the editorial side, so I’m not…that’s not my role.”)A group of reporters can be heard chatting as they pass McHale’s office. “Yeah, that’s kind of our job.” She added: “I’d love to be able to give him 1978 again. But McHale is confident there is still room for a congressional newspaper to thrive. As many of you know, we have been carefully reviewing and reconciling all expenses at FiscalNote over the last several months while more recently monitoring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employees and clients. By March, it was one-thirteenth of the high-mark in September. “I asked all staffers if they were tweeting about Congress, to offer it to the Many news organizations feel they benefit by giving their reporters room to build large followings on Twitter. “It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, of course,” Bellantoni tells “But we did a lot of work I was proud of. (Internal numbers show a less dramatic decline.) By May, Rothenberg says, “I decided I couldn’t take it anymore.” He stresses that his concern was not merely with the paper’s shifting mission, but with the impracticality of the new regime’s expectations. But in a separate interview with me in June, she said Rothenberg’s reasons for leaving did not have “any basis in fact. Few blinked when she didn’t show up to a staff meeting on Monday, August 1.So when the paper announced her departure the next day, staffers registered a mix of shock and kismet.