As you probably heard, on Tuesday the Huffington Post did massive layoffs and the entire Canadian bureau shut down.
Hard to believe this HuffPo gold is gone forever. https://t.co/uFmrh9IIag
— Sheila Gunn Reid (@SheilaGunnReid) March 10, 2021
In the comments about their announcement as posted by Small Dead Animals (which includes a screenshot of which I'll get to in a minute) it was hilariously noted that they started unionizing in February. The only thing more perfect would have been if a new minimum wage was taking effect this month.
What caught my eye however, was that this was released on March 9th (Tuesday, as I said). The statement seems to imply and match up with that: "As of March 9, HuffPost Canada will no longer be publishing content." Will is a future tense verb (well in this case used as a future tense even though technically that's not actually a thing), but that's okay because it's clear that on March 9th when you read this, HuffPoCa was in the process of winding itself down. The problem becomes what happens tomorrow (as of this writing, if you read it in the future it's all the past obviously). By tomorrow, of course, I mean March 12. You see: "certain site features were permanently disabled as of March 12".
Wait what? Reading this today (and last Tuesday) that's a pure past tense. Did a group of professional writers and copy editors somehow miss that? Or did the Huffington Post disable a bunch of website features on March 12th 2020 and they just bothered reporting on that fact now (don't laugh, many of them still haven't discovered social conservatives exist)? Is this writing meant for somebody in the future (say, March 24th) so that they know that previously (March 12th) certain site features were disabled so don't expect to leave a comment or get a trackback ping? If that's the case, however, then why "will" they be no longer publishing content? Shouldn't it then have said "As of March 9th, HuffPost Canada ceased publishing content"?
No wonder they needed union protection to avoid being fired for incompetance.
