Page 7 - Film Festival Journal + Review Spring/Summer 2020

THE NIGHTMARE CONTINUED

South by Southwest (SXSW) has laid off “approximately one-third”
of its full-time staff, the organization announced Monday night. The
layoffs follow last week’s cancellation of the 2020 festival due to fears
over coronavirus. In a statement, a SXSW spokesperson called the
group’s position “unimaginable” and the layoffs a “heartbreaking
step.”

South by Southwest laid off at least 50 employees, or a
third of its year-round staff, Monday as the festival faces
losses in the tens of millions after the cancellation of this
year’s festival.
Said the festival in a statement: “Due to the City of Austin’s
unprecedented and unexpected cancellation of the SXSW 2020
events in March, SXSW has been rigorously reviewing our op-
erations, and we are in the unimaginable position of reducing
our workforce. Today we said goodbye to approximately one-
third of our full-time staff. Those of us in the business of live
events know the level of trust required to execute an event of
SXSW’s scale, and we are deeply sad to let people go this soon.
We are planning for the future and this was a necessary, but
heartbreaking, step.”

The full-time staff was said to have been around 175
employees.
The statement followed the Wall Street Journal pub-
lishing an interview late Sunday with SXSW co-founder
and CEO Roland Swenson, who gave several “tens of mil-
lions of dollars” as a likely loss for the org. “We are plan-
ning to carry on and do another event in 2021, but how
we’re going to do that I’m not entirely sure,” he told the
Journal.
Swenson told the Journal that it would run out of money
by this summer if grants or other forms of additional mon-
ey did not come in. He earlier revealed that the festival’s
cancellation insurance policy did not include an extra pro-
vision for communicable disease coverage.
The Austin Chronicle confirmed the large number of
layoffs Monday, putting the figure at “around 50 people”
and attributing an anonymous senior official at the organi-
zation who said it was “the only way to stop the bleed-
ing.”