Fusion hired big names from digital, print, and televisioninfamously, it reportedly paid financial journalist Felix Salmon, who came on proclaiming that he would be post-text, more than $400,000 a year to do, as far as anyone could tell, nothing in particularas well as a thick layer of friends of Isaac Lee known internally as FOILs. Felipe Holgun and Daniel Eilemberg were prime examples, but Lee has a long history of keeping it in the family. Back in 2008, according to a FOIL, when Lee was running a local magazine called Poder in Miami, he helped out a friend from the business community (he dubbed her his fairy godmother) by hiring her son as an intern after he graduated college. That same intern was then hired at the Univision network a month after Lee was, and eventually came to Fusion TV, too.
At the working level, a lack of clear editorial vision left employees adrift. Relentless pivots meant that people hired to do one job were often given different assignments within a matter of months, ending up working on projects that didnt align with their experience; meanwhile, executives seemed far more focused on creating the narrative of a fast-growing media company than on what that media company was actually producing.
We didnt know how our projects were helping the company or how they were being monetized, one Fusion TV employee said.
For years, money flowed into a series of pet projectsthis U.S.-Mexico border concert is a typical examplefavored by executives and FOILs, while editorial staffers were left confused about the value of the stories they were pushed to pursue and wondering about the long-term viability of a company spending huge amounts of money without doing much the public seemed especially interested in. (As far as anyone could tell, practically no one watched the Fusion channel.)
One often-mocked example was Project Earth, Fusion TVs environmental unit. Headed by Nico Ibargen, an environmentalist and FOIL in top standing, it produced so much content about sharks that it became not just an internal joke but a subject of outside coverage. There were teams that had to work on shark stuff, a former Fusion staffer said. It was, [Nico] is a genius and therefore we must make shark content because he wants it. ... Even perfect execution might not have made the concept work. Its digital offerings launched at the height of Facebooks dominance over the media industry, into a crowded marketplace where even sites with clear voices would have had difficulty standing out. Some of Fusions biggest-budget Facebook pushes struggled to gain the following necessary to organically propel the new publication to the top of the News Feedsomething that led to a new focus on viral-friendly video and, according to a source with direct knowledge, seven-figure sums spent on simply buying traffic. ... The lukewarm response to Univisions attempts to sell or go public over the years can largely be attributed to the long-term debt its owners burdened it with in the first place. Univision has shrunk that pot from more than $10 billion in 2007 to just under $8 billion today, according to its most recent year-end report. But that debt is still far more than the amount of money Univision makes each yearroughly six times the size of the companys EBITDA. Thats about one-third higher than the levels seen at Sinclair Broadcast Group and Netflix in 2017, according to Fitch, and more than double that of AMC Networks. The ratings agency Moodys said in a 2017 report that Univisions debt has junk-bond status.
Whats more, interest payments on debt still eat up a sizable chunk of Univisions earnings. Without such payments, the company would have been safely profitable since 2012. Univision financial reports show interest expenses totaled $442 million in 2017 alone; over the past three years, theyve amounted to $1.46 billion.