Vox Media is making a number of cutbacks in response to the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to Vox itself, the digital media company owns properties including Curbed, Eater, Recode, SB Nation and The Verge — and it acquired New York Magazine last year.

In a staff memo obtained by TechCrunch (and others), CEO Jim Bankoff outlined several cost-cutting measures but no outright layoffs.

The measures including furloughing 9% of employees from May 1 to July 31. Bankoff said this will include some employees in sales, sales support, production, events, IT and office operations, along with editorial staff at SB Nation and Curbed. He also said affected employees will retain their company health insurance during this period.

In addition, the company is freezing wages through the end of 2020, pausing its 401K match, reducing hours for 1% of employees and cutting salaries during the same three-month furlough period for employees making more than $130,000 per year — the cuts start at 15%, with Bankoff and Vox Media President Pam Wasserstein taking a 50% salary reduction.

In explaining the layoffs, Bankoff pointed to the broader economic collapse caused by the pandemic, with the dramatic reduction in ad spending, which has led many other media companies to announce layoffs and/or salary reductions.

Bankoff wrote:

We&ve already seen a decline in our business. Weakness in March, driven by the cancellations of SXSW and March Madness, the collapse of travel, sports and fashion-related advertising, and other factors led us to miss our revenue goals by several million dollars in the first quarter; the impact will be significantly greater in the second quarter. While expressing the severity of this decline, italso important to know that we will rebound. We don&t know when or to what extent a rebound will occur. I&d be overjoyed if it happened quickly, but we cannot bet our company on these hopes.

Update: The Vox Media Union has been tweeting in response to the news, painting the current plan as the result of negotiation:

While we appreciate Vox Media talking to us in good faith, we don&t agree with the companydecision to furlough employees — especially after hundreds of us told the company we were willing to take wider pay cuts to save all jobs. So we fought for strong protections. We won a guarantee of no layoffs, no additional furloughs, and no additional pay cuts through July 31, along with enhanced severance for any layoffs that occur in August-December. The company also agreed to reduce the number of furloughs.

Codementor, an online education platform for software developers, is launching Code Against COVID-19 to match volunteers with software projects to fight the pandemic. The initiative, which Codementor is not making money from, wants to connect coders with universities, non-profits, local government agencies and other organizations.

Some of the programs Code Against COVID-19 is currently working with include Safe Paths and Covid Watch, both of which are developing tools to stop the spread of COVID-19 while safeguarding personal privacy. It has also connected developers to grassroots projects like Hospital@home and a UX designer working on a geofencing app to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Codementor platform includes hundreds of thousands of developers around the world. After seeing that many organizations and government agencies needed coders to work on COVID-19-related software, Codementor surveyed its community. Founder and CEO Weiting Liu said 98% of respondents said they were willing to donate their skills, and Code Against COVID-19 was created to quickly match coders to projects.

So far, more than 200 developers have signed up to work for free or for longer-term projects at a discount.

Liu is from Taiwan, which despite its close proximity to China has managed to prevent a major outbreak of COVID-19 without lockdowns.

Liu told TechCrunch that Codementorteam was inspired by the success of software projects lead by the countryDigital Minister Audrey Tang, including a citywide alert system in Taipei and maps that let users track the real-time inventory of rationed masks at nearby pharmacies to avoid waiting in long lines.

&If you believe software can change the world, this is a perfect example,& Liu said, adding that CodementorTaiwan-based team members want to help other countries. &We&re fortunate with the situation in Taiwan, we&re not locked down at home with our kids, we&re relatively safe, so we can just try to help the community.&

Other developer volunteer programs include Coding DojoTech for America, which is providing web development support to small businesses, and Help with COVID.

One of the largest COVID-19 vaccine trials currently underway will have over 500 volunteers actively testing its solution by the middle of next month. Researchers at the University of Oxford have already secured that number of participants, including a representative sample of people between the ages of 18 to 55, for a large-scale randomized clinical early and mid-stage trial of its potential vaccine, which uses a harmless, modified virus to trigger an immune response that is also effective against the novel coronavirus.

The trial will divide a total of 510 participant sent five groups, with one group receiving a follow-up, booster shot of the vaccine after the original does. The technology behind the vaccine has already been used in developing about 10 different other treatments, but will require an approach that includes setting up different test groups in different countries to ensure representative results, since infection rates are varying greatly place to place with prevention measures in place, study lead Sarah Gilbert told Bloomberg.

The team behind the vaccine is also still seeking additional funding to help scale manufacturing, since it aims to begin producing it in volume following the six month period this human trial phase will span. The goal is to have mass production up and running by this fall, under the assumption that the trial proves the potential vaccine effective, with a final stage trial of 5,000 people and the potential to begin providing some doses for use by frontline healthcare workers by as early as September.

The Oxford trial is one of just a handful that have progressed to the human testing phase, but more are coming online all the time. Existing clinical human trials from Moderna and Inovio are underway in the U.S., and those have also expressed the potential for earlier access for emergency use prior to broad rollout following the initial clinical results.

Even if there is some availability by fall of some of these vaccine candidates (and that assumes they even prove effective), that doesn&t mean they&ll be broadly available: That will still require further testing, and scaling manufacturing, as well as working out distribution and administration & all processes that will add months of work. Already, however, the unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in new efficiencies in the development process, and more could follow in these extraordinary times.

A demonstration mission of Northrop Grumman first-ever Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-1) has proven successful, extending the life of an Intelsat satellite by five years. The mission involved NorthropMEV docking with Intelsat IS-901 satellite in orbit on February 25, after which it altered the orbit of the Intelsat spacecraft to bury it more operating time.

While the original docking occurred in late February, the MEV has spent the intervening time altering the orbit of IS-901, and Intelsat has since also transitioned some of its customers to the previously inactive satellite for use of its communication services. Itnow providing &full service,& the companies announced, and will continue to do so for another five years, before the MEV returns it to its decommissioned orbit for final retirement. At that time, MEV-1 will become available again for other space tug missions, able to perform the same service for another satellite.

This is a big step in terms of orbital sustainability and in-space servicing and life extension, particular for Northrop Grumman, which can now offer this as a service. For Intelsat, the company sees it as a &cost-effective and efficient way& to continue to offer uninterrupted service and address customer needs without requiring building and launching an entirely new satellite, the release notes.

Therebeen a shift in the industry away from large, geosynchronous satellites to fleets of small, agile low-Earth orbit smallsats, owing to cost considerations. Orbital servicing could help provide another option, but for now itlikely to appeal more to legacy space industry satellite operators than to the newer constellation startups.

Northrop is planning a second MEV spacecraft to launch to service another Intelsat satellite later this year, however, so it does look like it could be a market in the near-term, and it could change the economics of larger spacecraft in future, too.

As a lot of us continue to stay indoors, Facebook has become a go-to platform for many people to check in with their friends, family and neighbors during the current coronavirus pandemic. Today, to give us another way of showing support and presence in its apps, the company said it would add a new reaction for &care& — in the forms of an emoji face hugging a heart, and a pulsing heart — that will appear alongside the &thumbs up& for like, the basic heart, and the laughing, shock, sadness, and anger emojis.

This makes &care& the first addition to the list of reactions since it was expanded from a simple &like& button back in 2015to give people more empathetic, quick responses to posts.

Starting next week, the care emojis will start appearing on Facebook main app (the emoji face embracing the heart), while the new reaction will appear on Messenger (in the form of a pulsing heart) from today. You can see the new heart by pressing on an existing reaction to change it, or by creating a new reaction to a chat.

&We hope these reactions give people additional ways to show their support during the #COVID19 crisis,& a spokesperson noted about the new emojis earlier today. &We know this is an uncertain time, and we wanted people to be able to show their support in ways that let their friends and family know they are thinking of them.&

Ahead of today, it looks likePedja Ristic, a product designer at Facebook, was testing the reaction on his own posts, another hint it was coming.

This is relatively speaking a pretty small gesture: offering up an emoji in response to a post is not putting food on the table (nor shopping for it, which has become a challenge in itself), giving someone a guarantee of income, making sure that a person is not being misinformed about the scope of the novel coronavirus and how best to deal with that, nor indeed curing anyone who happens to get sick from this awful thing.

But in the scope of Facebook being a crucial part of many peoplesupport networks, ever more important as people live in isolation, itanother way to make it more useful and more tuned to the kind of empathy we all need right now.

Facebook has been working on a number of levels to do something useful in the current health crisis. Its work has ranged from making stronger efforts to ferret out and remove misinformation, provide grants to those in media that are working to report the news well, separate grants to small businesses, supporting public health initiatives to get more important messages out, and like many others also donating masks to those in need.