Pulitzer Prize winning digital media outlet BuzzFeed News is being shut down as part of a cost cutting drive by its corporate parent that’s shedding about 15 percent of its entire staff, adding to layoffs made earlier this year.
In a memo sent to staff, Buzzfeed Inc. co founder and CEO Jonah Peretti said Thursday that in addition to the news division, layoffs would take place in its business, content, tech and administrative teams. BuzzFeed is also considering making job cuts in international markets.
BuzzFeed has about 1,200 total employees, according to a recent regulatory filing, meaning about 180 people will be losing their jobs in the latest cuts.
Peretti said in his memo that he “made the decision to overinvest” in the news division, but failed to recognize early enough that the financial support needed to sustain operations was not there.
Digital advertising has plummeted this year, cutting into the profitability of major tech companies from Google to Facebook. Waves of layoffs have rolled through the tech industry and more are expected.
“I’ve learned from these mistakes, and the team moving forward has learned from them as well,” Peretti wrote in the memo. “We know that the changes and improvements we are making today are necessary steps to building a better future.”
The announcement comes just a few months after BuzzFeed said that it would be cutting 12 percent of its workforce, citing worsening economic conditions. Job cuts at were also announced in December.
Christian Baesler, the Buzzfeed Inc.’s chief operating officer, and Edgar Hernandez, its chief revenue officer, are also leaving after they assist with the restructuring.
The company will have one remaining news brand, HuffPost, Peretti wrote.
Journalists who previously worked at BuzzFeed News lamented its end.
“I’m heartsick about it, and proud of the great journalism we did when I was there and after I left,” said Ben Smith, BuzzFeed News’ editor from 2011 to 2020 and now editor in chief of Semafor.
Smith made the controversial decision in 2017 to publish a “dossier” of information about then President Donald Trump, though many outlets avoided it as unreliable and even Buzzfeed said there were serious reasons to doubt the allegations. He wrote then that “we have always erred on the side of publishing.
BuzzFeed News’ shutdown “really marks the end of the marriage between news and social media,” said Smith, author of “Traffic,” a forthcoming history of that era.
BuzzFeed News won its first Pulitzer in 2021, in international reporting, for a series by Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek on the infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.
That same year, BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Journalists were finalists in that category for an expose on the global banking industry’s role in money laundering. A former US Treasury Department employee was sentenced to six months in prison this month for leaking the trove of confidential financial reports that served as the basis for the series.
BuzzFeed said Thursday that all of the news division’s work will be preserved and available within the BuzzFeed network. The company is also working to make sure that any stories currently in progress will be published and promoted on BuzzFeed properties.
BuzzFeed announced Thursday that it was shutting its news division as part of layoffs, signalling the end of one of the most notable news websites of the Internet era.
The company cited challenges including recession in the tech sector and the struggling stock market, with CEO Jonah Peretti admitting he was partly at fault for the closure.
“We are reducing our workforce by approximately 15 percent today... and beginning the process of closing BuzzFeed News,” Peretti wrote in a memo to staff.
The announcement is the latest to rock the US media landscape as outlets battle with falling reader numbers and lower advertising revenue.
Shares in BuzzFeed, known for its viral content and journalism, plunged more than 20 percent on Wall Street following the news.
Peretti said the company had come to the conclusion that it “can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization.”
He added that it would now concentrate its news output on its HuffPost website.
Peretti also cited the coronavirus pandemic, less capital, a decelerating digital advertising market and “ongoing audience and platform shifts.”
“Dealing with all of these obstacles at once is part of why we’ve needed to make the difficult decisions to eliminate more jobs and reduce spending,” he said.
Peretti conceded that he could have reacted differently to the challenges.
“I could have managed these changes better as the CEO of this company and our leadership team could have performed better despite these circumstances,” he wrote.
Peretti admitted that he had decided “to overinvest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much.”
“This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose built for social media,” he wrote.
BuzzFeed, created in 2006, first became known for its lists and topical quizzes.
But in 2011 it founded BuzzFeed News, which won a number of awards and became a symbol of a new wave of Internet media companies.
It received plaudits for its investigative work and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for coverage of the Chinese government’s detention of Muslims in Xinjiang.
But it was criticized after it published a cache of unverified information about Donald Trump known as the “Steele Dossier.”
BuzzFeed defended the decision by saying the public had a right to read the unsubstantiated claims since many in Washington already had.
Ultimately, making money was Buzzfeed’s problem and Peretti said he regretted that he “didn’t hold the company to higher standards for profitability.”
The New York headquarted company announced in May 2020 that it would shutter part of its loss making news operations in Britain and Australia as it scaled back global ambitions to cut costs.
In November that year, BuzzFeed bought the Huffington Post news site from Verizon in without disclosing the amount.
“Moving forward, we will have a single news brand in HuffPost, which is profitable, with a loyal direct front page audience,” Peretti wrote.
Newsroom employment has declined steadily in the United States, falling from 114,000 in 2008 to 85,000 in 2020, according to a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center.
Layoffs have taken place at CNN, NBC, MSNBC, and Vox Media in recent months. |
