On Thursday (April 20), American ‘liberal’ media company Buzzfeed announced that it is shutting down its News Division as part of its workforce reduction strategy.
In an email, CEO Jonah Peretti informed that 15% of staffers are being laid off across different teams. “While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization,” he emphasised.
Peretti also stated that Buzzfeed had ‘overinvested’ in its News Division, despite being faced with a lot of obstacles including the Coronavirus pandemic, tech recession, declining digital advertising market, falling stock market and a tough economy.
“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 added.
Absolute bloodbath at BuzzFeed.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 20, 2023
See below the full memo from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti and HuffPost editor-in-chief Danielle Belton sent to all staff: pic.twitter.com/r1VRw63IFn
Jonah Peretti also informed, “Additionally, I made the decision 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.”
The CEO of the liberal media company expressed remorse for not holding the company to ‘higher standards of profitability’ and thus failing to provide a buffer during downturns. The company will, however, continue to run HuffPost, which it acquired in 2020.
“I’ve learned from these mistakes, and the team moving forward has learned from them as well,” Mr. Peretti wrote. “We know that the changes and improvements we are making today are necessary steps to building a better future,” Peretti said.
Meanwhile, the affected employees of Buzzfeed News will be given the opportunity to apply for ‘select roles’ at Buzzfeed.com and HuffPost. It must be mentioned that BuzzFeed News was founded in 2011 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021.
