BuzzFeed News Shutters as Part of Broader Reduction at the Media Company
BuzzFeed News has posted its last story. Company chief executive officer Jonah Peretti said in a memo to employees on Thursday that the company will shutter what is left of its stand-alone news division. More than 50 staffers in the news division will lose their jobs amid a broader workforce reduction that will eliminate 15 percent, or close to 200 of its employees across divisions.
“While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a stand-alone organization,” Peretti wrote in the memo.
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It’s a sadly predictable end for the news division of the digital media start-up. While it was never profitable, it once had as many as 250 employees and in 2021 earned a Pulitzer Prize for reporting about China’s detention of Muslim people.
For the remaining BuzzFeed News employees, the writing has been on the wall for some time. Last month, editor in chief Mark Schoofs, deputy editor in chief Tom Namako and executive editor of investigations Ariel Kaminer all stepped down as layoffs loomed.
BuzzFeed will continue to publish on sister site HuffPost, which is profitable. In his memo, Peretti admitted that his soft spot for the news division had led him to “overinvest,” a mistake he has “learned from,” he added.
“I’ve learned from these mistakes, and the team moving forward has learned from them as well,” he wrote. “We know that the changes and improvements we are making today are necessary steps to building a better future.”
BuzzFeed went public via a spac deal in 2021; its shares were trading around 75 cents (near a 52-week low) toward the close of the market on Thursday.
BuzzFeed is among a slew of digital content companies that rode the social media wave to vast readership and, at times influence, but that struggled to become profitable on the relatively meager cut of digital advertising earned from platforms including Google and Facebook.
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