BuzzFeed is laying off 180 Staffers

BuzzFeed, a Pulitzer Prize-winning digital media firm, will eliminate its news section and lay off another 15% of its workforce overall in addition to the layoffs already announced earlier this year.

Approximately 1,200 people work at BuzzFeed overall, according to a recent regulatory filing.

Co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti informed the workers in a message that in addition to the news section, layoffs will also affect the business, content, technical, and administrative divisions. Additionally, BuzzFeed is thinking about eliminating positions in foreign markets.

In a note to the workforce, Peretti claimed that he “made the decision to overinvest” in the news section but failed to grasp the lack of the necessary funding at an early enough stage.

This year, digital advertising fell precipitously, reducing the income of big internet firms like Google and Facebook. The tech sector has experienced waves of layoffs, and more are anticipated.

Peretti stated in the email, “I’ve learnt from these mistakes, and the team moving forward has also learned from them. “We are aware that the adjustments and advancements we are making now are steps toward constructing a better future.”

The announcement comes just after BuzzFeed said it will let off 12% of its staff due to the deteriorating economic climate. Additionally disclosed in December were job layoffs at.

After helping with the restructure, the business’s chief operational officer, Christian Baesler, and chief revenue officer, Edgar Hernandez, are both leaving.

According to Peretti, there will only be one news brand left for the company: HuffPost.

Former BuzzFeed employees who were journalists bemoaned the closure of the news division.

Ben Smith, editor of BuzzFeed from 2011 to 2020 and current editor in chief of Semafor, stated, “I’m heartsick about it and proud of the wonderful journalism we accomplished when I was there and after I left.

In 2017, Smith took the contentious choice to make a “dossier” of material on the then-President Donald Trump public. Many media outlets ignored it because they believed it was untrustworthy, and even Buzzfeed stated that there were compelling grounds to distrust the accusations. We have always erred on the side of publication, he wrote at the time.

The demise of BuzzFeed “really marks the end of the marriage between news and social media,” according to Smith, the upcoming author of “Traffic,” a history of that time period.

For a series by Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing, and Christo Buschek on the facilities put in place by the Chinese government for the widespread imprisonment of Muslims, BuzzFeed News received its first Pulitzer in foreign reporting in 2021.

In the same year, an exposé on the involvement of the international banking sector in money laundering by BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Journalists was a finalist in that category. This month, a former employee of the U.S. Treasury Department received a six-month prison term for disclosing the vast collection of private financial documents that formed the foundation for the television series.

On Thursday, BuzzFeed announced that all of the news division’s work will be archived and made accessible throughout the BuzzFeed network. Additionally, the business is striving to ensure that any stories that are in the works will be published and promoted on BuzzFeed websites.