Iconic BuzzFeed News is shutting down due to revenue issues. This announcement was made by CEO Jonah Peretti in a company-wide memo on Thursday. He said that he “overinvested” in BuzzFeed News even though the site didn’t have the “financial support required to support premium, free journalism.”
According to him, “We are reducing our workforce by approximately 15% today across our Business, Content, Tech and Admin teams, and beginning the process of closing BuzzFeed News.” This reduction will affect 60 employees in BuzzFeed News, some of whom will be offered jobs at other parts of the company
Peretti said that BuzzFeed will focus its news efforts in Huffington Post, which it acquired from Verizon in 2020. However, it will still keep the company’s flagship BuzzFeed.com site.
“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,” Peretti added.
Founded in 2011, BuzzFeed News mirrored the practice of its parent company, BuzzFeed which Jonah Peretti started in 2006. BuzzFeed is known for its highly shareable news posts, quizzes, and its signature “listicles”. BuzzFeed News broke off from a section on BuzzFeed.com to its own site domain in 2018.
BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2021 for its coverage of China’s campaign against the Uyghurs.
In the last five years, BuzzFeed cut down on operations, laying off 15% of its workforce in 2019 and shutting down its Australia and U.K. operations in 2020. In March 2022, BuzzFeed News Editor in Chief Mark Schoofs announced he was resigning and warned the organization would have to shrink in order to remain profitable in 2023.
As per reports, Ariel Kaminer, the Executive Editor, also departed during that time, and nearly 50% of the organization’s 100 reporters were offered buyout packages.
