Global Courant 2023-04-20 20:22:38
BuzzFeed News is shutting down.
In an email to staff shared with NBC News, BuzzFeed CEO and co-founder Jonah Peretti said the move was part of a 15% staff cut across a number of teams.
“While layoffs are being made in nearly every division, we have determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization,” he wrote.
Peretti said he was “too invested in BuzzFeed News” because I love their work and mission so much.
“This made me slowly accept that the major platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial backing needed to support premium, free journalism built specifically for social media,” he wrote.
He added that he had failed to “hold the company to higher standards of profitability” to give it a buffer against downturns.
Peretti said he planned to talk to the News Guild union about the cost-cutting plans and what they would mean for affected union members.
BuzzFeed News launched in earnest in early 2012 after it appointed longtime New York City political reporter Ben Smith as editor-in-chief. In 2021, the news organization won a Pulitzer Prize for a series that exposed China’s mass detention of Muslims. That same year, it was also named a Pulitzer Finalist – its second time receiving the honor.
Later that year, BuzzFeed Inc. a publicly traded company in the midst of a global frenzy of reverse mergers, many of which have since lost significant value. In BuzzFeed’s case, it never traded above its initial public offering price of about $10, and was already down about 93% as of Thursday.
Following the announcement, shares in the company fell another 25% to about $0.72.
This is an evolving story.
