BuzzFeed is shutting down its news division as part of an effort to cut 15 percent of its work force, the company’s chief executive, Jonah Peretti, said Thursday in a memo to employees.
The layoffs will affect 180 people across the company’s business, content, tech and administrative teams. About 60 of those jobs will be affected by the shuttering of BuzzFeed News, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. The company will offer jobs at BuzzFeed.com and HuffPost, which Buzzfeed acquired in 2021, to more than a dozen BuzzFeed News staff members affected by the closure in an attempt to salvage some positions.
In his memo, Mr. Peretti said he “made the decision to overinvest” in BuzzFeed’s news division because he loved the work it produced but acknowledged that he had been slow to accept that social media platforms would not provide the financial support needed to make Buzzfeed News profitable.
“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.”
BuzzFeed will continue to publish news on HuffPost, which Mr. Peretti said in his memo was profitable and less dependent on social platforms. He added that the company was moving forward “only with parts of the business that have demonstrated their ability to add to the company’s bottom line.”
Edgar Hernandez, BuzzFeed’s chief revenue officer, and Christian Baesler, the company’s chief operating officer, will depart but have agreed to stay on through the transition.
Newsroom employees had been told not to come into the office on Thursday. Mr. Peretti held an all-hands video meeting after the announcement, with some members of management joining from a New York meeting room unfortunately named “Operation Doomsday,” according to a BuzzFeed staff member who was on the call and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. Mr. Peretti told the workers that he had failed them, the staff member said.
“It is clearly a massive failure on my part and I am deeply sorry for it,” Mr. Peretti said in the meeting, according to the person.
Mr. Peretti was asked if he would resign, and he said he was staying on at the company.
“I own this decision,” Mr. Peretti said, according to the person in the meeting. “Nothing that is happening today is about the work of this team.”
Shares of BuzzFeed, which went public in late 2021 via a deal with a special type of shell company, fell by more than 20 percent in midday trading, to around 70 cents per share.
Ben Smith, the founding editor in chief of BuzzFeed News who left in 2020, said in an interview that he was “really sad” about the closure.
“I’m proud of the work that BuzzFeed News did, but I think this moment is part of the end of a whole era of media,” said Mr. Smith, a former New York Times media columnist who now runs the media outlet Semafor. “It’s the end of the marriage between social media and news.”
BuzzFeed News, which was started during the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, became a beacon for up-and-coming political and investigative journalists. The site won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for international reporting for stories that used satellite imagery to report on the Chinese government’s detention of Muslims.
BuzzFeed News won plaudits for its investigative work, becoming a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for an exposé into a corporate dispute-settlement process, but it was also criticized for ignoring some of the norms followed by some of its more traditional competitors.
In 2017, BuzzFeed published a dossier full of unverified information about Donald J. Trump, who had just been elected president. The company’s decision to publish the dossier was met with opprobrium by some media critics, who said it was irresponsible to make the information public without extensive vetting. BuzzFeed and Mr. Smith defended the decision, saying the public had a right to information that was circulating at the highest levels of power in Washington.
That same year, BuzzFeed News was sued by a Russian executive named in the dossier, who said the news organization defamed him when it published its story. BuzzFeed won the lawsuit, and Mr. Smith defended the decision to publish the dossier, saying in an essay for The Atlantic on Thursday that he would do it again.
A spokesperson for BuzzFeed said the company was planning to keep all of the stories published by the news division archived on its website in perpetuity.
BuzzFeed News signed off on Thursday in the somewhat irreverent fashion it became well-known for during its operations.
“BuzzFeed News is logging off with a reminder that Blippi pooped on his friend,” read an Apple News push alert from BuzzFeed, referencing a story from the news organization.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
