BuzzFeed Inc. will close its news division and lay off about 15% of the company’s staff, CEO Jonah Peretti said Thursday in an email to employees.
In the email, obtained by The New York Times, Peretti said that BuzzFeed officials have “determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization.”
“Over the next couple of months, we will work together to run a more agile and focused business organization with the capacity to bring in more revenue,” he said. “We will concentrate our news efforts in HuffPost, a brand that is profitable with a highly engaged, loyal audience that is less dependent on social platforms.”
BREAKING: BuzzFeed news is shutting down. @peretti’s memo: pic.twitter.com/k3vGnHOkcl
— Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) April 20, 2023
Nearly every division of the company was expected to see layoffs, including its business, content, tech and admin teams. The company is also considering cutting roles in some international markets.
“We’ve faced more challenges than I can count in the past few years: a pandemic, a fading SPAC market that yielded less capital, a tech recession, a tough economy, a declining stock market, a decelerating digital advertising market and ongoing audience and platform shifts,” Paretti said. “Dealing with all of these obstacles at once is part of why we’ve needed to make the difficult decisions to eliminate more jobs and reduce spending.”
About 180 employees were expected to be affected, according to Reuters.
Peretti launched BuzzFeed in 2006, one year after he co-founded The Huffington Post. The company was focused on creating sharable content that could go viral in the new media era brought about by the advent of the internet.
BuzzFeed News started in late 2011 after the company poached political reporter Ben Smith from Politico to serve as the division’s editor-in-chief, The Washington Post reported. In 2021, BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
