The news website BuzzFeed fired 47 HuffPost employees in the US, the majority of whom are journalists, and discontinued HuffPost’s Canadian business, according to reports without warning, less than a month after buying the rival company.
Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s CEO, announced in a virtual staff meeting on Tuesday that the company had also warned that it could reduce operations in the UK and Australia.
The job cuts amount to nearly 30% of HuffPost’s US journalists, at a time when most news outlets across the country are shrinking or closing.
Peretti said during the meeting – after which employees said they ‘spr the password’! NgisH3r3 ‘had to use, saying that HuffPost’s Canadian edition would be completely shut down in an attempt to stem two years of financial losses.
BuzzFeed, which scrapped its own news division when it fired 43 journalists in 2019, announced its plan to buy HizPost from Verizon Media in November 2020, and the deal was finalized in February.
In a statement the HuffPost union said 33 members were being fired.
“We are devastated and furious, especially after an exhausting year of covering up a pandemic and working from home,” the union said.
He noted that the layoffs took place shortly after the BuzzFeed agreement, adding: “We never got a good chance to prove our worth.”
A BuzzFeed spokesman said HuffPost, in addition to reducing jobs in the US and closing Canada, would also “move away from local coverage in HuffPost Australia”.
“We will start consultations in Australia and the UK to suggest slimming in both places,” the spokesman said.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Peretti told HuffPost staff that while BuzzFeed is profitable, “we do not have the means to support another two years of losses”.
The news website Defector reported that HuffPost staff of the meeting were notified at 10 a.m. local time on the U.S. East Coast. Once there, Peretti told employees that their jobs were safe if they did not receive an email by 1 p.m. ET.
HuffPost Canada was closed immediately, even before staff were notified on the site, According to the website’s senior reporter, Samantha Beattie.
Beattie posted a picture of the closing message on HuffPost Canada’s website, saying employees had not been notified in advance.
“We want to ensure that the homepage remains a top destination on the Internet,” Peretti said when announcing the HuffPost cuts.
“We also want to maintain a lot of traffic, preserve your most powerful journalism, delve deeper into politics and newsbreakers and build a stronger business for affiliate revenue and shopping content.”
The Huffington Post, as it was originally called, was founded in 2005 by media and businesswoman and author Arianna Huffington and became a destination for clickable content in the days before Twitter and Facebook began to dominate news feeds. It was sold to AOL in 2011 for $ 315 million, and Verizon took over the newsroom when it bought AOL in 2015.
Peretti was chief technology officer at the Huffington Post before launching BuzzFeed, which grew into a greenhouse website known for its “lists” and quizzes before developing a widely acclaimed news section.
The company has recently been criticized for laying off a string of journalists, including 43 at one time, when BuzzFeed also closed its entire national desk.