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BuzzFeed News is closing.
CEO Jonah Peretti announced Buzzfeed is closing in a company-wide memo to staff on Thursday: “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.” The cuts will affect roughly 180 employees.
“I could have managed these changes better as the CEO of this company and our leadership team could have performed better despite these circumstances,” Peretti wrote. “I made the decision to overinvest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much.”
Peretti said his company will be focusing its news efforts on HuffPost, recently acquired, which has proved to be more lucrative than BuzzFeed News, according to Peretti’s email: “Moving forward, we will have a single news brand in HuffPost, which is profitable, with a loyal direct front page audience.”
“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 wrote. The company recently began experimenting with having artificial intelligence write its viral quizzes.
Founded in 2011, BuzzFeed’s news division won multiple awards in the course of its dozen years, including a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for an investigation of Uyghur detention in China. The outlet also received the George Polk Award and the National Magazine Award.
BuzzFeed News’ shuttering comes on the same day as Insider announced it would lay off 10% of its employees, including unionized writers. Like BuzzFeed, the business-focused outlet announced it would start experimenting with AI last week.
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