BuzzFeed to Cut 15% of Its Workforce
The Wall Street Journal is reporting:
BuzzFeed is planning to lay off about 15% of its workforce, according to people familiar with the situation, as the company seeks to reorient itself in a shifting digital-media landscape.
The cuts could affect around 250 jobs, the people said. The firm, among the most high-profile digital-native publishers, also is looking to realign its resources to invest more in promising areas of the business like content licensing and e-commerce, one of the people said.
(Featured image is a screenshot of Buzzfeed’s front page menu.)
Several prominent Buzzfeed writers have already announced their intention to continue their careers by attaching themselves to fish and sucking out nutrients.Report
And Huffpost got rid of its Opinion Division.
And Gannett is doing layoffs.Report
I would have guessed that Buzzfeed employed somewhere between 50 and 100 people, not 1,660. So what do the other 1,500 of them do? The Onion has to generate all-original content, including video, and they only employ 140. It suggests to me that Buzzfeed’s core problem is that they hired vastly more people than was really justified to run a website that’s not all that different from this one, and that the layoffs aren’t really indicative of anything more than correcting wildly unjustified past business optimism.Report
It is quite clear that venture capitalists are driving these firings, not because the business model isn’t working – in Buzzfeed’s case, it very obviously is – but because venture capitalists want even more money in their own pockets, and they’re willing to sacrifice hundreds of employees to make it happen. Here’s hoping they get taxed into oblivion, at the very least.Report
Here’s hoping they get taxed into oblivion, at the very least.
“Wait, why did they fire even more people?”Report
If Buzzfeed’s revenue decreases, they lay people off.
If Buzzfeed’s revenue increases, they lay people off.
If a staff of English speaking Indian nationals can perform the work, they will lay people off.
If a computer algorithm can perform the work, they will lay people off.
In conclusion, our economy is the greatest explosion of wealth since the Cambrian period.Report
Would it be fair to say that the landscape is changing and people shouldn’t expect to keep jobs forever anymore?Report
I think it is fair to say people shouldn’t expect to find jobs that pay above poverty level.
Notice how in every single discussion we have here, goes like this:
1. “If workers unionize, companies will move to a nonunion state.”
2. “If the nonunion workers demand higher pay, the company will move to an offshore state.”
3. If the offshore workers demand higher pay, the company will replace them with automation.”
#3 is always and forever the ultimate trump card, the competitor of last resort which every worker must contend with.
The traditional rejoinder, some variation of the Luddite/ Lump Of Labor Fallacy, doesn’t seem to be materializing, even after 40 years of market liberalization.Report
Remember this article from 2015? Good times.
Anyway, I agree that the argument always goes something like that.
The question is to what extent we should work to keep these jobs in the country.
As someone who saw a half-dozen jobs (my own jobs, mind… not those of other people) outsourced in the early oughts, lemme tell ya, I understand the trade isolationist impulse. It’s almost enough to get a guy to vote Populist.Report
I can’t remember where I read this but recently I saw an article that said the problems of journalism go back well before the Internet explosion. You can trace them back to decisions in the 1980s.
Producing news is very expensive and seemingly has a relatively small audience of people who want it. For better or for worse, a lot of the audience for news are not necessarily people who want the advertisements. I think this is especially true on the left-side when you have intellectualism combined with anti-consumerism and anti-materialism. This came up during discussions on the demise of the Village Voice. I remember lots of eulogies where famous and not-famous people state that they learned how to become “real New Yorkers” by reading the voice. This means that they learned how to appreciate highbrow art and culture and/or cool downtown semi-Bohemian scenes from the Village Voice. It introduced them to Film Forum and to Danceteria/Mudd Club. What was left silent in this eulogies is that the Village Voice relied on advertisements for sex workers and/or drug dealers for decades.
So I imagine two audiences for the Voice, one of middle-class professionals with artsy-bohemian pretensions/interests but ultimately in a kind of removed away and then people looking for sex workers who probably did not care about the Voice’s articles. Never did the groups meet.
On-line journalism is much trickier. Buzzfeed can do great reporting but it costs a lot.Report
Does/did Buzzfeed ever do journalism? I only remember them for pop culture lists.Report
After backlash, BuzzFeed says it will pay out earned paid time off to laid off employees.
Before the backlash, they had planned on only paying out earned PTO in the states where it was required by law.Report