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BuzzFeed News is shutting down.
In an email to staff shared with NBC News, BuzzFeed CEO and co-founder Jonah Peretti said the move was part of a 15% workforce reduction across a number of teams.
“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,” he wrote.
Peretti said he had “overinvest[ed] in BuzzFeed News “because I love their work and mission so much.”
“This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media,” he wrote.
He added that he had failed to “hold the company to higher standards for profitability” to give it a buffer for downturns.
Moving forward, Peretti said, BuzzFeed will have a lone news brand, HuffPost, which he said “is profitable, with a loyal direct front page audience.”
Affected BuzzFeed News staffers will be have an opportunity to apply for “a number of select roles” at HuffPost and BuzzFeed.com. Peretti said he planned to engage with the News Guild union about the cost reduction plans and what they would mean for affected union members.
BuzzFeed News launched in earnest at the outset of 2012 after it named longtime New York City political reporter Ben Smith as its editor-in-chief. In 2021, the news organization won a Pulitzer Prize for a series exposing China’s mass detention of Muslims. That same year, it was also named a Pulitzer finalist — the second time it had received the honor.
Later that year, BuzzFeed Inc. became a publicly traded company amid a global frenzy of reverse mergers, many of which have since lost significant value. In BuzzFeed’s case, it never traded above its initial public offering price of about $10, and was already down about 93% as of Thursday.
Following the announcement, shares in the company fell another 25%, to about $0.72.
MSNBC’s Hayes Brown contributed reporting.
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