The news site BuzzFeed laid off 47 HuffPost employees in the United States, most of them journalists, and closed the Canadian operation of HuffPost, reportedly without warning employees, less than a month after the rival company was bought.
Jonah Peretti, chief executive of BuzzFeed, announced the change at a virtual team meeting on Tuesday, as the company also warned that it could reduce operations in the UK and Australia.
Job cuts reach nearly 30% of US-based HuffPost journalists at a time when most news outlets across the country are shrinking or about to close.
At the meeting – at which employees said they needed to use the password “spr! NgisH3r3 ”to enter – Peretti said that the Canadian edition of HuffPost will be completely closed in an effort to contain two years of financial losses.
BuzzFeed, which reduced its own news division by laying off 43 journalists in 2019, announced its plan to buy HuffPost from Verizon Media in November 2020, and the deal was finalized in February.
At the a statement the HuffPost union said 33 members were fired.
“We are devastated and furious, especially after an exhausting year covering a pandemic and working from home,” said the union.
Noting that the layoffs occurred shortly after the BuzzFeed deal, he added: “We never had a fair chance to prove our worth.”
A BuzzFeed spokesman said that in addition to job cuts in the U.S. and the closure of Canada, HuffPost will be “moving away from local coverage at HuffPost Australia”.
“We will start consultations in Australia and the United Kingdom to propose weight loss operations in both places,” said the spokesman.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Peretti told the HuffPost team that while BuzzFeed remains profitable, “we don’t have the resources to support another two years of losses.”
The Defector news website reported that the HuffPost team was informed of the meeting at 10 am local time on the east coast of the United States. Once there, Peretti told employees that if they “did not receive an email” before 1:00 pm Eastern time, their jobs would be safe.
HuffPost Canada was shut down immediately, even before the site team was informed, according the site’s senior reporter, Samantha Beattie.
Beattie posted an image of the closing message posted on the HuffPost Canada website and said employees were not notified in advance.
“We want to ensure that the home page remains one of the top destinations on the Internet,” said Peretti in announcing HuffPost’s cuts.
“We also want to maintain high traffic, preserve your most powerful journalism, delve deeper into politics and breaking news, and build a stronger business for affiliate revenue and purchasing content.”
The Huffington Post, as it was originally called, was founded by media and business figures and author Arianna Huffington in 2005 and became a reference destination for clickable content in the days before Twitter and Facebook started to dominate news feeds. It was sold to AOL for $ 315 million in 2011, with Verizon taking ownership of the media when it acquired AOL in 2015.
Peretti was chief technology officer at the Huffington Post before launching BuzzFeed, which became a powerful site famous for its “lists” and questionnaires before developing a widely praised news division.
The company has been criticized for laying off a number of journalists in recent times, including 43 at once in January 2019, when BuzzFeed also closed its entire national office.