Digital media company BuzzFeed announced Thursday that it was shutting its news division and would cut its workforce by 15%, signaling the end of one of the most notable news websites of the internet era.
"We are reducing our workforce by approximately 15% today... and beginning the process of closing BuzzFeed News," chief executive Jonah Peretti wrote in a memo to staff.
The layoffs will affect 180 employees in teams, including business, content, tech and administrative units, Peretti said.
Pulitzer Prize-winning company has approximately 1,200 total employees, according to a recent regulatory filing.
Peretti said he "made the decision to overinvest" in the news division, but failed to recognize early enough that the financial support needed to sustain operations was not there.
Digital advertising has plummeted this year, cutting into the profitability of major tech companies from Google to Facebook. Waves of layoffs have rolled through the tech industry and more are expected.
"I've learned from these mistakes, and the team moving forward has learned from them as well," Peretti wrote in the memo. "We know that the changes and improvements we are making today are necessary steps to building a better future."
The announcement comes just a few months after BuzzFeed said that it would be, citing worsening economic conditions. Job cuts at were also announced in December.
Christian Baesler, the company's chief operating officer, and Edgar Hernandez, its chief revenue officer, are also leaving after they assist with the restructuring.
The company will have one remaining news brand, HuffPost, Peretti wrote.
Journalists who previously worked at BuzzFeed lamented the end of the news division.
"I'm heartsick about it, and proud of the great journalism we did when I was there and after I left," said Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's editor from 2011 to 2020 and now editor in chief of Semafor.
Smith made the controversial decision in 2017 to publish a "dossier" of information about then-President Donald Trump, though many outlets avoided it as unreliable and even Buzzfeed said there were serious reasons to doubt the allegations. He wrote then that "we have always erred on the side of publishing.
BuzzFeed's shutdown "really marks the end of the marriage between news and social media," said Smith, author of "Traffic," a forthcoming history of that era.
BuzzFeed News in 2021, in international reporting, for a series by Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek on the infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.
That same year, BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Journalists were finalists in that category for an expose on the global banking industry's role in money laundering.
A former U.S. Treasury Department employee was sentenced to six months in prison this month for leaking the trove of confidential financial reports that served as the basis for the series.
BuzzFeed said Thursday that all of the news division's work will be preserved and available within the BuzzFeed network.
The company is also working to make sure that any stories currently in progress will be published and promoted on BuzzFeed properties.
