I simply cannot help but think that if these companies were actually doing journalism rather than propaganda they might not have to shed all these fools. But, hey, let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth. Merry Christmas.
7,800 people have lost their jobs so far this year in a media landslide
Thomson Reuters
On December 10, CNN reported that Verizon Media planned to layoff 150 people that week. Verizon confirmed the cuts to CNN.
In a statement, Verizon said, “Our goal is to create the best experiences for our consumers and the best platforms for our customers. Today we are investing in premium content, connections and commerce experiences that connect people to their passions and continue to align our resources to opportunities where we feel we can differentiate ourselves and scale faster.”
In late January it was reported that Verizon would cut 7% of its staff at its media companies (an estimated 800 people), which include Yahoo, AOL, and The Huffington Post.
“These were difficult decisions, and we will ensure that our colleagues are treated with respect and fairness, and given the support they need,” Guru Gowrappan, CEO of Verizon Media, said in a memo to staff.
It’s estimated that 20 employees were laid off at HuffPost earlier that month, including opinion writers, political reporters, and others. Nearly 100 corporate Verizon employees were reportedly laid off in San Francisco.
The layoffs are in addition to the 10,400 employees that Verizon is looking to shed by the middle of 2019 as part of a buyout program announced in December 2018.
Thomson Reuters
Newspaper giant Gannett laid off at least 215 employees at papers across the country following its merger with local paper giant GateHouse, who has also been known for cutting staff at local papers.
The cuts affected flagship paper USA Today, and nearly 40 other publications, according to a spreadsheet tallying the layoffs kept by Florida Times-Union journalist Andrew Pentazi.
In January, Gannett reportedly laid off journalists across the US the same day that Verizon’s layoffs were reported, following a round of voluntary buyouts.
Gannett was quiet about the layoffs, but Poynter reported on cuts that affected editors and senior journalists at local papers owned by Gannett in regions across the US. The New York Post reports that cuts affected as many as 400 people.
Men’s fashion and lifestyle site Highsnobiety cut 6 employees on December 5, according to a source close to the matter.
The cuts affected the news and video divisions.
In a statement given to Business Insider, a representative for the site said:
“Highsnobiety recently announced the termination of six members of the editorial staff in its New York office. This decision follows a series of internal reorganizations implemented by its new Editor-in-Chief, Thom Bettridge, who was appointed in July. This announcement was made in service of Highsnobiety’s evolution as a publisher, a move to refocus priorities and invest further in long-form and style content. The change does not effect staff headcount, as the company is looking to fill additional roles as part of its 2020 editorial strategy.”
In November, CBC announced that it would be cutting 35 jobs effective December 31 due to “redundancy,” according to Broadcast Dialogue.
Cuts were said to affect employees “across the national news service,” including guild members and management.
Beautycon Media, a lifestyle media and events company, laid off four people in November and five people in September, according to The Wrap.
Bell Media, parent company of CTV and iHeartRadio, cut at least 10 jobs across Canadian newsrooms in November, in addition to the 11 cut at CTV earlier in the year.
JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock
Torstar Corp., the parent company of the Toronto Star, announced in November that it would lay off 73 people along with offering buyouts, according to Global News.
The announcement accompanied the decision to shutter local editions of the paper, branded as StarMetro, across Canada.
Bustle Digital Group
Bustle Digital Group shut down its controversial attempt to relaunch Gawker in July after the acquisition of Inverse and reported troubles finding staff for the site.
Four people were laid off: the editor-in-chief, Dan Peres; the writer Nate Hopper, the editorial director Carson Griffith, and sales vice president Amanda Hale, the New York Post reported.
The Gawker relaunch faced trouble from the beginning, with Gizmodo’s Splinter causing chaos after it dug up unsavory tweets of Griffith’s shortly after the old property’s new staff announcement. Shortly after, Gawker’s two writers left, alleging that BDG refused to take action over offensive comments Griffith made in the Gawker office.
After the controversy, Peres was hired to take charge of the publication but reportedly faced trouble recruiting, according to the Post.
In the fall, Business Insider reported on multiple rounds of stealth cuts across Bustle Digital Group’s lifestyle publications. In all, after multiple rounds, over 31 part and full-time workers were cut in addition to the cuts at Gawker.
A former employee told Insider that the cuts were planned in advance and staggered to avoid press attention.
Local Florida paper The Tampa Bay Times, the recipient of 12 Pulitzer Prizes and the creator of PolitiFact.com, laid off seven employees October, according to its owner Poynter.
Executive Editor Mark Katches told Poynter in an email, “It’s never easy to say goodbye to great colleagues. No one wins when local journalism jobs are lost. Like every regional metro in America, the revenue picture presents significant challenges for us. But we’re buttressed by the fact that we have one of the most enormously talented newsrooms on the planet.”
Poynter said the paper recently lost a major advertiser and has struggled with digital revenue. In April 2018 the paper laid off nearly 50 employees.
Newseum.com
9 people were laid off from daily subway tabloid amNewYork in October when the publication was sold by Newsday to Brooklyn’s Schneps Media, which own over 50 neighborhood and local newspapers.
amNewYork was left with just seven newsroom staff after the cuts, according to The New York Times.
NBCUniversal laid off 70 employees in two rounds in August and September.
In August, E! announced that as part of its decision to move it’s “E! News” show from LA to New York, it would be laying off 20 to 25 LA employees, Variety reports.
In September, NBCUniversal announced that it would be laying off 45 more employees from E!, Oxygen, Bravo, and other properties, according to MediaPost.
NBCUniversal said the layoffs were part of its efforts to consolidate network operations. “Today the Lifestyle Group is making some changes to better organize ourselves for the future,” NBCUniversal’s president for lifestyle FrancesBerwick wrote. “I’m confident that this new structure, which creates multi-brand roles, will allow us to continue to grow the business and optimize our internal talent.”
In October, NBC News announced that it was laying off a dozen staffers from its video and tech operations, but that it planned to open 70 positions in the future that laid off employees could apply for.
Splinter, the politics site formerly known as Fusion, was shut down by parent company G/O Media, resulting in 7 cuts.
Despite former editorial director Paul Maidment insisting that the headcount at G/O would remain the same, staff confirmed layoffs to The New York Times. Maidment said the decision came down to the struggle to find an audience for the site.
The cuts followed the acquisition of Gizmodo Media Group by private equity firm Great Hill Partners, who have faced resistance from staff, accusations of sexism, and now, mass walkouts and resignations.
iMoved Studio/Shutterstock
WBAI-FM, a left-wing FM radio staple in New York, shuttered in October, laying of ten of its 12 employees, according to The New York Times.
Parent company, nonprofit Pacifica Foundation, reportedly gave the hosts and the station no notice, but it was struggling to keep up with bills and salary payments.
In recent years, Pacifica faced financial troubles after it was ordered to pay over a million dollars to an Empire State Building trust, where it broadcast its signal from. It filed bankruptcy over the lawsuit.
In 2013, 19 employees were laid off.
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated cut nearly 40 staffers, according to The Wall Street Journal, and plans to replace some full-time positions with contract roles — a move seen across media, tech, and many other industries.
Sports Illustrated was recently licensed to The Maven Inc. by Authentic Brands Group after the publication was sold by Meredith.
HuffPost laid off 13 workers in its video department in early October, cutting managers, producers, camera operators, and show hosts, according to HuffPost reporting.
“HuffPost is realigning its video strategy to invest and allocate resources to support its core areas that have high audience engagement, differentiation and are poised for growth as we continue on our mission to provide a voice to all people,” a spokesperson said.
The cuts followed a round of previous larger cuts that were part of hundreds of layoffs at its parent company Verizon.
Pitchfork.com
In October, the music publication Pitchfork laid off all six members of its video team as part of a consolidation effort by parent company Conde Nast.
Conde, which acquired Pitchfork in 2015, has recently undergone struggles to monetize in the digital media economy. In January, it said it planned to put Pitchfork and all of its other digital properties behind a paywall by the end of the year.
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The Washington Post laid off 20 people in September when it shut down its commuter paper Express, according to Washingtonian.
Company representatives told employees that the paper had lost too much money to continue to justify its existence.
According to Washingtonian, The Post published a press release as employees were being laid off, and staffers began to receive texts from concerned friends and family while still in meetings.
Laid off staffers were given a minimum of 11-weeks salary as severence.
Valence Media cut seven positions at Spin Media Group on Monday, September 16, according to Billboard.
The cuts affected employees at music publications Spin, Stereogum, and Vibe. Valence is owned by the Hollywood Reporter-Billboard Media Group, which employs more than 400 people.
The group bought SpinMedia in 2016, “establishing the world’s largest music brand by digital traffic, social reach, and audience share,” according to a press release from Spin.
In January, 22 people were laid off at Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter, according to The Wrap. The cuts were said to be made in an effort to reduce redundancies.
In 2013, SpinMedia laid off about 30 people, then 15% of its workforce.
Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Fullscreen
Rooster Teeth, an online media veteran that’s lasted 16 years, announced its first round of layoffs in September, saying it would cut 13% of its workforce, or about 50 people.
“As we looked ahead at all of our upcoming opportunities and challenges, we had to make some difficult decisions about how we are organized,” CEO Matt Hullum said in a memo Variety obtained.
The company primarily makes videos and is best known for its “Red vs. Blue” series, which is the longest-running web series.
Rooster Teeth is part of Otter Media, the sci-fi and gaming division of WarnerMedia.
Otter Media cut 10% of its staff last year in layoffs that didn’t affect Rooster Teeth.
Jin S. Lee
As part of Mark Cuban’s sale of AXS TV to Steve Harvey and Anthem Sports & Entertainment, 40 people were cut from the company, according to The Wrap.
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
The progressive news and opinion site ThinkProgress, a project of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, announced on September 6 that it would shut down and lay off its 12-member staff.
“We are very sad to announce that after more than two months of searching, we have been unable to identify a new publisher for ThinkProgress, and we are left with no choice but to close ThinkProgress as an independent enterprise focused on original reporting,” the site, which has been for sale since July, said in a statement.
The Center For American Progress faced criticism for its decision to shutter the site, with its former writer Matthew Yglesias tweeting, “‘I want you to do accurate, well-reported, well-written stories about Republican Party politicians doing bad things’ would be a perfectly reasonable thing to spend money on.”
The personal-finance publication Kiplinger’s laid off 11 people in early September after being sold earlier this year. According to TalkingBizNews, a company representative said the layoffs affected numerous teams to lessen impact. Cuts included writers, editors, copyeditors, fact-checkers, administrators, and artists.
Kiplinger’s said the cuts accompanied a new strategy that consolidated certain departments and streamlined workflow.
“The new editorial structure and content strategy is intended to be faster, more efficient, and more responsive, and will leverage increased collaboration among the team of experienced and expert editors and writers across all our publications, digital and print,” the company said in a statement.
The owner of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced a plan to lay off about 87 people in early September but said the cuts would not affect the company’s flagship publication and would affect only managers.
Cox owns a set of TV and radio stations along with The Journal-Constitution. Ownership of some of the TV and radio stations was sold to another company that would retain the Cox name, but Journal-Constitution ownership remained the same.
Reuters
The Hollywood Reporter first reported that the Brooklyn, New York-based media company would cut about 250 jobs, with the aim of trimming down and helping the organization become profitable.
“Having finalized the 2019 budget, our focus shifts to executing our goals and hitting our marks,” CEO Nancy Dubuc wrote in an email to staff.
Vice Media will refocus around its TV production unit, its international news team, its digital properties, and its original TV content.
Staff members in the US who are unionized are set to receive payouts of their accumulated paid time off, 10 weeks of severance, and medical benefits.
The cuts were previewed in a Wall Street Journal report in November 2018 that said the company would cut staff in part because of audience attrition over the prior three years.
Later, in August, The Wall Street Journal reported 15 more cuts at Vice’s TV channel Viceland. The cuts, which hit across departments at the channel, were meant to focus the channel towards news content instead of lifestyle or other programming.
ESPN+
ESPN International decided to cut 20 employees from staff, according to a report from The New York Post.
10 staff were offered relocation packages for other jobs, while 20 individuals were slated to be told their contracts would not be renewed.
The video game retailer GameStop’s Game Informer magazine laid off at least seven staffers as part of larger layoffs that affected the struggling company.
Seven editors announced on Twitter that they had been let go of the company, which had a total masthead of 19, according to Kotaku.
“While these changes are difficult, they were necessary to reduce costs and better align the organization with our efforts to optimize the business to meet our future objectives and success factors,” GameStop told Kotaku.
In early August, Pacific Standard’s editor-in-chief, Nicholas Jackson, announced that the online publication covering the Western US would shut down on August 16, affecting 20 full-time employees, 25 contractors, and a stable of freelancers, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The magazine was founded by the academic publisher Sara Miller McCune, who started Sage publishing.
According to Pacific Standard’s board president, Clive Parry, the decision to shutter the magazine came after Sage decided to reduce its funds for charitable giving.
National Public Radio (NPR) announced in August that it was cutting “fewer than 10” newsroom jobs as part of a “realignment.”
Senior VP of news and editorial director Nancy Barnes wrote that “the changes are not about saving money.”
Barnes wrote that the company wanted to more deeply invest in investigations, opioid crisis coverage, and climate change coverage.
Leon Neal/Getty Images
GateHouse Media, one of the largest local newspaper publishers in the United States, quietly laid off journalists in multiple large rounds throughout the year.
Business Insider confirmed there were at least 60 layoffs at various local newspapers owned by the company at the end of January. The layoffs focused on local sports reporters and photographers, some of whom had worked at their papers for over 30 years.
At the end of May, GateHouse reportedly laid off at least an additional 159 people at newspapers across the country, including reporters, editors, and other staff.
The cuts seemingly began after the $30 million acquisition of Schurz Communications Inc., which immediately resulted in 11 cut jobs at three publications in Maine and Indiana.
After first-quarter losses, other cuts began in May. When Business Insider inquired about the cuts, New Media CEO Mike Reed called them “immaterial.” He later told Poynter that layoffs would number only about 10 people.
In August, it was reported that ahead of its merger with Gannett, GateHouse had laid off at least 24 people, according to a count from Poynter.
Reuters
Following Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox, the company began layoffs that were expected to eventually claim at least 4,000 jobs, many of which the company says are meant to eliminate redundancies. The layoffs, expected to affect both Disney and Fox employees, have already begun.
Executives at Fox were the first to get the chop, ahead of ad-sales employees at Fox Networks Group, according to The Wrap.
National Geographic was next, cutting about 60 employees from multiple departments.
And layoffs have continued to roll through Fox’s film and TV divisions.
Rewire.News, a nonprofit publication devoted to evidence-based reporting on social-justice issues, has laid off five reporters in 2019. In May, it laid off its Appalachia-specific reporter, and in July four union members were told they would lose their jobs in September.
According to the Rewire.News union, the cuts will leave the publication with no full-time reporters.
As part of a larger restructuring announced by the Canadian broadcaster CTV, 11 people were laid off in Vancouver, according to Vancouver Media News & Views, with more expected to come in other cities.
The layoffs were initially announced company-wide in May and included Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec, according to The Star.
The reorganization is supposed to focus more resources on digital content.
Howard Law, the media director for the labor union Unifor, told Business Insider that Vancouver was one of three local CTV stations not represented by the union. He estimated that further cuts could number between 50 and 200.
Law said the restructuring was largely due to technological innovations that will allow CTV to reduce the number of editors it uses, and lost ad revenue to online platforms.
Michael Seto/Business Insider
On June 23, five layoffs accompanied the acquisition of Inverse by Bustle Digital Group. Inverse is a small science and technology publication founded by Dave Nemetz, who cofounded Bleacher Report with Bustle’s Bryan Goldberg. Josh Topolsky of The Outline, which was also recently acquired by Bustle, has been tasked with overseeing Inverse under the company.
Inverse confirmed to Business Insider that two editorial employees and three others were laid off the day of the acquisition.
In the digital media ecosystem, Bustle has gained a reputation for acquiring struggling media companies or brands — recently acquiring Nylon, Mic, The Outline, Inverse, and Gawker.
Flickr/Brian Wilkins
Entrepreneur magazine laid off four editorial staffers in mid-June, according to Talking Biz News. The company framed the layoffs as part of a restructuring toward digital content.
“We’re restructuring our digital offerings, with the goal of developing new products that are even more useful for entrepreneurs,” the company said.
Mad Magazine laid off about 10 staffers, according to one estimate given to Insider by someone close to the situation, amid news that the magazine would cease the production of original content.
Issue 10 will reportedly be the magazine’s last issue including new material. The magazine will continue to honor existing subscriptions with issues featuring new covers and recycled material.
It’s estimated that hundreds of freelancers will be affected.
The editors Casey Boyd and Dan Telfer were affected by the layoffs, among other employees.
The New York Post reported that at least 15 people were laid off at the African American-focused magazines Jet and Ebony.
In May, seven staffers were laid off when the parent company Clear View Group told Ebony staffers that the print edition of the magazine was being suspended, according to the Post.
In June, eight Jet staffers were laid off shortly after Clear View Group told Jet employees it couldn’t pay them for the last pay period in May, according to the Post.
Quartz
Quartz, a publication focused on data-driven global coverage, laid off four employees in the UK in January and seven employees in June, according to reports from Digiday. The cuts were composed of business-side employees and members of the company’s commercial team.
According to Digiday, Quartz is attempting to pivot its business model from making custom commercial content for clients to a subscription-based model.
Quartz’s total headcount is reportedly down to 235 from 243 in January.
In July 2018, Quartz was acquired by the Japanese media startup Uzabase and was tasked with handling the company’s mobile English-language business subscription service, according to the Associated Press.
Quartz has had traffic struggles, according to Comscore, whose data indicates a 50% dropoff in visitors following the publication’s acquisition, Digiday reported.
In June, during LGBT pride month, WWD reported that five employees at the LGBT media group Pride Media were laid off after a year of drama surrounding payment and funding at the company. The cuts reportedly hit corporate Pride Media staff and Out Magazine editorial staffers.
Five other staffers at Out were reportedly cut in February.
The company, and Out Magazine in particular, had been facing criticism from its journalists who said they hadn’t been paid in months.
Just days before the layoffs, Pride Media had received a cash injection from investors after months of promises, Vice News reported.
The Youngstown Vindicator, a legendary Ohio daily that served an area with more than 500,000 people, announced in June that it would shutter in August, eliminating 144 full-time jobs, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Days before the announcement, the publication celebrated its 150th birthday.
In an article, The Vindicator’s publisher and general manager wrote: “Due to great financial hardships, we spent the last year searching for a buyer to continue to operate The Vindicator and preserve as many jobs as possible while maintaining the paper’s voice in the community. That search has been unsuccessful.”
(AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
The New York Post reported that the magazine giant Meredith laid off about 1% of its workforce, 60 employees, in early June, months after acquiring Time Inc.
The cuts were primarily at Entertainment Weekly and Traditional Home.
In September, the company laid off 200 people from a variety of lifestyle publications.
A Meredith spokesman told the Post that the cuts came amid “a lot of competition internally for ad dollars.”
AP
On March 13, First Look Media — the parent company of Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept and Laura Poitras’ Field of Vision — laid off seven staff members and two contractors (4% of the group) across the company.
Three of those laid off were tasked with maintaining and securing the company’s archive of materials leaked to Greenwald and Poitras by Edward Snowden. The Snowden archive was also shut down with the layoffs.
First Look Media CEO Michael Bloom told staffers that the company had decided to “focus on other editorial priorities” after mining the Snowden archive for five years, The Daily Beast reported.
Bloom continued: “It is our hope that Glenn and Laura are able to find a new partner — such as an academic institution or research facility — that will continue to report on and publish the documents in the archive consistent with the public interest.”
In June, First Look Media announced that it would lay off six staffers, shutter its Topic magazine, and defund its comics publication The Nib.
Photo credit should read STEPHEN MATUREN/AFP/Getty Images
Pennsylvania’s regional daily newspaper the Reading Eagle announced that it was filing for bankruptcy in May 2019.
The same month, MNG Enterprises said it would buy the paper and issued a warning that it could lay off all 221 employees, according to a state labor filing cited by the New York Post.
Later, however, a representative of the firm handling the sale of the company, Dirks, Van Essen, Murray & April, said, “We don’t know how many people will be retained.”
So far, only six people have been laid off.
On May 6 it was reported that more than 100 employees at CNN took buyouts amid corporate restructuring efforts. The buyouts were offered to employees who had hit retirement age, with four weeks of pay for every year of service — potentially providing two years’ worth of pay total, according to Deadline.
A CNN representative told Deadline the buyouts were explicitly not related to layoffs, but the move comes as AT&T — which owns CNN — attempts to restructure billions in debt.
Studio 1091 media laid off nearly a quarter of their employees, or 9 people, in cuts meant to focus their production line, according to The Wrap.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
In May, New Orleans’ Times-Picayune was acquired by one of its competitors, The Advocate. All 161 employees of the Times-Picayune were laid off.
The Times-Picayune had long been the city’s paper of record and had won numerous Pulitzer Prize awards for its reporting on Hurricane Katrina.
In 2012, the paper reduced its publication days to three days a week and put focus on its NOLA.com site. In 2013, the paper resumed daily publishing, but only after The Advocate swooped in and began publishing the New Orleans addition that would prove to be fatal competition for the paper.
Michael Seto
Despite G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller claiming he didn’t anticipate layoffs after he joined the new conglomerate (which comprises Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion), the company laid off 25 people, or 6% of its staff, in late April, Variety reported. The cuts included top editors and veteran reporters.
Spanfeller said that despite the cuts he planned to hire above the original headcount by the end of 2019. In May, there were only five postings on Gizmodo Media Group’s job site.
Circa
Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Circa News shuttered on March 26, 2019, with the company citing challenges facing small publishers.
“While we see new business opportunities with digital video and OTT, they do not require the daily publishing of a website,” Sinclair told The Washington Post.
Sinclair told the publication that 16 employees would be laid off, and 22 would be integrated into Sinclair’s news team.
Circa started as a news app in 2012 and was shut down in 2015 after failing to find a large user base. Sinclair bought and relaunched the property later that year.
Andrew Penner/Trans Canada Trail
In late March, the CWA Canada media union announced that Alberta’s local Red Deer Advocate, owned by Black Press Group, had laid off 26 staffers across the news and mail room.
Along with the cuts, Black Press announced it was shutting down the paper’s weekly edition.
Shutterstock.com
The former tech legend turned new-media company Digg.com laid off two editors in March, shrinking the number of employees to 10.
The staffers affected were the managing editor and the features editor, each of whom wrote and edited original content on the primarily aggregated site, indicating a refocusing on aggregation for the brand that in the past few years had branched out to publishing original writing and video.
The layoffs followed the sale of Digg in 2018 to the ad-tech company BuySellAds, which cleaved off nearly half of the company.
In a statement to Business Insider, BuySellAds’ CEO said: “This does not mark the end of original content at Digg, nor does it hint at a major change in direction or strategy. We continue to believe in the publication just as much as the day we acquired it.”
AP Photo/Tony Dejak
Cleveland’s Plain Dealer newspaper announced on March 15 that it would lay off 12 newsroom employees in addition to 29 previously announced layoffs scheduled for May. The editor George Rodrigue told union members by email that “since around 2001 newspaper advertising revenue has been plummeting.”
The union has asked for the paper to wait until after an coming subscription drive to make the cuts and vowed to fight them.
“This is a catastrophe for Cleveland and for local journalism,” the Guild unit chairman Ginger Christ said, according to Cleveland.com.
The 29 positions at stake are production jobs, which are being moved to a third-party factory that the paper is contracting. The additional 12 jobs are in the paper’s news department.
Frank Micelotta/Invision/AP
Country Music Television cut at least 10 jobs in March,according to The Wrap. Many of those affected were in the marketing department.
New York Media, the family-held owner of New York Magazine, Vulture, and other properties, laid off 32 employees on March 11 as part of a restructuring. The cuts affected 16 full-time employees and 16 freelance or part-time workers, according to a statement from the company.
“The departments most especially affected include audience development/circulation, copy, fact, production, and video,” the company said.
In November, the company announced that all its online content would go behind a paywall, which it said was part of the reason for the cuts.
“In some cases, the changes we are making reflect a need for new focus as we build out our digital subscription business; in others, they reflect an overdue integration of print and digital staff,” read the statement.
Last year the company said it was considering a sale; this year its staff formed a union.
On March 7, Philadelphia’s Inquirer reported that three staffers in Philadelphia had been laid off from the free tabloid Metro, which also publishes in New York City and Boston, where there were also layoffs.
The team was told the news over the phone from a new executive team in New York, and were shell-shocked, according to The Inquirer. The paper is said to be refocusing on building readership among train and bus riders in the city.
Fourteen people took voluntary buyouts at the legendary St. Louis Dispatch in March, following the paper’s announcement in January that it would offer 15 buyouts and downsize offices.
In February, nine design, copy, and layout employees were laid off when the paper decided to outsource the work.
The Dispatch laid off five people in 2018 and had another round in 2015.
Elle magazine
On February 19, Canadian Living, Style at Home, and Elle Canada magazines, owned by Groupe TVA, cut as many as 28 staffers.
According to an email from the company’s VP of communications to J-Source, the company will move the headquarters of Canadian Living and Style at Home from Toronto to Montreal as part of the restructuring.
The company said: “In the context of the magazine industry undergoing numerous worldwide changes, TVA Publications had to reconfigure its internal structure. This decision will allow TVA Publications to continue to offer its readers and its advertisers high-quality brands that perform well in Canada.”
Canadian Living and Style at Home were acquired in 2014 by Groupe TVA, which also owns Les Publications Transcontinental-Hearst Inc. — the owner of Elle Canada and Elle Quebec, according to J-Source.
Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider
Machinima, what used to be one of the largest video producers online, announced that it was closing in statements to news outlets February 1.
“Machinima has ceased its remaining operations, which includes layoffs,” a spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter, announcing that 81 jobs had been cut.
The company, which made gaming content for YouTube, was bought by WarnerMedia and housed under Otter Media in 2016 but stopped publishing material in January.
Otter Media announced that it had cut 10% of staff in December.
REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
On February 1, The McClatchy Co., which owns properties such as the Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star, emailed staffers to announce that 450 employees would be offered voluntary buyouts as part of a “functional realignment,” essentially signaling that the jobs have been marked out of the budget.
According to McClatchy, 200 people took the buyouts.
The news was first reported by the Miami New Times. It followed McClatchy’s failed attempt to buy Tribune Publishing in 2018.
BuzzFeed announced last Wednesday it would lay off about 220 employees, slashing jobs in its news, LGBTQ, international, and other divisions.
The layoffs ruffled feathers among media watchers when employees working outside of California were not offered payouts for their accrued paid time off, a decision that was eventually reversed after BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti met with staff council and was called out on the publisher’s own streaming show, AM2DM.
Laid-off BuzzFeed employees also received a notable amount of harassment from trolls online, NBC News reported.
In a memo published by Digiday on Tuesday, Peretti said the company would refocus its efforts on BuzzFeed Originals (home to quizzes and viral videos), commerce content, branded content, and branded production and publishing.
In 2018, BuzzFeed laid off its in-house podcasting team and restructured its advertising group.
Job cuts hit Condé Nast in January, quietly eliminating several positions across its properties.
Slate reported that on January 10, the day Condé Nast’s Wired magazine moved onto a new floor of One World Trade Center, five employees were let go. In November, Wired cut five staffers devoted to its Snapchat channel.
WWD reported cuts also hit editors at Glamour and junior staff at GQ magazine.
In 2018, multiple executives left the company ahead of an unspecified number of layoffs on its digital side.
Raymond Boyd/Getty Images
The Dallas Morning News eliminated 43 jobs, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, half of them in the newsroom, on January 7. The cuts affected journalists who covered immigration, transportation, the environment, and the courts.
In a letter, publisher Grant Moise said the cuts would reduce costs and begin a refocusing of the paper. Moise said the editorial and opinion section would be merged, and arts coverage would be reduced.
Alison Millington / Business Insider
The cuts represent a seismic shift in the media landscape. According to the Pew Research Center, a total of 5,000 media jobs left the market between 2014 and 2017, including growth in the digital sector.
This story has been updated to note that only 200 people took voluntary buyouts at McClatchy, after initially reporting that 450 people had been offered buyouts.
