The news website BuzzFeed has laid off 47 HuffPost workers in the US, the majority of them journalists, and closed down HuffPost’s Canadian operation, reportedly without warning to staff, less than a month after purchasing the rival company.
Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s chief executive, announced the move in a virtual staff meeting on Tuesday, as the company also warned it could trim operations in the UK and Australia.
The job cuts amount to nearly 30% of HuffPost’s US-based journalists, at a time when most news outlets across the country are shrinking or facing closure.
In the meeting – which employees said they had to use the password “spr!ngisH3r3” to enter – Peretti said HuffPost’s Canadian edition will be shut down entirely, in an effort to halt two years of financial losses.
BuzzFeed, which slashed its own news division when it laid off 43 journalists in 2019, announced its plan to buy HuffPost from Verizon Media in November 2020, and the deal was finalized in February.
In a statement the HuffPost union said 33 members were being laid off.
“We are devastated and infuriated, particularly after an exhausting year of covering a pandemic and working from home,” the union said.
Noting that the layoffs came soon after the BuzzFeed deal, it added: “We never got a fair shot to prove our worth.”
A spokesperson for BuzzFeed said that in addition to the US job cuts and the Canada closure, HuffPost will be “moving away from local coverage in HuffPost Australia”.
“We will begin consultations in Australia and the UK to propose slimming operations in both places,” the spokesperson said.
In Tuesday’s meeting Peretti told HuffPost staff that while BuzzFeed remains profitable, “we don’t have the resources to support another two years of losses”.
The news site Defector reported that HuffPost staff were told of the meeting at 10am local time on the US east coast. Once there, Peretti told employees that if they “don’t receive an email” by 1pm ET their jobs were safe.
HuffPost Canada was shut down immediately, even before staff at the website were informed, according to the site’s senior reporter Samantha Beattie.
Beattie posted an image of the closure message posted on HuffPost Canada’s website, and said employees had not been told in advance.
Without telling us they've shut down our site. pic.twitter.com/3KEndpH82b
— Samantha Beattie (@Samantha_KB) March 9, 2021
“We want to ensure the homepage remains a top destination on the internet,” Peretti said as he announced the HuffPost cuts.
“We also want to maintain high traffic, preserve your most powerful journalism, lean more deeply into politics and breaking news, and build a stronger business for affiliate revenue and shopping content.”
The Huffington Post, as it was originally called, was founded by the media and business figure and author Arianna Huffington in 2005 and became a go-to destination for clickable content in the days before Twitter and Facebook began to dominate newsfeeds. It was sold to AOL for $315m in 2011, with Verizon taking ownership of the news outlet when it purchased AOL in 2015.
Peretti was chief technology officer at the Huffington Post before launching BuzzFeed, which grew into a powerhouse website famed for its “listicles” and quizzes before developing a widely praised news division.
The company has been criticized for laying off a slew of journalists in recent times, including 43 in one fell swoop in January 2019, when BuzzFeed also closed its entire national desk.
