BuzzFeed wields its ax for the third time
BUZZFEED made a third round of coronavirus-related cuts this week — and for the first time, took aim at the journalism side of the company.
The cuts involved the furloughs of 19 staffers by newly installed Editor-in-Chief Mark Schoofs, who was tapped earlier this month to succeed Ben Smith, who left for The New York Times.
Schoofs furloughed four people in the US, including BuzzFeed’s Washington DC bureau chief and the site’s creative director, as well as 10 journalists in London and five in Australia. The cutbacks come as BuzzFeed boss Jonah Peretti scrambles to keep coronavirus-induced losses under $20 million this year.
More reductions are expected as Peretti and Schoofs sit down with the NewsGuild this week to negotiate paring back the rankand-file staff on the editorial side of the company, which produces the hard news and is unionized. The side that produces the cat videos and listicles — and pulls in most of the traffic — is not unionized and has borne the brunt of the cost-savings thus far.
This week’s actions hit Kate Nocera, BuzzFeed’s DC bureau chief and daughter of New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, and Creative Director Dennis Huynh, a five-year veteran.
Nocera, who left BuzzFeed in 2015 for a public relations job only to return the next year, tweeted on Wednesday, “This is such a strange time and I’m having a lot of feelings, but mostly just that this was the best job I’ve ever had.” She added, “There’s a reason I came back to BuzzFeed News 4 years go — it’s the people.”
Huynh tweeted, “It has been a magical 5 years and a privilege to lead the wonderful people of @BuzzFeedNewsArt and @styleguide throughout the years.”
Although both tweets sounded like goodbye notes, a spokesman said any cuts this week involved three-month furloughs — not layoffs.
This latest round follows the earlier furlough of 68 people for three months unveiled on May 6 and effective May 16. The earlier moves were from the side of the company that generates quizzes, listicles and pet videos that helped BuzzFeed in its early days by attracting readers from social media outlets like Facebook.
In yet another round of cuts unveiled in late March, Peretti said he would forgo pay until the pandemic was over while cutting employees pay on a sliding scale — ranging from 5 percent for employees making less than $65,000, up to 10 percent for employees over $90,000, and 25 percent for top executives.
Quartz cuts
Financial news site Quartz is laying off 80 people and shutting its offices in London, San Francisco, Hong Kong and Washington, DC, in response to the coronavirus-advertising collapse that has forced dramatic cutbacks across a slew of publications.
Chief Executive Zach Seward broke the news to employees Thursday, saying the eight-yearold company, which posted its first-ever profit in 2017, would embark on a new strategy that emphasized paid subscriptions over ad revenue. Seward said the company had 17,680 paid subscribers at the end of April.
Seward said he is cutting his salary and that of Editor-in-Chief Katherine Bell, who replaced founding editor Kevin Delaney, now an opinion columnist at the The New York Times, in December. Quartz also lost Executive Editor Xana Antunes, a former editor of the New York Post, who died on Jan. 27 following a two-year battle with pancreatic cancer.
In his remarks to staffers, Seward said, “I never want to eliminate jobs if we can avoid it, least of all in the current environment, and so we looked for every other responsible way to save money first. I have cut my own salary by 50 percent for the remainder of the year, and the rest of our executive team ... are voluntarily cutting their salaries by 20 percent, as well.” In addition to Bell, President Katie Weber and Chief Executive Officer Tomo Ota will face pay cuts. The company is closing its four satellite offices as those leases expire, but will continue to employ people in all of those cities operating remotely. Quartz is also seeking to reduce the rent it pays in its New York City headquarters, among and other cost-saving moves. “Those savings alone, however, aren’t enough to control our losses or sufficiently correct our business model, so I reluctantly concluded that much more significant changes were necessary,” he told staffers. The NewsGuild of New York said it represented 43 Quartz journalists in the Big Apple, and that about half of its members are among those being laid off.