BuzzFeed Canada closing Ottawa bureau
Little more than a year after launching in Canada, viral content and news factory BuzzFeed is closing shop on its parliamentary operations in Ottawa and changing the mandate for its Canadian team, according to a memo provided by the company to the Financial Post.
BuzzFeed’s two employees on Parliament Hill — political editor Paul McLeod and political reporter Emma Loop — have been offered jobs covering the U. S. Congress in Washington, D. C. They were also presented with a buyout offer. MacLeod announced on Twitter that he will be taking the offer to relocate and cover U. S. politics.
“With the 2015 Canadian federal election behind us, we are wrapping up our Canadian political coverage,” s aid BuzzFeed VP International Editorial Scott Lamb in the memo to staff.
BuzzFeed has aggressively expanded its news operations and political coverage globally, but sources confirmed that, while frequent Canadian political coverage performed well during last year’s election, audience interest has since dropped off. The decision to abandon day- to- day poli tical coverage marks an unprecedented retreat for BuzzFeed, which has established political beats in the U. S., U.K. and Australia.
According to sources at BuzzFeed, there are no immediate plans to replace the two staff lost in Canada. The ten employees currently employed at BuzzFeed Canada’s Toronto headquarters will remain with the company.
The Toronto office is one of eighteen international bureaus including London, Sydney, Mumbai and Berl i n. Canadian visitors to BuzzFeed’s website, which make up around 12 million of the i ts purported 200 million monthly unique visitors, have been directed to a tailored home page that mixes domestic and international content since BuzzFeed Canada launched last year.
However, according to Lamb’s memo, the amount of Canadian content BuzzFeed produces may be significantly reduced, as its Toronto editorial staff will now report to editorial staff in the United States.
“We’ve decided to more closely align the efforts of our Toronto- based writers with our editorial team in New York, updating their reporting lines and opening up their editorial scope so they’re free to cover the topics that appeal to them from anywhere in the world, in addition to Canadian-centric content,” wrote Lamb.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has in recent months emphasized that the company’s goal for its Englishspeaking news and content is global integration.
To that end, its offices in Australia and the U. K. already have a mandate to produce a balance of domestic and international stories, which the company’s Canadian staff will now do as well.
The moves come in the wake of an April report by The Financial Times, which suggests t hat BuzzFeed missed its revenue target by 32 per cent last year, bringing in US$ 170 million instead of a projected US$ 250 million. According to the report, the company subsequently slashed its 2016 revenue projections in half, f rom US$ 500 million to US$250 million.
BuzzFeed denied the figures in the FT’s issued report.