Buzzfeed, the leftist news outlet responsible for fake reporting on the now debunked Trump/Russia dossier, has announced it will shut down its news division.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said that the move was a part of slashing 15 percent of staff amid the economic downturn hitting big tech forcing them to shut down.
“While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization,” he wrote to staff in an email.
The CEO admitted he overinvested in the news portion of the company.
“This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media,” he wrote, as reported by NBC News.
The CEO added he would “hold the company to higher standards for profitability” in the future.
Meanwhile, conservatives celebrated the news outlet’s demise. Greg Price wrote, “For every former Buzzfeed reporter being fired today, take this quiz to find out which industry you’re most suited for: Solar panels, coding, or oil drilling.”
For every former Buzzfeed reporter being fired today, take this quiz to find out which industry you're most suited for: Solar panels, coding, or oil drilling👇https://t.co/trDWM0uWrw
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) April 20, 2023
The job losses come amid an avalanche of other layoffs from significant companies like Disney, Facebook, and Amazon.
As NBC reported:
Affected BuzzFeed News staffers will be have an opportunity to apply for “a number of select roles” at HuffPost and BuzzFeed.com. Peretti said he planned to engage with the News Guild union about the cost reduction plans and what they would mean for affected union members.
Later that year, BuzzFeed Inc. became a publicly traded company amid a global frenzy of reverse mergers, many of which have since lost significant value. In BuzzFeed’s case, it never traded above its initial public offering price of about $10, and was already down about 93% as of Thursday.
READ: Disney Lost over a Quarter of a Billion Dollars in 2022 from Two Woke Movies