In the latest mass layoff, Vice Media announced that staff cuts would affect around 250 people. The move is part of its new CEO’s plan to reduce spending and reach profitability. It is reported that the cuts will be distributed across all of the company’s departments, leaving 10 percent of its workforce looking for a new job. Last year, they implemented a hiring freeze and tried to reduce their workforce through attrition.
In addition, Vice will be shifting its focus away from online publishing toward television and film production and branded content.
BuzzFeed has also been hit with significant job cuts. The site was once a social media sensation due to its popularity among those with short attention spans who enjoyed wasting time on its “listicles” and quizzes, and they were hailed as the future of the industry when they hired reporters to create a more serious journalistic presence. However, they haven’t been as successful as they hoped, with 15 percent of staff – roughly 250 workers – getting their walking papers recently.
One former employee of BuzzFeed, which is owned by NBC Universal, told the Los Angeles Times: “The speed with which we went from being the gold standard to suddenly being this place of gloom and doom is really head-spinning.”
Interestingly, NBC Universal is also an investor in Vox Media, which saw 50 employees getting the pink slip last year and dozens offered different roles. Vox Media properties include Vox, Recode, Polygon, and the Verge. Meanwhile, Verizon Media Group, owners of the Huffington Post and Tech Crunch, recently announced that it would be cutting seven percent of its work force; Refinery29 and Mic have also seen job cuts in recent times. Gannett, which owns more than 1,000 newspapers across the nation, has recently cut 400 jobs, while another newspaper operator, McClatchy, recently offered 450 workers voluntary buyouts.
The tide is turning
Many of those who have lost their media jobs recently blame Google and Facebook and their monopoly over digital ads. There’s no question that traffic from these internet giants can make or break a site, but it’s also interesting to see the tables turned; some of the very same outlets that are suffering now have also benefited greatly from the moves by Google, Facebook and YouTube to bury independent media sites.
All told, 2,100 media jobs were lost in the span of just two weeks, according to the Guardian, with most coming from digital publishers. According to the U.K. paper, the biggest mistake most digital publishers made was assuming Facebook and Google were truly interested in helping sustain their business. After adjusting their algorithm in a way that essentially “demoted” news in general, publishers like BuzzFeed have seen their traffic drop significantly.
It’s clear that people are growing increasingly tired of being fed the narratives that the globalist-funded, left-wing media was trying to push, and it looks like their efforts to silence independent journalism are now coming back to haunt them.
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