Three weeks after acquiring HuffPost from Verizon, Buzzfeed has shut down the Canada and Quebec newsrooms. 47 employees in the US Huffington Post office have been affected.
The HuffPost Union has released a statement that “today, we learned that 33 of our unit members — nearly 30% of our unit — are being laid off. We are devastated and infuriated, particularly after an exhausting year of covering a pandemic and working from home.”
“This is also happening less than a month after HuffPost was acquired by BuzzFeed. We never got a fair shot to prove our worth.”
Reportedly, the decisions were made without forewarning staff.
Journalist Laura Basset tweeted that “HuffPost employees, after a year of working through a pandemic that isn’t over, were invited to a meeting today with the password “spring is here,” where they were told 47 of them would be laid off. They would only know if they still had a job if they didn’t receive an email by 1.”
That is cruel and psychotic and ridiculous.
— Laura Bassett (@LEBassett) March 9, 2021
Senior HuffPost Canada reporter Samantha Beattie tweeted that the masthead’s website had been taken down without any of the staff being informed. The newsroom, along with HuffPost Quebec, reportedly filed for union certification two weeks ago.
https://twitter.com/Samantha_KB/status/1369346927641387011?s=20
Buzzfeed bought the HuffPost from Verizon. Last year, Buzzfeed made significant cuts to staff numbers, including 70 per cent of their furloughed staff. They also shut down Buzzfeed UK and Buzzfeed Australia.
A spokesperson has said that the HuffPost’s Australian and UK operations would also “be slimmed”.
HuffPost (formerly The Huffington Post) was founded in 2005 by Andrew Breitbart, Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti.
Peretti is also the co-founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, where he bgan working full time after leaving the Huffington Post
