DUBAI: BuzzFeed is reorienting and shrinking its news division as the digital media company best known for its lighthearted lists and quizzes strives to increase its profitability.
The New York-based company is offering voluntary buyouts in its high-profile, 100-person newsroom and some top editors are leaving. They include Mark Schoofs, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, and deputy editor in chief Tom Namako, who announced a move to NBC News Digital on Tuesday. Ariel Kaminer, the executive editor for investigations, is also leaving.
BuzzFeed News is unprofitable but has won awards, including its first Pulitzer last year, and its staff has been regularly poached by traditional news organizations. BuzzFeed spokesman Matt Mittenthal said about 35 people were eligible for the buyouts, but the company doesn’t expect all of them to take one.
Buyouts will be offered to news staffers on the investigations, inequality, politics and science teams, as BuzzFeed focuses more on big breaking news and lighter content.
“We’ve had freedom to chase wild, impossible stories,” tweeted Rosalind Adams, an investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News. “It’s a sad day to watch @BuzzFeedNews move away from valuing that work.”
Beyond the newsroom buyouts, the company also said it is cutting 1.7 percent of its staff. In a January filing with securities regulators, Buzzfeed said it had 1,524 US and international employees, so the cuts would amount to roughly 25 people.
BuzzFeed’s shares have dropped more than 40 percent since the company went public in early December via what’s known as a SPAC, merging with a company that already trades, rather than an IPO.
The company had a solid year in 2021, it reported Tuesday in its earnings release. Its revenue rose 24 percent to $397.6 million, thanks to increases in e-commerce and ad revenue, and its profit more than doubled, to $25.9 million.
But it expects revenue to drop in the current quarter if it includes the acquisition of Complex Networks, a group of pop culture sites BuzzFeed acquired last year. The layoffs separate from the news division will come from BuzzFeed Video and the editorial side of Complex.
BuzzFeed also acquired HuffPost in early 2021, and laid off several dozen of its staffers shortly after.
On BuzzFeed’s earnings call Tuesday, CEO Jonah Peretti said the company is accelerating its investment in vertical video, the smartphone format used on the increasingly popular video sharing site TikTok.
As for the news division, it “will need to get smaller,” and “prioritize the areas of coverage our audience connects with most,” Peretti said in a memo to employees.
On the earnings call, he said that the company needs to make BuzzFeed News “a stronger financial contributor to the larger business,” and doing so will involve focusing on big breaking news, culture and entertainment, celebrities, and “life on the Internet.”
BuzzFeed cutting jobs, top editors leaving news division
https://arab.news/n2v4n
BuzzFeed cutting jobs, top editors leaving news division
- The New York-based company is offering voluntary buyouts in its high-profile, 100-person newsroom and some top editors are leaving
- BuzzFeed News is unprofitable but has won awards, including its first Pulitzer last year
OpenAI’s Altman says world ‘urgently’ needs AI regulation
- Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a global artificial intelligence conference on Thursday that the world “urgently” needs to regulate the fast-evolving technology
NEW DELHI: Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a global artificial intelligence conference on Thursday that the world “urgently” needs to regulate the fast-evolving technology.
An organization could be set up to coordinate these efforts, similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he said.
Altman is one of a host of top tech CEOs in New Delhi for the AI Impact Summit, the fourth annual global meeting on how to handle advanced computing power.
“Democratization of AI is the best way to ensure humanity flourishes,” he said on stage, adding that “centralization of this technology in one company or country could lead to ruin.”
“This is not to suggest that we won’t need any regulation or safeguards,” Altman said.
“We obviously do, urgently, like we have for other powerful technologies.”
Many researchers and campaigners believe stronger action is needed to combat emerging issues, ranging from job disruption to sexualized deepfakes and AI-enabled online scams.
“We expect the world may need something like the IAEA for international coordination of AI,” with the ability to “rapidly respond to changing circumstances,” Altman said.
“The next few years will test global society as this technology continues to improve at a rapid pace. We can choose to either empower people or concentrate power,” he added.
“Technology always disrupts jobs; we always find new and better things to do.”
Generative AI chatbot ChatGPT has 100 million weekly users in India, more than a third of whom are students, he said.
Earlier on Thursday, OpenAI announced with Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) a plan to build data center infrastructure in the South Asian country.
