Media organizations are in crisis mode.
Newspaper giant Gannett cut an unknown number of positions from its publications under the USA Today network Wednesday. BuzzFeed slashed 15 percent of its workforce, or 200 employees, it revealed Wednesday night. And Verizon Media capped the purge by laying off seven percent of its employees, amounting to about 750 jobs cut. Altogether, that totals more than 1,000 media jobs lost in a single day.
Gannett, which owns a slew of papers across the country, had been expected to announce layoffs since a company owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital announced a bid for Gannett earlier this month. Alden has been called the "destroyer of newspapers" due to the layoffs it brought to other papers it purchased in recent years. The extent of these latest layoffs is still unknown, but at least 20 employees, including senior editors with decades-long tenures and a Pulitzer Prize winner, announced their ousters Wednesday, per Poynter.
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BuzzFeed's announcement was more surprising, but came after staffers learned senior editors were being sent to the company's New York City office for a major announcement, CNN reports. The cuts are part of a restructuring effort to move BuzzFeed toward profitability, as detailed in The Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, the biggest cuts came from the Verizon Media-owned HuffPost, AOL, and Yahoo. Specific layoffs were made official Thursday morning, HuffPost says, with editor Chloe Angyal announcing that HuffPost's entire Opinion section was being cut. All the layoffs sparked a wave of tweets from experienced journalists who learned their jobs were gone, followed by a rush of supportive responses and a call to tweet job openings at other media companies.
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