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Business Insider, the Axel Springer-owned financial news group in a fight over plagiarism with hedge fund boss Bill Ackman, will cut its workforce by close to a tenth.
On Thursday, Barbara Peng, who took over as chief executive from Henry Blodget last year, told staff in a memo that job cuts would follow a new editorial plan to drive future growth.
In a memo to staff, Peng said the group has “already begun to refocus teams and invest in areas that drive outsize value for our core audience. Unfortunately, this also means we need to scale back in some areas of our organisation.”
The decision, which is expected to affect the jobs of about 8 per cent, or more than 50 staff, across its operations, caps a brutal few weeks for newsrooms in the US and UK.
The Los Angeles Times, which was acquired by pharma-billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2018, said earlier this week that it would cut more than a fifth of its newsroom as its owner looks to trim the tens of million dollars in losses he has endured in recent years. The newspaper was criticised for telling staff of the cuts over an HR zoom webinar.
Condé Nast executive Anna Wintour last week announced she was folding Pitchfork into men’s magazine GQ and laying off several writers, including editor Puja Patel, fuelling anger from staffers and music critics.
Other publications such as Time magazine, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated have also been hit by job losses. In the UK, Reach, the country’s largest commercial news publisher, is cutting about a tenth of its workforce — or about 450 jobs — owing to a combination of a slump in advertising revenues and a drop in demand.
Amid the lay-offs, several US newsrooms have hit the picket lines in protest of their employers.
This week, Condé Nast employees across titles including Vanity Fair, Vogue and GQ staged a walkout at the company’s New York headquarters, timed on the same day as Hollywood’s Academy Award nominations. Holding red balloons to imitate a red carpet, workers chanted: “Bosses get Prada, workers get nada”.
Last week, LA Times staff also walked off the job in protest over job cuts. Forbes’s union is planning a three-day work stoppage.
Business Insider’s decision relates to a strategy laid out at the end of last year to refocus its editorial efforts on core areas such as business and technology, according to a person familiar with the plan, rather than more general news coverage in areas such as politics.
The person added that the cuts had no relation to the ongoing fight with Ackman, who has threatened legal action against Business Insider over plagiarism claims against the hedge fund boss’s wife. Following Ackman’s criticism of the Business Insider story, Axel Springer ordered an internal review of the reporting. The review concluded the reports had been “accurate and well documented”.
In response to the news on the job cuts, Ackman on X said that it “appears that they are purging and pivoting to attempt to become a legitimate business journal”.
This month, the Financial Times revealed that Axel Springer has paid out dividends of more than €750mn over the past four years, including just weeks after announcing hundreds of job losses at its domestic news outlets last year.
