layoffs

Jerrell Jimerson, Disney Streaming’s chief product officer and one of the architects of Disney+, has been let go as part of the media conglomerate’s latest round of layoffs. Jimerson on Wednesday sent a note to his team at Disney Streaming telling them that “after five incredible years at Disney, I will be leaving the company at the end of June.” Disney is laying off some 4,000 employees across the company this week, part of its previously announced target of cutting 7,000 jobs to reduce costs.

Disney TV Animation, responsible for 1,200 half-hours of animated content, including Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, is the latest division to be hit as it also merges the current and development teams. This has led to the departure of a number of executives including Khaki Jones, SVP current, who has been with the company for nearly 13 years, as well as a number of director level roles. Disney’s first-run syndication operation has been dissolved. Departing as part of that is Brent Jones, director and head of production finance and operations for first-run syndication.

Day 1 of Disney’s second wave of layoffs impacted ABC and Freeform’s senior programming ranks, Disney Television Studios marketing, which is being dissolved, and its music operations, which are being consolidated. Here are some of those affected.

Disney is initiating the second and largest round of its planned layoffs today and expects to reach 4,000 of its projected 7,000 staff cuts by Thursday. A staff memo from Disney Entertainment Co-Chairmen Alan Bergman and Dana Walden delivered the news, indicating that affected workers would be notified from now through Thursday. A final round will take effect before the start of summer.

BuzzFeed News, which earned as reputation as a scrappy news-breaking digital rival to legacy media brands, is shutting down. Jonah Peretti, the CEO of BuzzFeed, announced to staffers in a memo on Thursday that they will concentrate their news efforts on HuffPost, “a brand that is profitable with a highly engaged, loyal audience that is less dependent on social platforms.” BuzzFeed bought HuffPost from Verizon Media in 2020.

ESPN will begin layoffs early next week as part of parent company Disney’s cost cutting efforts, according to people familiar with the matter. Cuts will include some on-air talent and management, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. The number of layoffs at ESPN is unclear and the decision process is still fluid.

Workers at Facebook’s parent have been increasingly alarmed by job cuts and the company’s direction.

Roku said it will eliminate 200 employees, or about 6% of the company’s workforce as part of a new restructuring plan. The restructuring will result in a nonrecurring charge of $30 million-$35 million, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said it will stop using and sublease some of its office facilities.

ABC News underwent a round of staff reductions on Thursday, with about 50 positions impacted as part of parent Walt Disney Co.’s companywide cuts. ABC News President Kim Godwin also announced a realignment of her leadership team, with Katie den Daas serving as VP of newsgathering, overseeing the domestic and international teams, as well as NewsOne; Derek Medina, EVP, will oversee an expanded business and operations team; and Stacia Deshishku, executive editor and SVP of news, who will oversee the investigative and enterprise reporting units, as well as linear shows and special events.

Walt Disney Co. has eliminated its next-generation storytelling and consumer experiences unit, the small division that was developing metaverse strategies, according to people familiar with the situation, as part of a broader restructuring that is expected to reduce head count by around 7,000 across the company over the next two months.

Disney will begin layoff notices this week for more than 7,000 staffers whose positions will be eliminated as part of a deep cost-cutting effort that will be felt across all of the company’s key divisions. Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed Monday morning in a memo to employees that the layoffs will come in three waves, starting today. Iger disclosed the plan to significantly cut Disney’s overhead with massive staff reductions on Feb. 8. The cuts are expected to hit across the board and hit senior management levels as well as lower-level executives.

The CW is undergoing another round of staff cuts, sources tell Deadline. More than 15 people were affected, with the marketing/promotional team impacted, along with finance. The laid-off employees are said to include mid- and high-level executives, including some in SVP roles. A rep for CW parent Nexstar Media declined comment. Thursday’s staff reductions come a month and a half after Chris Spadaccini joined the CW as chief marketing officer.

ESPN’s latest round of layoffs will have “no sacred cows,” meaning everybody from top on-air people to big-time executives are being scrutinized with the cuts expected to be finalized in the next four to six weeks. The moves are a part of layoffs that Disney’s CEO Bob Iger announced were coming across all of the company’s units. Last month, Iger said that 7,000 jobs would be eliminated across the board.

Amazon plans to lay off 9,000 corporate and tech workers by the end of April, adding to the 18,000 roles it already cut late last year and this January, Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive, said in a note to employees on Monday.

Sinclair Broadcast Group has confirmed that it is planning changes at some of its stations. A  spokesperson said the station group was not planning mass layoffs or closing newsrooms, but will be making some changes to the way it produces news in a few of its markets. “In addition to our local news coverage, we will be adding The National Desk, which provides real-time national and regional news from Sinclair’s television stations across the U.S. TND will feature local news content from the market in every hour of the newscast,” Sinclair said.

After cutting 11,000 jobs last November, Facebook’s parent Meta said today it will slash another 10,000 jobs and will not fill 5,000 open positions as the social media pioneer cuts costs.

The nonprofit media organization, which has a staff of about 1,100 people, said the layoffs were required because of a slowdown in advertising and a drop in corporate sponsorships.

Showtime laid off approximately 120 staffers Monday amid a streaming-focused restructuring that saw the exits of several top execs as the pay TV channel’s team was merged into MTV Entertainment Studios, a spokesperson confirmed. No other details were available regarding which departments within Showtime were affected, although a source close to the situation tells Variety those cuts could amount to roughly 25% of Showtime’s workforce.

Nearly 1,000 employees will be let go this week as part of a major restructuring in the company’s advertising technology group.

The restructuring creates a new division called Disney Entertainment headed by TV content chief Dana Walden and movie studio boss Alan Bergman. The ESPN businesses will be a separate unit, run by current chief James Pitaro. And the Parks, Experiences and Products division will continue to be run by Josh D’Amaro. Those execs will be tasked with finding cost-cuts eventually totaling $5.5 billion annually. And that includes cutting some 7,000 jobs.

It’s the latest major labor action to strike a national news organization in recent months as the media industry faces headwinds and cut-backs.

Zoom Video Communications said on Tuesday it would cut about 1,300 jobs, as demand for the company’s video conferencing services slows with the waning of the pandemic, and take a related charge of up to $68 million. The company’s shares, which fell 63% last year amid a rout in technology shares, closed up 9.9% on the news but were down marginally in extended trading.

The initial exuberance and relief following Bob Iger’s return as Disney CEO has been replaced by anxiety as speculation about a pending corporate restructuring is intensifying — and with it, rumors about the layoffs that are likely to follow. Rumblings of a new organizational chart unveiling are growing louder amid mounting pressure on the company (including from activist investor Nelson Peltz) to stage a rebound with Iger back at the controls.

Dotdash Meredith, the publishing giant that owns publications including People, InStyle and Better Homes & Gardens, and is one of the largest digital publishers, said on Thursday that it would cut 7% of its staff (274 people), the latest media and tech company to do layoffs.

The Washington Post began firing staffers Tuesday as the Jeff Bezos-owned broadsheet suffers declines in advertising revenue and readership, the paper announced. The company is expected to lay off 20 journalists and not fill another 30 vacancies, leading to a sigh of relief from those at the venerable paper who were fearing a more major blood-letting.

The digital streaming platform is now in the midst of restructuring its business. As part of the changes, its head of content and advertising, Dawn Ostroff, will leave the company after a four-year tenure. She was behind the audio streaming giant’s podcast push, which includes Joe Rogan’s controversial show that promoted alleged misinformation about COVID-19.

The company, which publishes New York magazine, The Verge and numerous other brands, joins a parade of tech and media companies cutting back staff amid economic uncertainty.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the parent company of Google, informed staff Friday at the Silicon Valley giant about the cuts in an email that was also posted on the company’s news blog. It’s one of the company’s biggest-ever round of layoffs and adds to tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other tech companies as they tighten their belts amid a darkening outlook for the industry. Just this month, there have been at least 48,000 job cuts announced by major companies in the sector.

NBC News and MSNBC were undergoing a round of layoffs on Thursday, although the impact appeared to be less severe than the staff reductions at other media entities. The layoffs were in the double digits, according to a source, out of a workforce of about 3,500. CNN reported that the number was around 75. The staff cuts also were scattered across the divisions, according to the source. No on-air talent was expected to be impacted. This follows the announcement earlier this week of layoffs across the parent company NBCUniversal, numbering in the dozens.

As cord cutting grows, TV providers like DirecTV have been getting hit hard recently as Americans look for ways to cut their bills as inflation hits their wallets. Now it has been reported that DirecTV will be laying off hundreds of employees to help offset the losses. According to a report by CNBC, about 10% of the satellite service’s managers will be laid off, with their last day on Jan. 20.

Insiders disputed early accounts of the reductions being widespread and amounting to hundreds of positions. Instead, the tally is more in the dozens and does not involve every division. One additional element is the company’s voluntary retirement program process, which business units are factoring into their assessment of operations heading into 2023.

Vimeo has chopped down its workforce by 11% in a new sweep of layoffs, the video hosting platform said Wednesday in a company blog post. This is another layoff round for Vimeo, which cut its employee staff by 6% back in July 2022.

Amazon is planning to lay off more than 18,000 employees, adding to a massive round of job cuts first announced last year, the tech giant said Wednesday, after more than 100,000 employees of large U.S. corporations lost their jobs in 2022 amid growing recession fears.

The tech giant has so far taken steps to streamline without mass layoffs, but employees are girding for deeper cuts.