layoffs

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.

Fred Ryan, the publisher of The Washington Post, said in a meeting with employees on Wednesday that the company would eliminate some positions early next year, including some in the newsroom, as the company looks to focus on different coverage areas. Ryan said that the cuts would amount to a single-digit percentage of staff, adding that the company would finish its plans over the coming weeks. He said there would not be an overall reduction in the newsroom’s head count because the cuts would be offset by hiring in other areas. The newsroom has more than 1,000 employees.

E! has laid off a “small number” of staffers on the digital side, according to an individual with knowledge. The move is due to a larger restructuring effort of the cable channel to create a centralized Terrace Studios that will share production efforts across E! News brands and NBCU’s syndicated Access programs.

BuzzFeed will cut about 12% of its workforce to rein in costs, the online media company said Tuesday, as it joins a growing number of U.S. firms that have taken similar measures in anticipation of a potential economic downturn.

AMC Networks said that a restructuring plan that includes laying off 20 percent of its staff will result in pre-tax charges of between $350 million and $475 million.

Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the United States, began another round of layoffs Thursday, joining a host of other media companies cutting jobs in recent weeks. Employees at Gannett’s newspapers, which include USA Today, The Indianapolis Star and The Detroit Free Press, began receiving layoff notifications Thursday, part of an effort to cut about 6 percent of the company’s roughly 3,440-person U.S. media division.

The expected alignment of CBS Studios, Paramount TV Studios and the Paramount+ scripted originals team is happening, and it is resulting in staff cuts. The latest round of Paramount Global layoffs is impacting fewer than 30 people, all on the West Coast. According to sources, the majority of them are at CBS Studios and Paramount TV Studios, with handful of employees at CBS also let go.

CNN signaled to its employee base Wednesday that it had begun to cut some staff amid economic headwinds that are affecting its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. CNN CEO Chris Licht told employees in a memo: “Today we will notify a limited number of individuals, largely some of our paid contributors, as part of a recalibrated reporting strategy. Tomorrow, we will notify impacted employees, and tomorrow afternoon I will follow up with more details on these changes. It will be a difficult time for everyone.”

A media sector squeezed by streaming losses, anemic stocks, layoffs and executive turmoil unveiled its latest casualties Tuesday: 20% of AMC Networks’ U.S. staff, or about 200 people, along with the departure of CEO Christina Spade. The news follows Bob Chapek’s equally sudden departure last Sunday from Disney after a quarter of hefty streaming losses and months of PR missteps.

After announcing the departure of CEO Christina Spade, AMC Networks Chairman James Dolan sent a memo to staff warning the the company was planning to make ‘large scale’ layoffs and other cuts to operations. In his memo Dolan cited the difficulties faced by the pay TV industry and the fact that streaming has not yet replaced the revenues being lost by the traditional cable networks that make up the bulk of AMC’s business.

With CNN getting ready for more layoffs, NewsNation, Nexstar Media Group’s cable news network, has mounted a billboard near CNN’s Atlanta facility that announces “we’re hiring.”

The job market is booming, so why is the tech industry getting hit with layoffs?

Chris Licht, CNN’s CEO and chairman, held a town hall meeting with his staff on Tuesday, where he provided more details about the network’s upcoming layoffs. The town hall was a follow-up to revelations that a six-month business review of the network, which Licht had ordered, had just been concluded, and one of the takeaways from it was that job cuts would be happening towards the end of the year.

Paramount Global is winnowing down its ad-sales staff after the unit was recently restructured by its new leader. The job losses are said to number fewer than 100, according to a person familiar with the matter, and come after John Halley, named president of Paramount Global’s ad-sales efforts in September, realigned much of his staff to focus on direct relationships with major media-buying agencies.

Early on Tuesday, Musk’s team ordered nearly two dozen Twitter employees who had pushed back publicly and privately against him to be fired, three people with knowledge of the matter said. The billionaire, who completed a $44 billion acquisition of Twitter last month, later confirmed the exits on the platform and mocked the former employees.

Among the mass layoffs at the company formerly known as Facebook last week are several roles that have served as a bridge between the news industry and the sprawling tech company.

Reeling from a roller coaster stock market and earnings misses, the Walt Disney Co. is about to start cutting spending, costs, and staff, CEO Bob Chapek said Friday. “I am fully aware this will be a difficult process for many of you and your teams,” Chapek wrote to Disney executives this Veterans’ Day as the House of Mouse heads into its 100th anniversary. “We are going to have to make tough and uncomfortable decisions,” he added.

Hiring the best, the brightest and the highest number of employees was a badge of honor at tech companies. Not anymore as layoffs surge.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news today in a note to staff: “Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history,” he wrote. “I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.”

Meta Platforms Inc. is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week, according to people familiar with the matter, in what could be among the largest round in a recent spate of tech job cuts after the industry’s rapid growth during the pandemic.

The layoffs are expected to affect many thousands of employees and an announcement is planned to come as soon as Wednesday, according to the people. Meta reported more than 87,000 employees at the end of September. Company officials already told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week, the people said.

The San Francisco-based company told workers by email Thursday that they would learn Friday if they had been laid off. About half of the company’s staff of 7,500 was let go, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety & integrity, confirmed in a tweet. The speed and size of the cuts also opened Musk and Twitter to lawsuits. At least one was filed alleging Twitter violated federal law by not providing fired employees the required notice.

Twitter has reportedly sent out a company-wide email warning its estimated 7,500 employees that layoffs will start Friday. The culling is not unexpected, as new Twitter owner Elon Musk has said repeatedly that the company needed a reduction in force and had too large a management layer. Workers were instructed to go home and not return to the offices on Friday as the cuts proceeded. The message, came from a generic address and was signed “Twitter.” The email did not specify the number of cuts, but previous reports have indicated it will be in the thousands.

Less than a month after Nexstar Media closed a deal to take 75% ownership of The CW, the broadcast network has been hit with dozens of layoffs. The exact number of departures is still becoming clear, but one person with knowledge of the situation pegged it at about 30 to 40. While Nexstar is known for local stations, the company also operates NewsNation, which it overhauled and reformatted from its prior incarnation, WGN America, after acquiring Tribune Media in 2019. The lower cost profile of news programming, a distinctly different neighborhood from the scripted fare that was briefly WGNA’s specialty, was the driving motivation of the makeover.

CNN will see layoffs and other cuts in the coming weeks, as the global news division responds to a worsening economic climate and as Warner Bros. Discovery continues its effort to bring together the WarnerMedia and Discovery businesses. CNN CEO Chris Licht explained the rationale in a memo to staff Wednesday, adding that “our aim is to have most of these decisions made by the end of the year so we can start 2023 feeling settled and prepared for the future.”

Warner Bros Television is cutting more than a quarter of its workforce as part of its parent company’s drive to cut costs. The studio is slashing 26% of personnel, a total of 125 positions, across scripted, unscripted and animation.

Sources say that, as part of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s effort to find $3 billion in post-merger cost savings, that layoffs will impact several departments in the merged companies. Among those expected to be impacted are Channing Dungey’s Warner Bros. Television Group (which includes scripted, unscripted and alternative studios); possibly DC Comics, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and other units.

In response to stalling growth and intense competition, Facebook parent Meta is looking to reduce costs by at least 10%, people familiar with the plans said, while Google has required some employees to apply for new jobs.

The CTO will head up product, engineering, research & development at the TV measurement firm.

NBCUniversal will lay off more than three dozen staffers who worked on E!’s entertainment shows Daily Pop and Nightly Pop, which were canceled last month. The move is due to a larger restructuring effort of the cable channel to create a centralized Terrace Studios that will share production efforts across E! News brands and NBCU’s syndicated Access programs.

The layoffs of about 30% of ad sales employees at Warner Bros Discovery started Tuesday and will likely proceed over the next few weeks. The latest cuts from a combined workforce in the range of 40,000 (10,000 from Discovery and the rest from WarnerMedia) come as the company continues to work toward achieving at least $3 billion in cost savings from the $43 billion merger. Since the deal closed in April, the company has embarked on an aggressive effort to roll back expenses in many areas.

The layoffs come amid a major strategic shift for the company, which is phasing out its HBO Max originals in Europe and moving to a local commissioning model.

The long-running daytime talk show Dr. Phil conducted a round of layoffs ahead of its upcoming season this fall, a spokesperson for the show confirmed on Friday. The cost-cutting move affected about 25 workers, most of which worked in production roles for the talk show, the Dr. Phil spokesperson said, adding the show had “streamlined production to ensure longevity.”