Buyouts hit Boston.com

Boston.com, The free website owned by The Boston Globe, announced on Wednesday it’s offering buyouts to its staff as its parent company undergoes an overhaul of its digital operations.

Citing a desire for “fewer redundancies, increased collaboration, greater efficiency and cost savings,” Boston.com General Manager Eleanor Cleverly and Executive Director of Engineering Anthony Bonfiglio announced the buyout program in a memo to staffers. It did not specify how many employees Boston.com was aiming to cut.

Boston.com is now more than twenty years old; and this year, Globe.com celebrates its fifth anniversary. These sites are the two most popular digital news and information destinations in New England. As the digital landscape continues to change, we too must change and evolve.

Elsewhere in the memo, which is reproduced in its entirety below, Cleverly describes a desire to better differentiate the two general-interest news websites maintained by The Boston Globe: Boston.com, the Globe’s free website, and Globe.com, its paywalled offering. The mission of the sites will continue to diverge, with Boston.com earmarked for “community-centered resources” while Globe.com will remain the “foremost site for news, information, and journalism from our region.”

News of the buyout was reported first by Politico, which adds that employees will receive “one week of pay for every six months with the company.”

The remaking of Boston.com is part of a broader transformation underway at Boston Globe Media, the parent company of The Globe owned by billionaire John Henry. In April, Globe editor Brian McGrory announced that the newspaper would re-examine its strategy and coverage priorities in order to keep pace with the unceasing digital disruption affecting the news business.

Here’s the memo: