BuzzFeed:

““This is going to be a tough week,” Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, wrote in an email to his staff on Wednesday. On Friday, the newsroom learned just how tough, when the company laid off 43 of the roughly 250 journalists who worked in that division, according to a BuzzFeed spokesman.

The cut was the start of a planned 15 percent reduction of the overall work force at BuzzFeed, a company perhaps best known for producing content meant to be shared on social media. The layoffs, which the staff learned about from an email sent by the BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, are expected to continue into next week and affect around 200 employees.

The staff reduction at BuzzFeed News included the seven members of the national desk, the six-person national security team and the two journalists covering health, according to the spokesman. All but two members of the entertainment team were laid off and all but one on the L.B.G.T. desk. There were no cuts to the technology, politics or investigations teams.

“The national desk at @BuzzFeedNews was killed off today,” Tina Susman, the national editor, wrote on Twitter. “This was my first full-time editing gig, and I nearly didn’t take the job, but despite tday’s gloominess i’m glad I did. It’s been great, and I’m proud to ride out the front door with my team.”

Jessica Testa, a national reporter who was laid off after about seven years at BuzzFeed News, said she felt blindsided. “Our work has always, always been celebrated, internally and by readers,” Ms. Testa said in an email interview. “We’ve changed laws, we’ve won awards, we have great traffic.”

The cuts are meant to lower costs and maintain growth as the company aims to hit profitability this year. BuzzFeed, which employs more than 1,300 people, generated more than $300 million in revenue in 2018, a 15 percent increase from the previous year. …”