If you live by Google and Facebook, you die by them. The loss of 1,000 mostly digital news jobs last week made that clear. The long death rattle of the newspaper industry is now being heard at digital news companies that only a few years ago were the shiny new stars of journalism.

News that the layoffs had commenced arrived on BuzzFeed’s hip morning show on Twitter. The commentary, like the show, was short. “It fucking sucks,” said one of the hosts, as the pink slips were beginning to be delivered near their set. BuzzFeed is shedding 15 percent of its 1,500-person staff, some 220 jobs. The same day, Verizon, the corporate overlord of HuffPost, announced big layoffs in its media division, including HuffPost journalists. The cuts will continue this week at BuzzFeed, which has already discharged its national-security team, its national desk, and its bureau in Spain. As if to emphasize that all were in the same boat, Gannett, venerable corporate parent of USA Today, laid off journalists at many of its regional papers across the country.

Of the affected institutions, BuzzFeed is the one I know best, from extensive reporting I did there for my new book, Merchants of Truth. BuzzFeed launched as a site catering to what its founder, Jonah Peretti, called the “bored at work” network, millennials who were glued to their News Feeds when the boss wasn’t around, sharing BuzzFeed’s adorable puppy pictures or answering its quizzes about 1980s celebrities. It moved into news in 2012 and aimed to compete with the old guard, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Its editor, Ben Smith, came from Politico.

The journalists who were laid off at BuzzFeed and HuffPost were different from those of the standard-issue Times or Post model, both generationally and in terms of approach. HuffPost’s new editor, Lydia Polgreen, who herself had come from the Times, aims to cover the news as it impacts real people, an approach that is refreshing given the unitary focus on politics and President Donald Trump that most news shops have had recently. And, as digital natives, they understood the power of the Web in the way others didn’t. Two BuzzFeed journalists were ferreting out “fake news” earlier than most news organizations, exposing teens in Macedonia who were making a fortune on advertising by promoting their fake news sites on Facebook. The journalism can be excellent: BuzzFeed was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for an investigation of the Russians who were behind 14 suspicious murders in Britain.

Peretti’s belief was that BuzzFeed couldn’t be a serious media player without a major commitment to serious journalism. He gave Smith the money he needed to compete and bring a younger audience to hard news. I viewed BuzzFeed as a genuine competitor when I was executive editor of The New York Times. And with the Trump administration, there cannot be too many investigative or national-security reporters. BuzzFeed’s news side had 20 journalists in its investigative unit alone.

In their heyday, places like HuffPost and BuzzFeed looked like they had figured out a sustainable business model by building audience scale and attracting lots of digital advertising. Old media envied them and resented their success. HuffPost rode the Google search wave, mainly by figuring out the digital science of search-engine optimization. BuzzFeed rode the social wave and attached itself to Facebook. Its snackable, shareable content was manna to advertisers.

Peretti is the thread that connects them. He was one of the founders of the Huffington Post and figured out how to make its stories and blogs, mostly written by unpaid authors and celebrities in Arianna Huffington’s Rolodex, rank at the very top of Google searches. At the Times, I was horrified every time one of our big scoops was virtually copied by Huffington and drew more eyeballs than our originals, courtesy of ranking higher on Google.