Have you ever received a gift that you did not want? Like it was just all-around bad?

Well, that’s many people’s sentiment about this current job market. It’s dishing out notices no one wants to hear, such as layoffs and downsizing. And BuzzFeed is the latest to announce changes in its workforce.

According to CNN Business, the news reporting arm of the BuzzFeed umbrella will be shutting down. The news comes with layoffs that will impact 15% of its workforce as a whole.

“While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote to staffers in a memo.

BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost in 2020 and — in light of the recent announcement — noted that some staff would have opportunities to find roles with that brand.

“HuffPost and BuzzFeed Dot Com have signaled that they will open a number of select roles for members of BuzzFeed News,” Peretti told employees. “These roles will be aligned with those divisions’ business goals and match the skills and strengths of many of BuzzFeed News’s editors and reporters.”

Peretti also noted that HuffPost would serve as the company’s single news brand and all of the media that BuzzFeed News produced would come from the single HuffPost brand.

According to Variety, BuzzFeed News Chief Revenue Officer Edgar Hernandez and COO Christian Baesler would be leaving the company as a part of the 180-people laid off. However, a BuzzFeed spokesperson noted that none of the jobs would be replaced by AI technology.

According to an SEC filing, BuzzFeed will incur a fee of roughly $7 million to $11 million related to the layoffs to cover severance pay, “including outplacement services and benefits continuation.”

BuzzFeed is one of the latest groups to announce layoffs as the economy experiences inflection points. A previous post from AfroTech showed that several prominent companies had announced layoffs since the top of 2023, mainly in the tech sector.

This announcement from BuzzFeed also comes on the heels of a separate CNN report on the upcoming layoff of 10,000 individuals from Meta, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in March.

Nevertheless, these announcements do not tell the entire job market picture. Many companies are hiring at a significant rate, and AfroTech has created its year-round Resume Book to connect quality talent with organizations.

To add your resume to our network and get discovered, click here.