Announcing his resignation in a company-wide email on Tuesday, BuzzFeed News editor in chief Mark Schoofs said the organization must “once again shrink in size” to achieve profitability by the end of 2023, and that he hoped the company would do so “through voluntary buy-outs, not layoffs,” according to The Daily Beast. “Also: This is not your fault,” he wrote. Roughly half of the 100 employees that make up BuzzFeed’s news division were offered buyouts Tuesday, Axios reported. 

Schoofs was one of the three senior editors at BuzzFeed News to resign Tuesday, a leadership loss first reported by The Information. Schoofs’s deputy, Tom Namako, said he is leaving to become the next executive editor of NBC News Digital. Executive editor of investigations Ariel Kaminer reportedly told staff she also intends to leave. Samantha Henig, the executive editor of strategy at BuzzFeed News, will be the division’s interim editor in chief.

BuzzFeed’s cuts to the news team, an attempt to make it more profitable, were announced on the company’s first earnings call Tuesday, along with other changes Axios described as a “push to course correct” following the company’s fumbled stock market debut. The company said it would be consolidating advertising teams between BuzzFeed and Complex—which it acquired as it went public—and making investments in short-form video. The announced strategy came the same day BuzzFeed “projected that its revenue would drop in the first quarter and that it would lose money,” per The Information. The company this year made $398 million in revenue and $41.6 million in pretax income—still short of what it had told investors as it was preparing to go public. Initially, BuzzFeed said it expected to make $521 million in revenue and $57 million in profit.

The downsizing of BuzzFeed’s news division is the latest bad news for a company that has seen little else since its bumpy stock market debut in December 2021. BuzzFeed, which went public via a SPAC merger but suffered a wave of SPAC investor withdrawals before the first day of trading, has been sued by some 80 of current and former employees over its alleged mismanagement of the public listing process. (BuzzFeed has denied doing any wrongdoing and said it intends to fight the claims.) Since its IPO in December, BuzzFeed’s stock has fallen more than 40%, per Axios.

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