It turns out that nine-figure corporate backing is not enough to sustain left-wing websites in their ambition to dominate digital media with huge staffs.  In the past two days, two giants, BuzzFeed (with a reported $400 million in backing from Comcast) and HuffPost (sold for $315 million to AOL, later acquired by Time-Warner, and now owned by Verizon) have announced layoffs.

BuzzFeed, which has disgraced itself (again) with a major story purporting to reveal a smoking-gun impeachable offense that dominated mainstream media for a day, only to be denied by the special counsel's office, is firing 15% of its staff.  This blow to a lefty fake news outlet was headlined by taxpayer-funded NPR as "'Upsetting And Disappointing': BuzzFeed To Cut 15 Percent Of Its Workforce."

End of an era?  No longer floating on $400 million?
Image credit: Katy Blackwood.

There are no signs (yet) of free food for newly unemployed BuzzFeed staffers the way that furloughed federal employees are garnering sympathy and help.  But maybe with HuffPost joining the layoff party, progs will work up some sort of effort.  HuffPost's layoffs are less severe (for now).

Paul Bois of The Daily Wire:

On Thursday, 20 employees with The Huffington Post were given pink slips just one day after Verizon Media (parent company) decided to cut 7% of its staff.

"About 750 Verizon Media employees were expected to lose their jobs," reports HuffPo.  "That announcement came more than a month after Verizon took a $4.6 billion write-down on HuffPost's parent company, Oath (now called Verizon Media), which includes AOL, Yahoo and HuffPost."

"HuffPost unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East in 2017," the report continued. "A spokesman for the union said at least 15 members had lost their jobs. Two full teams – the opinion and health sections – were eliminated."

Among those laid off was Pulitzer Prize finalist Jason Cherkis:

It happened. I've been laid off.

— jasoncherkis (@jasoncherkis) January 24, 2019

While I am not privy to the internal financial data of either, I suspect that they are suffering from the same malady that afflicts American Thinker: a radical and fairly sudden decline in advertising rates per thousand views.  I can't prove it, but it does seem to be true that between Facebook and Google, a huge share of ad revenue is being gobbled up by a duopoly of Silicon Valley tech giants.

With newspapers already economically strangled, radio and television ad revenues in steep decline, and now websites being strangled, the tech giants are even closer to dominating the information available to Americans.