The pressure worked. Mr. Peretti met with the council on Monday and sent an email to employees hours later, informing them that the company would include payments for vacation and comp days as part of the severance packages.
The same day, The New Yorker published a letter to the editor by Mr. Peretti. It was his response to the magazine’s recent article on the state of the journalism business by the historian Jill Lepore. In the piece — whose tenor was summed up by an illustration of the Grim Reaper holding a newspaper — Ms. Lepore wrote that “speculation is that BuzzFeed is trying to dump” BuzzFeed News. In his letter, Mr. Peretti wrote: “This speculation is incorrect. Whatever challenges we face in this difficult environment for digital media, BuzzFeed News remains a key part of the future of BuzzFeed.”
Adding to the turbulence were the public complaints of BuzzFeed’s quizmaster, Matthew Perpetua, another victim of the layoffs. On Monday, Mr. Perpetua published a blog post informing readers that a number of the site’s most popular quizzes were created by unpaid contributors. One so-called community user, whom he identified only as a college student in Michigan, was “the second-highest traffic driver worldwide” among BuzzFeed’s quizmakers, Mr. Perpetua wrote.
This came as news to the quizmaker, Rachel McMahon, a 19-year-old student at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich. After writing on Twitter that she felt “horrible” that BuzzFeed may have been emboldened to lay off staff partly because of the popularity of her unpaid work, she had a moment in the media spotlight when she was interviewed at length for New York magazine’s Intelligencer site.
A BuzzFeed spokesman complimented Ms. McMahon’s work but disputed that she was the second most popular quizmaker in 2018, adding, “We’d be all too lucky to hire her when she graduates from college.”
Over the last week, many of the laid-off BuzzFeeders found themselves the recipients of ugly messages and tweets sent by trolls and alt-right Twitter accounts. The messages included some variation of “learn to code,” images of nooses and insults. One message sent by email included death threats, NBC News reported.
“I believe there is a special, dedicated section of Hell just for people with anime twitter avatars who tell laid-off journalists to ‘learn to code,’” Patrick George, the editor in chief of the automotive site Jalopnik, said on Twitter.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/business/media/buzzfeed-layoffs.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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