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Yahoo News Lays Off Staffers, Shuts Down Gen Z-Focused Site

It’s the latest news outlet to slash its payrolls as the media market takes hit after hit.

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Yahoo News joins the rank of newsrooms large and small facing layoffs throughout the holiday season, laying off a number of staffers on Tuesday.

Layoffs affected a number of verticals including the website’s “Originals” teams, with affected staffers told of their status in a meeting with their manager on Tuesday. The company will also be shutting down its “In The Know” vertical, which curated news for Generation Z and millennial audiences.

“We’ve made the difficult decision to make changes in several areas of the U.S. editorial team, which means we must part ways with some colleagues,” general manager Kat Downs Mulder told staffers in a memo on Tuesday, which was obtained by The Daily Beast. The goal, she said, was part of the brand’s efforts to be “a trusted guide to high quality digital content” and was not a budget-related decision.

“These decisions were not made to cut costs, but to realign our resources and efforts to achieve our strategy - making Yahoo News the best place to go to find out what's going on in the world and get things done,” Mulder wrote.

Some members of the “In The Know” vertical will move to a commerce team while other members will join the website’s “Trending & Live” vertical, which covers breaking and political news. Other members, however, will leave at the end of the week, Mulder wrote.

“Although these changes are necessary, I know they may be difficult to process and impact all of us,” she wrote, adding: “We appreciate the many contributions of our departing colleagues and wish them well.”

Ben Adler, a senior writer at Yahoo News, confirmed on X that he was part of the layoffs. “If you're paying people for writing or editing about politics, policy, climate change, energy, housing, transportation, architecture, NYC, pizza, or anything else that can pay my mortgage,” he wrote, attaching his email for good measure.

A spokesperson for Yahoo told The Daily Beast: “After a careful review of Yahoo News, we are making changes to our organizational structure. We believe these changes will help us achieve our mission of delivering high-quality and trustworthy content to our readers. As part of this effort, some roles will be transitioned while others will be created as we reshape the organization to support our long-term path toward differentiated content and user growth.”

Kelsey Weekman, an “In The Know“ internet culture writer who previously worked at the now-defunct BuzzFeed News, applied her beat expertise to an X post on the changes. “If I had a nickel for every time in 2023 the website i was working for got shut down, I’d have two nickels,” she wrote. “Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice right.”

Mulder joined Yahoo News last year from The Washington Post, where she served as a managing editor and chief product officer. In the months since she took hold, the site has incorporated more aggregation into its “Originals” tab, along with boosts of both syndicated content and aggregated links under its “recommended reading” tabs.

The media market has been particularly affected by a dampened economy, with cuts at G/O Media and Conde Nast affecting titles like Jezebel and The New Yorker, while The Washington Post has threatened layoffs if it does not reach a buyout cap of 240 employees. Nearly 20,000 media industry jobs have been slashed this year, according to a November report by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

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Corbin BoliesMedia Reporter

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