AP Photo/Alex Brandon
George Zornick, the chief national editor at the Huffington Post, tore into his own CEO, Jonah Peretti, on Thursday amid news that the news site will be laying off some thirty editorial staffers in the coming weeks.
Zornick took to X and wrote that Peretti “will soon gut another newsroom, this time HuffPost. The cuts we heard about this week would devastate our news-gathering operation, just as Trump prepares to take office.”
“It’s a tough business and I’m not naive about cuts – but is he also another exec bowing to MAGA?’ Zornick questioned of Peretti, the co-founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, Inc. – HuffPo’s parent company.
“Again, I know that layoffs happen. Believe me I know. But the shocking scale of this week’s announce layoffs do not match the financial information we have about HuffPost. We’ve been given scant, if any, explanation,” Zornick added in his post.
Zornick also shared an excerpt from Pertti’s recent interview with Semafor following his meeting with Vivek Ramaswamy, who bought 9% of Buzzfeed,
“But Ramaswamy doesn’t have control of BuzzFeed, and doesn’t have Musk’s money to burn. An investor in a previous Ramaswamy venture told me he expects the former presidential candidate to find a way toward a successful exit of his BuzzFeed investment,” read the article Zornick quoted, adding:
And perhaps there’s a path to successful activism and a bit of political satisfaction on the side. Ramaswamy is also pushing cost cuts. BuzzFeed’s news division is the progressive news site HuffPost, which Peretti co-founded in 2005 and which has drawn strength from a migration away from social media and back to homepages. The site regularly breaks news on — for instance — divisions inside the Biden Administration on Gaza.
He went on to explain why he shared this quote, “The above column from Ben Smith was published this summer, and based on an interview with Peretti. the speculation Jonah would cut HuffPost to please Vivek was not directly attributed him but written in a knowing, voice-of-god section. Jonah owes his staff answers.”
Alexander Kaufman, a senior reporter at HuffPo, shared Zornick’s post and added:
In the coming weeks, HuffPost is going to ax upward of one-quarter of our newsroom.Under @gzornick’s leadership, my team won awards, broke major stories and beat our monthly traffic goals by threefold.How does dismantling us serve long-term business or journalistic goals?Before any MAGA folks reply to smear mine or
my colleagues’ work as partisan, I’m proud to note that Republican political and industry leaders have routinely shared and praised our coverage of things like nuclear power, mining, and the electrical grid over the past year.
Read the full post here.