Bustle Digital Group CEO Bryan Goldberg announced Wednesday the company will lay off 8% of staff and is “suspending operations” at the news and gossip website Gawker.
In an email to employees obtained by CNN, Goldberg said the company is “facing a surprisingly difficult” first quarter of 2023 and had made the decision to “reprioritize” some of its investments that “better position the company for the direction we see the industry moving.”
Those changes, he said, would result in laying off 8% of the media company’s full-time staff.
“The most noticeable change you will see today is that BD will be suspending operations of Gawker,” Goldberg wrote. “We are proud of the site that [editor-in-chief Leah Finnegan] and her team built. Gawker published a lot of brilliant pieces in these nearly two years. But in this new reality, we have to prioritize our better monetized sites. It’s a business decision, and one that, reluctantly, must be made.”
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Finnegan tweeted Wednesday morning that Gawker had “an incredible 1.5 years” but that “BDG has decided it is done with Gawker 2.0.”
“Can’t say enough about how proud I am of the site and all the brilliant people who worked to create it, and what a staggering shame this is. I had an absolute blast, and I love you,” Finnegan wrote.
BDG houses a number of other notable digital brands, including Bustle and Elite Daily. The company purchased the rights to Gawker in a 2018 bankruptcy auction after the gossip website was forced to shut down after losing a massive lawsuit from former wrestler Hulk Hogan.
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