BuzzFeed, the digital media startup approaching its 10th anniversary, is splitting into two divisions. According to Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed “will separate itself into two distinct departments—BuzzFeed News and a newly formed BuzzFeed Entertainment Group (BFEG)—in a move aimed at solidifying its dominance in digital video.”
In a companywide memo that BuzzFeed shared with Yahoo Finance, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote, “Having a single ‘video department’ in 2016 makes about as much sense as having a ‘mobile department’ … As digital video becomes ubiquitous, every major initiative at BuzzFeed around the world will find an expression as video.” BuzzFeed News will “expand” under editor-in-chief Ben Smith, while the newly created BFEG will be led by Ze Frank, president of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures.
BuzzFeed did something very similar to this just seven months ago.
In January, as Yahoo Finance reported at the time, BuzzFeed combined two divisions, Buzz and Life, into a group called… BuzzFeed. And it combined three teams—social, app, and homepage—into a group called News Curation.
The changes, Ben Smith wrote in a memo at the time, were about “how we can work better together, inside editorial and as a global company, as we move into a world where the web is just one of the places we operate, and posts are just one of the things that we publish.”
In addition, BuzzFeed let go of some editorial staffers at the time, the company confirmed, though it said they were not related to the restructuring. BuzzFeed says this new restructuring will not directly result in any layoffs. But Yahoo Finance did hear of more editorial cuts at BuzzFeed back in the spring.
One BuzzFeed employee who left within the last year, speaking on condition of anonymity, offered some color to Yahoo Finance in May about the changing culture at the company.
“It’s not operating like a startup anymore,” the person said. “With that, morale became extremely low and I think people were made a lot of promises that fell through. There’s also very big salary drama happening. Every single person there is unhappy with their pay.”
The source suggested that staffers who got cut often do not know why—a point that four other former BuzzFeed employees also made in interviews with Yahoo Finance in January. “They always tell us that if someone leaves the person will know why, that they were warned first,” the source said. “But everyone who leaves says they were not warned and don’t know why they’ve been cut.”
In an all-staff email from 2014, obtained by Yahoo Finance, Ben Smith addressed this very problem. “What we try to do, and will try to get better at: Make sure things don’t come out of a blue sky, and if things aren’t working, that you know from your editor that there’s an issue and you’re trying to fix it,” he wrote.