Popular Media House, Vox Media, known for its news, tech and other portals like The Verge, New York Magazine, Eater, SBNation and Curbed announced on Thursday that it will be laying off nearly 72 employees or 6 percent of its staff as its advertising revenue was hit during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a report in CNBC, the majority of those laid off were furloughed by the company in May. Chief Executive Jim Bankoff said in an e-mail: "We will be laying off 6% of our employees. These layoffs include furloughed colleagues as well as other employees who were not on furlough".
"The roles affected have experienced substantial changes in workload or business priority; in some cases, they are in areas undergoing a strategic shift accelerated by the crisis and its hastened changes to our industry".
Bankoff said that the company has already or will bring back close to 30 percent of furloughed employees who did not take buyouts. He said that "based on our current outlook, that the difficult actions that we are taking today will be sufficient to weather this downturn and uncertainty, without need for significant additional measures".
According to the CNBC report, Vox was 40 percent off its revenue forecast for the second quarter and plans to miss its full-year target by 25 percent. Several media outlets across the US have either cut salaries or laid off staff during the coronavirus pandemic. Vox said that for the rest of the employees, it will "reinstate full salaries as planned, after the temporary and tiered salary cut we implemented in May".
(With inputs from agencies)
