News outlet Insider has announced that it will be laying off ten percent of its workforce due to a decline in subscriptions.
In a staff email shared on Thursday morning, Insider said that multiple positions, including staff writers, will be cut from the workforce. The announcement comes one week after Insider Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Carlson said the company would be experimenting with an AI chatbot; an Insider spokesperson told Gizmodo that the layoffs do not stem from the AI chatbot experiment.
“As you know, our industry has been under significant pressure for more than a year. The economic headwinds that have hurt many of our clients and partners are also affecting us,” Insider Incorporated Barbar Peng said in the email to staff. “Unfortunately to keep our company healthy and competitive, we need to reduce the size of our team. We have tried hard to avoid taking this step, and we are sorry about the impact it will have on many of you.”
Peng said that Insider staff would receive a notification 15 minutes after her email as well as 13 weeks of base pay and another two weeks for each additional year with the company for up to four years.
The staff writers who unionized at the outlet would be included in the cuts. A source close to the union told Gizmodo that they were not informed of the pending layoffs and were not given an opportunity to bargain.
As to what led to this round of layoffs, the Daily Beast noted in a lengthy profile that the company failed to gain subscribers and readers after it broke from its original aggregation model “to launch a brand-new Beltway team focused on original reporting.”
“We made a big push into DC and politics over the past few years and hired many talented journalists. We are grateful to this team and proud of their coverage,” an Insider spokesperson said. “Their great work got a lot of attention from many of our most prestigious competitors for whom political coverage is core to what their audience expects. For us, that’s business and tech.”
The Daily Beast noted that Insider saw an initial uptick in subscriptions during the commotion over the January 6 riots on Capitol Hill, but those quickly faded after former President Donald Trump left office.
“Insider’s subscription goals increased even as audiences dwindled, staffers said. Marquee stories, insurrection—as told by lawmakers, journalists, and police officers who were present—fell well short of Insider’s subscription goals,” noted the Beast.
“Further fueling tension was a ‘too many cooks’” problem,” the Beast added. “Staffers said there were five top editors meddling with the bureau at any given moment, including Carlson himself. With each boss came different opinions on how to cover politics, often straying from a single, coherent editorial strategy.”
Reporters also expressed frustration with Insider management for not adequately identifying a target audience. As time went on, the outlet shifted from original stories and focused more on aggregation for traffic purposes, which further fueled resentment.
“That was the way it was run for a while,” one reporter said. “I found that to be really, really frustrating and kind of a boneheaded way of doing journalism.”
As Breitbart News reported, corporations like Disney have only just begun its round of layoffs, which will reportedly unfold in three phases. Starting next week, the company could be laying off thousands of jobs.
“The Walt Disney Co. will reportedly swing the ax again next week in what is expected to be the company’s largest massacre so far this year,” Breitbart News reported. “Thousands of jobs are on the chopping block as part of the woke company’s ongoing round of layoffs that will see a total of 7,000 workers lose their jobs.”
ABC News, NPR, Buzzfeed, and Vox Media have also enacted layoffs of their own.
Paul Roland Bois joined Breitbart News in 2021. He also directed the award-winning feature film, EXEMPLUM, which can be viewed for FREE on Tubi or rented at VIMEO On Demand. Follow him on Twitter @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms as well as on Truth Social @paulboisbreitbart.
