Univision’s Gizmodo Media will trim an additional 15 percent of its editorial workforce, a person familiar with the situation told TheWrap Thursday. The company is looking to handle the matter through buyouts to avoid another potential round of layoffs.
Reps for Univision declined to comment for this story.
Buyout packages have already been floated at Jezebel and Deadspin, two properties purchased by Gizmodo from the now-defunct Gawker Media in 2016. Buyouts are also planned for The Onion.
“If enough people accept buyouts, they won’t have to do layoffs,” a Gizmodo Media employee told TheWrap.
The buyouts are the latest round of bad news for a company that has been buffeted by layoffs and management shuffles in recent months. In March, Univision CEO Randy Falco stepped down amid questions over his performance. A month later, the company shed 150 jobs and scuttled plans for an IPO. People familiar with the matter at the time said the cuts were broad-based “across all of Univision”
“We are taking steps necessary for our business to continue to thrive, but we will never compromise our duty and purpose to inform, entertain and empower our community, which is more important today than ever before,” a spokesperson told TheWrap at the time.
Gizmodo Media CEO Raju Narisetti stepped down in April.
“If you can, amid all the relentless change that is now the new normal for our business, remain focused on our growing audiences, and keep creating meaningful differences than better sameness, with all your journalism,” Narisetti said to the staff at the time.
Last month, Splinter, a Gizmodo property, published a brutal rebuke of Univision, calling the company a “f—ing mess”
“From routine human resources f-ups to vastly overselling the prospects of an IPO whose ultimate doom this March precipitated the company’s current cost-cutting spree, Univision has been deeply mismanaged and is in the midst of making huge cuts that have, among other things, already claimed vast swaths of Univision Noticias-the most vital newsgathering operation serving the Spanish-speaking community in the U.S.-and Fusion Media Group,” the wrote.
News of the buyouts was first reported by Bloomberg.