Vox Media, which owns brands like The Verge, SB Nation and New York magazine, said on Friday that it would cut about 7 percent of its staff, joining a parade of tech and media companies laying off workers amid economic uncertainty.
In an email to the staff on Friday morning, Jim Bankoff, Vox’s chief executive, said the company needed to become smaller in the face of a downturn, adding that the company had already reduced its spending and frozen new hiring.
“Unfortunately, in this economic climate, we’re not able to sustain projects and areas of the business that have not performed as anticipated, are less core to where we see the biggest opportunities in the coming years, or where we don’t have enough rationale to support ongoing investment in what could be a prolonged downturn,” he wrote.
Mr. Bankoff did not disclose whether the cuts would come from all of the company’s brands, but said that the teams affected included revenue, editorial, operations and core services. The company has about 1,900 employees, a spokeswoman for Vox Media said. She declined to comment further on the cuts.
Mr. Bankoff said that staff whose roles had been eliminated would be notified on Friday, and senior leadership would soon provide more details on the extent of the layoffs.
Mr. Bankoff said that the company was “fundamentally strong,” adding, “These setbacks are driven primarily by the temporal macro-economic forces that are impacting nearly all businesses in our sector.”
The Vox Media Union said in a statement, “We’re furious at the way the company has approached these layoffs, and are currently discussing how to best serve those who just lost their jobs.”
Last year, Vox Media merged with Group Nine, the publisher of lifestyle websites like PopSugar and Thrillist, to become one of the country’s largest digital media companies. It cut about 3 percent of its work force in March after the merger, and another 39 workers in July. The deal was part of a wave of consolidation in the industry in the past few years as publishers sought to expand so they could better compete for online ad revenues.
But ad spending across the sector has fallen in recent months as the economy has slowed. Media and tech industries have seen mass layoffs as companies try to cut costs.
CNN and Gannett laid off hundreds of workers at the end of last year. The publisher of The Washington Post announced a plan for layoffs in December. Tech behemoths like Amazon, Microsoft and Google and have all recently said they would cut thousands of jobs.
