Covid-hit Vox Media to lay off 72 employees

San Francisco, July 16 (IANS) Vox Media which owns news, tech and other portals like The Verge, New York Magazine, Eater, SBNation and Curbed is laying off nearly 72 employees or 6 per cent of its staff as advertising revenue have nosedived amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the media reported on Thursday.

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 per cent 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 per cent off its revenue forecast for the second quarter and plans to miss its full-year target by 25 per cent.

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”.

–IANS

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