Media Cuts Hitting — WGBH, Business Insider, and Washington Post

Media Cuts Hitting — WGBH, Business Insider, and Washington Post

More journalists are losing their jobs.

The impacts are being felt here in Rhode Island and across the country.

This week, some of the biggest hits were at WGBH, the public radio station in Boston, and Business Insider.

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Business Insider - Move to AI

Business Insider has laid off about one-fifth of its workforce. And, it has a big push to replace journalists with AI. The company wants all of its remaining journalists to use the technology. 

Reportedly, the cuts impacted every department in the news company.

The layoffs were announced in a staff memo from Business Insider chief executive Barbara Peng, who wrote that the cuts as part of a long-term transformation strategy to make the publication "the essential source of business, tech, and innovation journalism."

"We are reducing the size of our organization, a move that will impact about 21% of our colleagues and touch every department," Peng wrote in the memo, which was sent to staff at the end of May.

"While today's changes are what we must do to build the most enduring Business Insider, it doesn't make them any easier," she added.

 

WGBH

Boston-based public radio giant is also making cuts. The station is far more popular in the Providence media market than the Rhode Island public radio station, The Public's Radio.

GBH has a 60% higher rating in Rhode Island, according to Nielsen.

“Media — and public media in particular — is facing multiple challenges,” GBH President and CEO Susan Goldberg wrote in a staff email Monday. “At GBH, we’re being hit with several of them at once: funding cuts, rising costs of doing business, flat revenues, and the urgent need to adapt our work to meet audiences’ habits and desires.”

GBH is one of the nation’s biggest producers of public media content for broadcast and the web. The nonprofit employs about 750 people and announced on Monday that it is cutting 41 positions. 

Just over a year ago, GBH laid off 31 staff members to close a $7 million budget shortfall. Those layoffs came shortly after Boston’s other NPR station, WBUR, announced cuts of up to 14% of its staff.

One of the cutters-in-chief, Pam Johnston, came to RIPBS in 2024 after four years at GBH in Boston. The end of her tenure in Boston was bumpy as that media company implemented significant layoffs.

 

Washington Post

Jeff Bezos' Washington Post is cutting again.

The Press-Gazette reported last week:

The Washington Post is offering voluntary buyouts to staff who have been there for more than ten years as well as the video desk, copy editing desks and opinion team.

A message to staff from executive editor Matt Murray, first reported by Ben Mullin at The New York Times, said: “The program is part of our ongoing newsroom transformation efforts aimed at reshaping and modernizing the newsroom for the current environment. Like the rest of our industry, we are adapting to changing habits and new technologies that are transforming news experiences. Even as we have begun creating new departments and welcoming new colleagues, to reach new audiences we must increase our staffing flexibility and expand in areas such as audience data and social video.”