TIME Magazine lays off 15% of unionized editorial staff, becoming latest news outlet to slash workforce
Jan 23, 2024, 6:56 PM | Updated: 6:57 pm
TIME laid off some 15% of its union-represented editorial employees on Tuesday, January 23. (Yongyuan Dai/iStock Unreleased/Getty Images/File)
(Yongyuan Dai/iStock Unreleased/Getty Images/File)
(CNN) — TIME, the iconic red-framed magazine, laid off some 15% of its union-represented editorial employees on Tuesday, the newsroom’s union said, becoming the latest major news outlet to slash its reporting staff.
A TIME spokesperson told CNN that the outlet had laid off roughly 30 employees across several departments, including editorial, technology, sales and its studios division.
Among those laid off Tuesday was a majority of the staff at TIME for Kids, a news publication for school-age children, the union said.
“I started at Time Magazine exactly one year ago today, and this morning I was laid off along with 12 other journalists,” Haley Weiss, a TIME health and science reporter, wrote in a post on X.
In a memo to staff obtained by CNN, the magazine’s chief executive, Jessica Sibley, said the decision “was not made lightly” and described the layoffs as “a series of decisions to structure our company for long-term sustainability and growth.”
“We have worked to manage expenses in other areas of our business aggressively to minimize the impact of this decision on our employees,” Sibley wrote. “All of these actions have moved us considerably closer to being a profitable company, an achievement we must reach to realize TIME’s full potential. While this was not an easy decision to make, it is the necessary step we must take in order to drive our business forward and improve our financial position as an organization.”
The union blasted the decision in a statement, calling the staffers essential to TIME’s success.
“TIME and other corporate media owners continue to undermine quality editorial work by treating their own workforces as disposable,” Susan DeCarava, the president of the NewsGuild of New York, said. “Audiences can read the difference between a media company that invests in journalists and one that invests in executive compensation and outside consultants. We all—readers and workers alike—deserve better.”
The significant cuts at TIME came on the same day that more than 400 Condé Nast staffers staged a 24-hour walkout to protest layoffs at the prestige publisher, and The Los Angeles Times slashed its newsroom staff by 20%.
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