News outlet HuffPost — previously known as the Huffington Post — laid off 39 staffers on Wednesday, a move that follows parent company AOL’s acquisition by telecom giant Verizon.
The layoffs come as new editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen is “assembling a newsroom leadership team,” according to a HuffPost article reporting on the layoffs. Arianna Huffington, who founded the site in 2005 as the Huffington Post, left the outlet in August.
{mosads}The 39 employees were represented by the Writers’ Guild of America, which released a statement that was tweeted by HuffPost’s media reporter. It states that fired employees will receive a severance package including benefits that will last for two months plus one week for each year the employee has been with the company.
The layoffs include David Wood, a military reporter who won HuffPost its first Pulitzer Prize in 2012.
The layoffs also included several reporters in HuffPost’s Washington, D.C., bureau. HuffPost senior politics editor Sam Stein described the layoffs on Twitter as “a very difficult day.”
HuffPost is “also a business, with all that entails,” Stein wrote.
Last week, it was reported that Verizon would cut 2,000 jobs across AOL and Yahoo, which are being combined into a new company called Oath. TechCrunch reported that the merger would result in about 15 percent of employees at the two companies being laid off. About 14,000 employees work at AOL and Yahoo.