The online news sites HuffPost Quebec and HuffPost Canada stopped publishing on Tuesday, leading to the elimination of twenty journalist positions, announced their new owner, the American giant BuzzFeed.
Read also: BuzzFeed seizes its rival HuffPost
The online news site, which bought its competitor HuffPost in November, also said it had cut 47 jobs in the United States in order to increase the company's profitability.
"As of March 9, HuffPost Quebec will no longer publish content,"
the site announced to its readers.
A similar ad was posted on the English version covering the rest of the country, HuffPost Canada.
“Existing content will be kept as an online archive;
however, some features of the site have been permanently disabled
,
”
says the post, which links to the global HuffPost.com site.
The announcement was made to Canadian employees of HuffPost by Buzzfeed boss Jonah Peretti during a videoconference this Tuesday in the middle of the day, a source in the editorial staff told AFP, who requested anonymity. .
A total of 18 positions will be cut at Toronto-based HuffPost Canada and five in Montreal.
"A shock"
Jonah Peretti notably justified this decision by the deficit of 20 million dollars of the company HuffPost, which according to him risked to recur in 2021 if nothing was done, according to this source.
"It was not totally a surprise"
because the numbers have continued to decrease in recent years in Canada
"but the total closure of the two Canadian editions was a shock,"
said this source.
"We did not have the chance to prove ourselves, to present a plan to BuzzFeed"
, while HuffPost Quebec recorded 1.5 to 2 million unique visitors per month, according to the same source.
HuffPost Canada was created in 2011 and its French-speaking Quebec version a year later.
At the end of 2020, the online news site Buzzfeed announced that it was taking control of its competitor HuffPost, a new step in the consolidation of the free online information sector, which is in crisis in Canada and in the rest of the world.
Created in 2005, the Huffington Post, which became the HuffPost in 2017, was one of the first “pure players” of information on the internet, a site without physical publication, only present online.
