Wall Street Journal Lays Off Staffers on Video and Social Desks

Staffers at The Wall Street Journal were hit by another round of layoffs on Wednesday, multiple sources confirmed to The Daily Beast, with employees on the video and social media desks most impacted.

The number of affected employees was at least 11 people, including four producers on the visuals desk, two social media editors, two video journalists, a senior video journalist, a video producer, and one reporter, Tim Martell, the executive director of IAPE 1096, the union that represents Dow Jones publications, told The Daily Beast.

Some of the video staffers laid off include those in the Journal’s Journalists as Creators program, a partnership with Google to develop YouTube channels centered around individual journalists and subject matters. Staffers were told that the agreement was not renewed and the funding for those staffers had lapsed, a Journal staffer told The Daily Beast.

The Journal declined to comment. Google did not immediately responded to a request for comment.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned paper has faced cuts since editor-in-chief Emma Tucker took over last year, often in a piecemeal fashion. The paper let go of nearly 20 staffers in its Washington, D.C. bureau in February as part of a newsroom shake-up that included Pulitzer Prize winner Brody Mullins, rankling staffers in both the paper’s D.C. and New York newsrooms.

The newspaper has since laid off various foreign correspondents and standards and ethics editors in recent months, including veteran editor Christine Glancey and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Dion Nissenbaum, who covered the Middle East.

Tucker spent the early months of her tenure launching a content review, which resulted in top editors eventually departing the paper or switching roles. That included the move of then-Washington bureau chief Paul Beckett to a new role dedicated to securing reporter Evan Gershkovich’s removal from Russia.