Pulitzer prize-winning website BuzzFeed News, the news-focused companion outlet of BuzzFeed.com, is slated for closure according to a Thursday memo from CEO Jonah Peretti to employees.

“I am writing to announce some difficult news,” Peretti wrote in a memo to staffers. “While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization.”

Peretti said that maintaining the fiscal health of the site, which earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for reporting on China’s detention of Muslim Uyghurs, was no longer tenable. Before the announcement, the company had enacted a series of staff reductions.

“We’ve faced more challenges than I can count in the past few years: a pandemic, a fading SPAC market that yielded less capital, a tech recession, a tough economy, a declining stock market, a decelerating digital advertising market and ongoing audience and platform shifts,” Peretti wrote. “Dealing with all of these obstacles at once is part of why we’ve needed to make the difficult decisions to eliminate more jobs and reduce spending.”

While noting market changes and reduced revenues contributed to the demise of BuzzFeed News, Peretti also took personal responsibility for the circumstances that led to the closure decision.

“I could have managed these changes better as the CEO of this company and our leadership team could have performed better despite these circumstances,” Peretti wrote. “Our job is to adapt, change, improve, and perform despite the challenges in the world. We can and will do better.

“Additionally, I made the decision to overinvest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much. This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media.”

Peretti said plans are in place to lay off 15% of BuzzFeed’s workforce across multiple divisions. Those reductions equate to about 180 employees, according to an analysis from The Associated Press.

The company will shift focus to its other news site, HuffPost, and continue to operate BuzzFeed.com, which has become best known for its lists, quizzes and entertainment/pop culture shorts. Some employees displaced by the BuzzFeed News shutdown may be able to find new positions with these outlets, according to Peretti.

“HuffPost and BuzzFeed Dot Com have signaled that they will open a number of select roles for members of BuzzFeed News,” Peretti wrote. “These roles will be aligned with those divisions’ business goals and match the skills and strengths of many of BuzzFeed News’s editors and reporters.”

Ten years ago, BuzzFeed and its newly launched sidekick BuzzFeed News was the banner carrier for web-based news and entertainment with a strategy that successfully leveraged social media tools to draw millions of readers to its content.

In a 2013 story about the platform expanding into the U.K., The Guardian raved about the success of the BuzzFeed formula.

“BuzzFeed is the irreverent U.S. news and entertainment website taking the social web by storm,” the Guardian wrote. “The site is said to be one of the fastest-growing on the internet, with more than 40 million people a month viewing viral hits.

“One high-profile investor, the Buddy Media co-founder Kazz Lazerow, hailed BuzzFeed as building ‘the defining media company for the social age.’ Its cocktail of humorous lists, celebrity gossip, picture stories and breaking news has captured a booming demand for material to share with friends.”

The company went public in 2021 on a valuation of $1.5 billion, and had earlier hit a peak valuation of $1.7 billion. At the end of regular trading on Friday, BuzzFeed, Inc. stock was trading at 68 cents per share, giving the company a market capitalization of just over $94 million.