NBC News just slashed its teams focused on covering issues impacting Black, Asian American, Latino, and LGBTQ+ communities as part of a layoff plan that affected around 150 staffers on Wednesday. This major downsizing comes as the Peacock network parts ways with its sister news outlet, MSNBC.
With these cuts, the dedicated teams behind NBC BLK, NBC Asian America, NBC Latino, and NBC OUT are gone. They’ll still publish stories relevant to these groups, but now that work will be spread out across the broader newsroom, according to one source.
Overall, these cuts touch every corner of NBC News, accounting for roughly 7% of its 2,000-member newsroom and about 2% of the larger NBCU News Group, which includes Telemundo and the network’s local news stations. The layoffs weren’t aimed at certain teams but were instead a result of the network’s budget constraints and a move to streamline its editorial workflow, as one insider explained.
Catherine Kim, NBC News’ executive vice president of editorial, delivered the news during a brief staff meeting at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, stating that the layoffs represented a “difficult day for a lot of us,” according to a source present.
These job losses are a reflection of the network’s adjustment as it no longer needs to support two separate news operations following MSNBC’s shift to the spun-off company Versant. This move also highlights the tough reality of running a large newsroom in a media landscape struggling with declining ratings and a broken-up audience, with similar layoffs hitting other news outlets like the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, CNN, and PBS.