(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Google’s news division fired dozens of its employees, as the Big Tech giant continues to downsize during the economically troubling times for the country.
A spokesperson for the Alphabet Workers Union said that between 40 and 45 employees at Google News were laid off, according to the New York Post.
The news source also added that the search engine that is owned by Alphabet also slashed headcount at Verily, the health care analytics subsidiary, as well as Waymo, the robot-taxi unit. However, it wasn’t clear how many people were fired from Verily and Waymo.
The job cuts that came just before the company is set to release its third-quarter earnings results on Oct. 24, 2023, caused employees of the company to start asking whether additional layoffs could be in the offing.
The company still employs hundreds in its news division, a spokesperson for Google said.
“We’re deeply committed to a vibrant information ecosystem, and news is a part of that long-term investment. We’ve made some internal changes to streamline our organization. A small number of employees were impacted. We’re supporting everyone with a transition period, outplacement services and severance as they look for new opportunities at Google and beyond,” the spokesperson said.
Google News is the search engine’s news aggregator that mines stories from thousands of publishers all over the internet, which means that articles that are listed on Google News provide valuable referral traffic to news sources.
Considering the politically leftist bias of the company and the fact that the search engine has a history of blacklisting conservative news websites, it means that people who were using Google News were not being fed with articles from conservative news sources.
Rob Ruenes, a staff software engineer at Google, commented on layoffs in his message on his LinkedIn page.
“These are some of the best and brightest people I’ve ever worked with, and frankly, I don’t expect the calculus behind this decision will ever make sense to me. We’re definitely worse off without them,” he wrote.
