Vogue Owner Condé Nast to Cut Staff by 5% and Close Job Openings

Condé Nast is cutting its workforce by 5% in a bid to cut costs amid a changing media landscape, chief executive Roger Lynch wrote in a memo to staff Wednesday morning.

“As many of you have heard me say before, we are in an industry that is changing,” Lynch wrote in the memo obtained by The Messenger. “Our audiences are changing, technology is changing, and what advertisers want from us is changing. With all of this change surrounding us, the only certain mistake is to not change ourselves.”

With 5,400 employees globally, the layoffs could affect approximately 270 workers. These reductions will take place over the next few months, and affected employees will be given “enhanced severance packages and career service offerings,” Lynch wrote.

The company will take additional steps to reduce costs over the next several months, Lynch said, including consolidating its U.K. staff into one space, closing open roles and re-evaluating long-term projects across its portfolio of publications.

Condé Nast owns Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ and Vanity Fair, among others.

Lynch attributed the cuts to a number of factors, including declines in traffic from Facebook and Instagram due to Meta’s deprioritization of news content and shifting trends towards video formats, which it has not yet found a way to monetize.

“While we can’t control platform algorithms or how AI may change search traffic, we believe our long-term success will be determined by growing the many areas that we can control, including subscriptions and E-commerce, where we directly own the relationship with our audiences,” Lynch wrote.

Condé Nast plans to double its consumer revenue over the next five years, according to the memo. 

Condé Nast is expecting its “third straight year of overall revenue growth” as a result of its investments into consumer strategy, which has more than doubled new digital subscriptions this year, Lynch said.

This has been a difficult year for media organizations when it comes to layoffs. Last month, The Messenger reported that Washington Post was planning to cut around 240 positions across the organization.

In June, The Los Angeles Times announced it was cutting 74 positions in its newsroom and National Geographic laid off all of its remaining staff writers.