The Penny Hoarder, a multimedia-heavy personal finance publication based in St. Petersburg, laid off 45 employees on Tuesday, slashing roughly half its newsroom and a majority of its visuals team in a company-wide reorganizing effort.
The layoffs affected all departments and reduced Penny Hoarder’s total workforce by roughly 50 percent, according to two employees familiar with the matter. The company’s video team of around seven was eliminated entirely, one employee said, while the photo department was reduced to two employees. Nearly two dozen writers, or half the newsroom, were laid off.
"The Penny Hoarder has always been an independent, bootstrapped company, and we intend for it to continue to be,” Penny Hoarder’s founder and CEO, Kyle Taylor, said in a statement. “We’ve had to make difficult decisions to better position and re-organize ourselves for the future, including the reduction of our team.”
“I was very surprised that it was so widespread,” one employee, who asked not to be named because of nondisclosure agreements, said of the layoffs. Some employees expected the cuts, which occurred throughout Tuesday in department-specific meetings.
Penny Hoarder’s downsizing comes almost a decade after its founding in 2010 and about two years since the company set up shop in its 23,000-square-foot offices in downtown St. Petersburg's Tampa Bay Times building.
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