NEW YORK (Reuters) - Magazine publisher Conde Nast, which owns Vogue, GQ and The New Yorker, is laying off a broad group of nearly 100 employees based in the United States as the coronavirus pandemic has sharply reduced ad revenue, according to an internal memo distributed on Wednesday seen by Reuters.
"Not all teams will be impacted equally by these actions. That doesn’t mean some teams are more valuable to us than others," Conde Nast CEO Roger Lynch said in the memo. "We tried to identify specific areas where we could bring down our costs without limiting our growth priorities."
The cuts reflect industry-wide efforts to reduce costs by newspaper publishers like Gannett Co . Inc. (N:GCI) and Tribune Publishing Co . (O:TPCO), which also slashed salaries and cut jobs as ad revenues plummeted during the spread of coronavirus.
So far, at least 36,000 media workers are estimated to have been laid off or furloughed amid the pandemic, according to the New York Times (NYSE:NYT).
Lynch said in a memo that less than 100 of Conde Nast's approximate 2,700 employees in the United States would also be temporarily furloughed. There will also be "a handful" of employees on reduced work schedules.
In April, Conde Nast announced in a separate memo that employees earning more than $100,000 would receive 10% to 20% pay cuts. Lynch also said that he would reduce his salary by half in an effort to save costs.