Forbes Starts a Second Round of Layoffs; Who Else Will Join It?
Forbes Media has begun a new round of layoffs and will let go of more than 50 people on its editorial and business teams, I'm told. The cuts are roughly proportional to the ones the business publication made in November …
Context & Ripple Effects
Forbes Media's cost-cutting has now come in waves rather than one stroke: the company fired 19 from the magazine and web operation in early January, after a first round last November, and this new cut of more than 50 people across both editorial and business teams is described as roughly proportional to that November action. Two rounds inside a quarter signals the January cuts were sized to revenue at that moment, not to a longer plan.
The scale matters for a business publisher whose brand rests on its masthead — cuts hitting editorial alongside the business side put Forbes' newsroom capacity under the same pressure as its ad sales, and the open question the headline raises is whether peer publishers are running the same math.
First-order effects
- More than 50 Forbes editorial and business employees lose their jobs immediately, deepening a reduction that already took 19 people in January and an earlier November round.
Second-order effects
- Competing business publishers face the same ad-revenue shortfall Forbes is responding to, forcing each to choose between matching these cuts or defending newsroom depth as a differentiator while rivals slim down.
Third-order effects
- A pattern of repeated, revenue-triggered layoff rounds rather than a single restructuring would make editorial headcount a variable cost in magazine publishing — with each successive round normalizing smaller staffs as the baseline for business-news operations.
The trend: Publishers are shifting from one-time crisis restructurings to recurring, revenue-indexed layoffs that reset newsroom staffing levels downward each cycle.