Yahoo shutting down half of its verticals sites – Business Insider
Yahoo is shutting down a bunch of its digital ‘magazines’ — but not its tech section
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Yahoo is shutting down a number of its vertical content sites, includingВ Yahoo Food, Yahoo Health, and Yahoo Autos, the company said in a blog post Wednesday.
But contrary to earlier reports, the Yahoo Tech news site will not close, a Yahoo spokesperson told us.В Instead, it will be incorporated into the larger news site.
The shuttering of its content sites means В Yahoo is ditching one of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s early initiatives to create online “magazines” that were designed to В eventually draw В more users to Yahoo.
Also, as part of the stir, Dan Tynan, YahooВ Tech’s editor in chief, will leave the company, Politico reported. In a farewell memo, Tynan wrote that internal problems may have played into today’s decision.
“Despite an enormous set of challenges (most of them internal) they still managed to produce some of the smartest, funniest, most original tech coverage on the Web. I could not be more proud,” he wrote.
David Pogue, the formerВ Fresh York Times tech columnist who joined Yahoo Tech in 2013, will stay with the company, but budge toВ Yahoo’s broader news vertical. Yahoo Beauty’s editor in chief Bobbi Brown will leave the company, according to Racked.
In the blog post, Yahoo wrote, ” On our latest earnings call, Yahoo outlined out a plan to simplify our business and concentrate our effort on our four most successful content areas  – News, Sports, Finance and Lifestyle. To that end, today we will begin phasing out the following Digital Magazines: В Yahoo Food, Yahoo Health, Yahoo Parenting, Yahoo Makers, Yahoo Travel, Yahoo Autos and Yahoo Real Estate .”
It was a big deal in two thousand thirteen when Yahoo exposed its plan for a newВ tech news site. It hired a number of starlet writers, including Pogue, who built a brand name for himself during his thirteen years at the Fresh York Times. In a pitch deck collective in 2014, Pogue indicated Yahoo Tech’s design and content geared towards the general audience would be its strong point.
Today’s reorg comes amid a larger layoff plan Yahoo announced earlier this month. It plans to cut 15% of its workforce and close a number of its overseas offices by the end of this year. Just yesterday, it announced it would pull the buttplug on Yahoo Labs, its in-house research lab. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that a fresh round of job cuts would begin Wednesday.
Yahoo is also shuttering Yahoo Travel and laying off four to five staffers including editor in chiefВ Laura Begley Bloom , according to a Wednesday report from Skift’s Jason Clampet.В