Pink News Cuts Staff Again After Snapchat Retires the Format That Paid for It
The publisher proposed its second round of redundancies of the year on August 20. The stated cause was a change in how a platform distributes publisher content: Snapchat is retiring its Shows and Publisher Stories formats as part of a broader shift in how it handles broadcasters and publishers. A large majority of Pink News revenue came from that platform.
A spokesperson noted that many major publishers had already transitioned to the new model and that Pink News, as one of the larger publishers on Snapchat, is realigning its business accordingly. That is a fair description and it also contains the whole problem. Being one of the larger publishers on a platform means being one of the more exposed publishers on a platform.
The running tally for the year sits inside a longer decline. At least 3,434 journalism jobs were cut across the United Kingdom and United States in 2025. The figure was at least 3,875 in 2024 and around 6,000 in 2023. This year’s count is tracking above last year’s, and the current cuts land on a base that has already halved since 2008 by most counts.
What separates this particular cut from the general gloom is that nothing went wrong at the publisher. Audience did not decline. Costs did not run away. A product manager at another company retired a format, on a normal roadmap, for normal reasons, and a newsroom’s revenue disappeared with it.
There is a version of this story told as a warning about diversification, and it is not wrong, but it is glib. Diversification costs money that a publisher living on platform revenue does not have. The formats pay well precisely because they demand the whole operation be built around them: vertical video, native templates, a production pipeline that produces nothing usable anywhere else. The exposure is not a mistake somebody made. It is the price of admission, and it is charged in advance.
The category most at risk is the one Pink News occupies: outlets serving specific communities, funded by a platform rather than by the community itself. When the platform’s economics shift, the coverage goes, and no general-interest newsroom picks up the beat, because the beat was never commercially viable at a general-interest outlet. That is what disappears here. Not a business. A subject.