The Walt Disney Company on Wednesday notified sent a fresh round of pink slips to around 75 workers at ABC News and its local ABC television stations across the country.
The workers were notified about the job cuts early Wednesday morning, according to two sources, with the layoffs split between the national news division at ABC and local newsgathering operations at eight ABC-owned television stations.
Staffers affected include national news workers at ABC News bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., as well as employees at ABC-owned television stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston Raleigh-Durham and Fresno.
The trade publication Variety was the first to report on the layoffs.
The job cuts come about a month after Disney executed a fresh round of layoffs that impacted around 300, primarily at the company’s entertainment businesses. Then, the job cuts impacted roles within administrative parts of the business, including human resources, finance and communications.
“We continually evaluate ways to invest in our businesses and more effectively manage our resources and costs to fuel the state-of-the-art creativity and innovation that consumers value and expect from Disney,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement emailed to reporters last month. “As part of this ongoing optimization work, we have been reviewing the cost structure for our corporate-level functions and have determined there are ways for them to operate more efficiently.”
The layoffs on Wednesday mark the fifth such round of job cuts over the past two years. Last summer, Disney released a handful of employees from its National Geographic business, which it acquired from present-day Fox Corporation several years ago. Workers at Pixar Animation Studio and some Disney-owned broadcast TV stations were also let go earlier this year.
