Yahoo is shutting down a number of its vertical content sites, including 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. Instead, it will be incorporated into the larger news site.
The shuttering of its content sites means Yahoo is ditching one of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's early initiatives to create online "magazines" that were designed to eventually draw more users to Yahoo.
Also, as part of the move, Dan Tynan, Yahoo 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 former New York Times tech columnist who joined Yahoo Tech in 2013, will stay with the company, but move to 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 recent earnings call, Yahoo outlined out a plan to simplify our business and focus 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: Yahoo Food, Yahoo Health, Yahoo Parenting, Yahoo Makers, Yahoo Travel, Yahoo Autos and Yahoo Real Estate."
It was a big deal in 2013 when Yahoo revealed its plan for a new tech news site. It hired a number of star writers, including Pogue, who built a brand name for himself during his 13 years at the New York Times. In a pitch deck shared 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 plug on Yahoo Labs, its in-house research lab. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that a new round of job cuts would begin Wednesday.
Yahoo is also shuttering Yahoo Travel and laying off four to five staffers including editor in chief Laura Begley Bloom, according to a Wednesday report from Skift's Jason Clampet.
