Spin Media Group eliminated 19 positions on Tuesday, C.E.O. Stephen Blackwell told Capital in a phone interview. Blackwell told Capital that Tuesday's "reduction in force" affected about 14 percent of the company's 127 staff members—mostly in the video, photo, and sales departments. Some of the layoffs, he added, were due to the decision to end the print edition of Vibe, which the company acquired last year. "If we're not going to be putting together print pages anymore and designing print, we really don't need those design platforms. We really don't need the capacity to negotiate with printers," he added.
The decision to kill Vibe's print edition is not entirely unexpected. When Spin Media acquired the title in April 2013, The New York Times reported that the company would likely make the magazine online-only. (The company had previously shut down the print edition of SPIN after acquiring it the year before.)
