Newspaper chain Gannett plans to close its Cambridge-based product review site Reviewed and lay off its 73 employees on Nov. 1, a spokesperson confirmed Tuesday.
“After careful consideration and evaluation of our Reviewed business, we have decided to close the operation,” said Reviewed spokesperson Lark-Marie Antón, who added that the closure was a business decision. “We extend our sincere gratitude to our employees who have provided consumers with trusted product reviews.”
The closure comes after reports that the company had previously published product reviews that seemed to be generated by artificial intelligence and months after the site’s unionized editorial employees held a one-week strike over low wages and “bad-faith bargaining.” It also coincides with a difficult year for the media industry, in which hundreds of employees have been laid off across the country.
Gannett, a public company that owes nearly $1 billion to private equity firm Apollo Global Management, has shed thousands of employees and closed physical newsrooms, including in Massachusetts, in recent years as it has worked to cut costs after merging with GateHouse Media in 2019.
“We are deeply troubled by Gannett’s decision to shutter Reviewed,” NewsGuild of New York president Susan DeCarava said in a statement. “We are concerned for the future of dozens of workers represented by The NewsGuild of New York working at Reviewed, and about the broader impact of this announcement on the media industry at large.”
The NewsGuild of New York represents 43 employees at Reviewed, spokesperson Jennifer Sheehan said. Just under 30 of the union members are based in Cambridge at the website’s editorial headquarters, which has office space and a laboratory where most of the products were tested. (NewsGuild-CWA, of which NewsGuild of New York is a chapter, also represents reporters at the Globe.)
Members of the unit, which unionized last year, had been bargaining for their first contract. Sofia Tort, a Cambridge-based operations coordinator who is the unit chair of its lab and operations bargaining unit, said the two sides hadn’t begun negotiations on exit packages, accusing Gannett of delaying the process. She added that the closure blindsided employees.
“They didn’t telegraph at all that things were so bad as to necessitate a closure,” Tort said.
Antón did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday regarding exit package negotiations.
Technology news site The Verge first reported the closure. In a notice filed with Massachusetts government officials, Gannett reported that 74 employees would be laid off in November.
Founded in 1997, the site publishes reviews of products such as home appliances, tech devices, beauty items, and more. Reviewed makes money by selling advertising and earns a commission when users click certain links on its site.
Antón said the decision to shutter the business was largely influenced by Google search algorithm changes, which had impacted Reviewed’s business.
Reviewed came under fire last year from its own unionized editorial employees for allegedly posting AI-generated content.
The NewsGuild of New York posted on X last year that the reviews sounded “robotic” and that the authors on the posts were not Reviewed editors and did not show up on LinkedIn or through Google search, suggesting they were not real people. The union posted about the seemingly AI-generated reviews two weeks after unionized staff held a one-day strike during Amazon’s Prime Big Deals Day.
Gannett denied at the time that the articles were AI-generated and said it had hired a marketing agency, AdVon Commerce, to write some reviews. The site updated the reviews with affiliate disclaimers, Antón previously said.
The same agency had a partnership with Sports Illustrated, which published similarly sounding reviews a month after the articles at Reviewed. Multiple former employees of AdVon previously told The Verge that some of its content was AI-generated. AdVon CEO Ben Faw previously told The Verge that the company “offers human-only, AI-enhanced, and hybrid solutions” to its clients.
In a statement Tuesday, Antón said: “We refuted the AI claims vigorously and stand by the fact that AI was NOT used,” adding that the company “always bargained in good faith.”
Aidan Ryan can be reached at aidan.ryan@globe.com. Follow him @aidanfitzryan.