Financial news channel Cheddar News reportedly laid off several staff members on Tuesday, days after the millennial-targeted network was sold to cable company Altice USA.
“While we would have liked to have communicated more about this action, this decision has been necessitated by unforeseen internal and external factors that require rapid adjustments to our business strategy,” Cheddar News management told employees. Memo quoted by New York Times.
It's unclear how many employees the new owner of Archetype, the media company that owns Army Times and Defense News, has laid off.
Last week, Altice USA, the fourth-largest cable provider behind Comcast, Charter and Cox, announced the sale of Cheddar, which has an estimated 130 employees.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The newspaper has contacted Cheddar, Archetype and its parent company, California-based investment firm Regent, for comment.
Altice USA, the American division of the European telecommunications conglomerate, is the parent company of Optimum, the Cablevision brand name formerly owned by James Dolan.
In 2019, Altice USA acquired Cheddar, billed as “CNBC for Millennials,” for $200 million.
In July, the Times reported that Altice USA hired Goldman Sachs to explore a possible sale of Cheddar News.
A month before the Times report, Altice USA fired several high-profile hosts on Cheddar's popular show, but like other digital media outlets, it was struggling to make money from a shrinking advertising market.
Cheddar was founded in 2016 as an unconventional cable news station. Instead of making cable providers pay for each channel, Cheddar aimed to make money solely through advertising.
Jon Steinberg, who founded the channel after serving as president of BuzzFeed, pursued distribution strategies such as playing cheddar on gas station pump screens.
