Android Central has laid off its full-time editorial staff, but its owner insists the site will keep publishing.
Four of the six people listed on the site's staff page posted publicly about the cuts, including Shruti Shekar, Derrek Lee, Harish Jonnalagadda and Nicholas Sutrich; former senior editor Namerah Saud Fatmi updated her LinkedIn to indicate her tenure had ended. Lee, the managing editor, and Sutrich confirmed that all remaining staff were let go. The former staffers said they were not told whether the site would shut down.
So far it has not. New posts have appeared on Android Central since the layoffs, though they come from freelance contributors rather than the departed full-time team. "Future will continue to publish Android Central. We'll share further information about the future of the site in due course," spokesperson Nicole Martineau told The Verge, adding that the company would not comment further at this time.
The cuts are not isolated. Android Police, another Android-focused publication, has laid off at least two staffers recently and now lists an editorial team of four; it is owned by Valnet, which also bought The Verge's sister site Polygon. Specialist tech blogs are being squeezed from several directions at once — a soft advertising market, consolidation, and falling referral traffic as search engines answer more queries on the results page instead of sending users to a publisher's site, the very shift at the centre of a US antitrust ruling this week.
