Amazon plans to lay off at least 27,000 employees this year, including the 9,000 it announced in an internal email yesterday morning. One unexpected casualty: Digital Photography Review, also known as DPReview, is losing all of its editorial staff, and the site will stop updating on April 10th.
The announcement, written by DPReview General Manager Scott Everett, states that new articles will be posted until April 10, after which “the site will be locked down.”It’s unclear what will happen to the site’s content after that – the publication only promises that the site’s content “thereafter will be available in read-only mode for a limited period of time.”Any photos and text that readers have uploaded to their accounts can be requested and uploaded until April 6, “after which we will not be able to complete the request.”
Former site editor Gannon Burgett revealed on Twitter that the decision to lay off employees was announced back in January and that “Amazon hasn’t yet developed an archive plan “for the site. Cameras, even digital ones, tend to have a fairly long shelf life, and there is an active market for used lenses and camera bodies – if DPReview.com goes offline completely, it would be a huge blow to anyone trying to research older products.
Founded in November 1998, DPReview is one of the few active review sites as old as Ars Technica. Amazon acquired it back in 2007, and since 2010 the site’s team has been based in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, Washington.