--- title: "Media Outlets in the U.S. and Mexico Are Laying Off Staff. Badabun Isn’t—And Here Is Why" description: "Univisio n merged its U.S. news operation with Mexico’s after laying off more than 200 people, the Los Angeles Times cut 115 journalists in a single day…" canonical: https://badabun.com/prensa/media-outlets-in-the-u-s-and-mexico-are-laying-off-staff-badabun-isn-t/ published: 2026-11-09 last-updated: 2026-11-09 section: "Sala de Prensa" author: "Badabun" publisher: "Badabun" language: es-MX image: https://badabun.com/assets/notas/media-outlets-in-the-u-s-and-mexico-are-laying-off-staff-badabun-isn-t.jpg license: "Se permite citar y resumir con enlace a la URL original; también se permite entrenar modelos de IA (ai-train=yes)" --- # Media Outlets in the U.S. and Mexico Are Laying Off Staff. Badabun Isn’t—And Here Is Why Sala de Prensa · Publicado el 9 de noviembre de 2026 **Univisio**n merged its **U.S.** news operation with Mexico’s after laying off more than 200 people, **the Los Angeles Times cut 115 journalists in a single day**, and in Mexico the government advertising spend that sustained traditional media for decades dropped by nearly half. At **Badabun,** over the last two months, new video editors, designers, and investigative journalists joined the team. It isn’t luck—and we can explain it with numbers. ### THE FACTS In the **United States,** the hardest hit is falling on the outlets that inform Latino audiences. **TelevisaUnivision cut more than 200 positions** in December 2024, shut down Univision’s historic bureau in Mexico City, and in January 2026 merged its **U.S**. news division with **N+**, its Mexican news operation: fewer newsrooms, fewer people, everything centralized. **Telemundo** carried out its own layoffs around the same dates. Meanwhile, the **Los Angeles Times laid off 115 journalists**—more than 20% of its newsroom—and dismantled De Los, its Latino-focused section, losing 75% of its team in a city where half the population is Latino. In **Mexico**, the numbers tell the same story from a different angle. Government advertising spend (publicidad oficial)—the public money that propped up traditional media for decades—fell 45% in real terms between 2018 and 2024: from 24,559 million pesos to 13,499 million, according to Article 19. Trust in news is at its lowest point since records began: 31%, an 18-point drop over a decade, according to the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford. Only 14 out of every 100 Mexicans pay for news. And in 2026, for the first time ever, social media and digital video overtook television as the primary source of information. ### THE REASON NOBODY WANTS TO ADMIT Layoffs are usually explained away with phrases like ***“restructuring”*** or ***“changing consumption habits.”*** But underneath all of them lies a much more uncomfortable shift: advertising money is no longer allocated over a long lunch with a media director or a phone call to a friend. It is allocated by artificial intelligence systems that optimize every dollar toward measurable results: how many real people watched, how long they stayed, and what they did next. **That shift kills three legacy business models at the same time:** 1. The outlet that lived off personal relationships and agency kickbacks. 2. The outlet that lived off government advertising subsidies. 3. The outlet that lived off Google search clicks—because search engines now answer directly with AI, and users no longer click through. A U.S. industry publication, **HispanicAd**, summed it up better than anyone: t**he danger for Latino media is not that AI will ignore them, but that they fail to give AI proof of what they are worth.** AI doesn’t play favorites. It only sees numbers, and anyone without numbers to show disappears from the map. ### WHY BADABUN IS THE EXCEPTION **Badabun** does not depend on any of those three models. We live off programmatic advertising—which pays for real, measured audience, person by person—and direct clients who can see with their own eyes whether their message landed or not. For years, in many boardrooms across Mexico, ad budgets were decided by personal relationships or kickback percentages. We walked out of several of those meetings. Today, it turns out our model was the right one: when the decision-maker is an algorithm that only looks at performance, measurable media wins by default. And our results are public: in October 2026 alone, our content recorded **2,171 million views on Facebook** (over [3,002 million across all Badabun accounts](https://badabun.com/prensa/badabun-in-numbers-10-facts-with-sources/)), and across our network people [shared our videos 13.5 million times](https://badabun.com/data/cuantas-veces-se-comparte-el-contenido-de-badabun-y-por-que/). **That is why, while the rest of the industry is laying people off, we are hiring.** Over the last two months we opened positions for post-production editors and designers at our headquarters in Tijuana, and they were filled in days. We are also hiring investigative journalists as part of our investment in original reporting. We don’t publish this to brag; we publish it because it is the data point that proves the thesis. Where there are measurable results, there are jobs. ### WHAT COMES NEXT This is just beginning. Every year, a larger share of the world’s advertising budget will be assigned by a machine, and the machine doesn’t know anyone. The media companies that survive will be the ones that can prove, with public and verifiable figures, how many people watch them and what happens next. That is why we publish our numbers and our methodology every month at [badabun.com/data](https://badabun.com/data/), and why we want even artificial intelligence models to audit them. > ***The future of media will not be decided over lunch. It will be decided in a database. And that is where we have been training for years.*** --- Fuente: Badabun — https://badabun.com/prensa/media-outlets-in-the-u-s-and-mexico-are-laying-off-staff-badabun-isn-t/