Genius laid off a quarter of its staff and is moving toward video

Brooklyn web annotating startup Genius has laid off a quarter of its staff in a retrenchment, and is now focusing on creating video content. This according to a piece published yesterday by Casey Newton in The Verge exploring the company’s new path.

It might explain Genius’s recent On the Market entry looking for a producer to make a daily video on music news.

From The Verge:

It’s not unusual for tech companies to transform over time, though typically they are loath to lay off engineers. But Genius’ shift is more dramatic than most: going from all-encompassing annotator of the internet to a more traditional media company model, chasing video views alongside an ever-growing number of well-capitalized competitors.

Some of Genius’s problems with its editorial push started last spring when former News Editor Leah Finnegan caused a stir with some particularly biting annotations of a writer’s blog post.