Disney Cuts Web Staff, Closes Mr. Showbiz Site

LOS ANGELES – The Walt Disney Co. has laid off more staff at its Internet operations and shuttered entertainment Web site Mr. Showbiz, as planned, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

The job cuts come as Disney continues to restructure its Web unit after announcing last January that it would shutter its Go.com Internet Portal and slash 400 jobs.

The Disney spokeswoman would not say exactly how many jobs were cut as a result of the latest move, which affected staff at the Disney Internet Group and the ABCNews.com Web site.

Message boards on the Web put the number of jobs cut at ABCNews.com at 26 and at 125 at Disney Internet Group.

Disney said the layoffs were part of ongoing efforts to restructure its Web operations. The ABCnews.com jobs were trimmed because that site has more tightly integrated itself with overall ABC news operations, the spokeswoman said.

In August, Disney had said it would shutter the Mr. Showbiz site, which was one of the Web's earliest providers of entertainment and celebrity news and information, and redirect users to the home page of its ABC Television network (www.abc.com.)

On Tuesday, the site had a message thanking users and saying "After six years ... Mr. Showbiz has retired." Users were then automatically linked to ABC.com.

Disney, which was one of the biggest Web players early on, has had a difficult time, like many media companies, figuring out how to make money off the Web. Disney early on had acquired search engine Infoseek and attempted to transform it into its own search portal, called the Go Network.

When that failed, it tried to restructure the portal, Go.com, to focus on entertainment, lifestyle and leisure topics, but that also failed.

Disney shuttered Go.com in January and shifted its focus to individual Web sites for its various divisions, such as ABC.com for the broadcast television network, ESPN.com for the cable TV network, and Disney.com for the overall company.