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In June, when Steve Beynon learned that a Canadian media company called Valnet was buying his employer, Military.com, he had no idea what that meant. “And then I googled them,” Beynon said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, this is the worst-case scenario.’” 

As Beynon, who was the chair of the newsroom’s union, quickly learned, when Valnet acquires a media outlet, it typically lays off most of the staff and replaces them with contractors. Valnet recently sued The Wrap in US District Court in Delaware, alleging it was defamed by reporting on alleged exploitative labor practices at several of Valnet’s entertainment sites, including unrealistic work quotas and blacklists for those who complained. The Wrap has moved to dismiss the 64.5-million-dollar suit. “We intend to vigorously defend ourselves against a nuisance lawsuit that is intended to disrupt our ability to honestly report,” Sharon Waxman, The Wrap’s founder and editor in chief, said. 

Beynon and several of his coworkers at Military.com, which has reported on the US military for a quarter century, braced for impact. Once Valnet took over, the company laid off staffers in waves and the site stopped publishing the in-depth news coverage for which it had long been known, multiple former staffers said. “Why buy this thing only to run it into the ground?” said a former Military.com staffer who left before the sale. “It was unnecessary, and military and service members are now in a poorer place because of it.” 

Since the sale, the site has become a shell of its former self, according to eight former staffers. Some, like Beynon, were laid off, while others left for new jobs. Most requested anonymity. Valnet did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

The gutting of Military.com comes as new Pentagon restrictions have made it harder for reporters to cover the men and women who work in national defense. It means there will be less scrutiny of issues like moldy barracks, child abuse at military daycare centers, a policy that prohibited Air Force pilots from using an anti-HIV drug, and the scourge of military suicides, former staffers said.  

Founded in 1999, Military.com made a name for itself covering issues affecting active-duty service members and veterans, investing significant resources in stories that mainstream outlets and even other trade publications tended not to touch. As is common on the military beat, many of the site’s staffers were veterans themselves, which gave them insights into the most critical challenges facing their audience. “We carved a niche for ourselves in the trade press community as being the only outlet that would speak for the service members,” the former staffer who left before the sale said. 

Before the sale, according to a former member of the site’s senior leadership team, Military.com had a newsroom staff of seventeen people, and averaged between twelve and fourteen million page views per month. Military.com won awards and earned the respect of high-ranking officials such as Christine Wormuth, who served as secretary of the Army under the Biden administration. “It was Military.com and Task & Purpose that really shined a light on the kinds of issues that were affecting soldiers and families in their daily lives,” Wormuth said, pointing to Military.com’s reporting on topics including food quality on bases and military daycare waiting lists. 

Even though Military.com was profitable, the site’s prior owner, job-board company Monster, had debts approaching four hundred million dollars. In late June, Monster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and Valnet was confirmed as the stalking-horse bidder, a preselected company that submits the first bid in a bankruptcy auction to set a price floor. Valnet ultimately purchased Military.com and FastWeb.com, a scholarship search platform, for 27.25 million dollars. 

Before the sale was finalized, some Military.com staffers tried to raise the alarm. The editorial staff had unionized in 2024 but had yet to reach a contract. On June 27, the union wrote to Mark Nelson, Monster’s media division vice president at the time, expressing concern that Military.com was about to be sold to a company with no discernible interest in journalism whose founder, Hassan Youssef, got his start with his brother in the online porn business, launching sites like Jugg World and XXX Rated Chicks.

“We are concerned about suitors with origins in exploitative pornography and documented patterns of gutting editorial teams, stripping outlets of their integrity, and transforming reputable publications into clickbait content farms,” the union wrote to Nelson. “These kinds of buyers do not align with our mission to deliver fact-based, independent journalism to the military and veteran communities.” Nelson responded a few days later, according to correspondence reviewed by CJR. “I appreciate and understand your concerns,” he wrote, before going on to say the site’s buyer had not been confirmed. Nelson declined to comment. 

A newly created Valnet subsidiary, Iron Corp, became the outlet’s new owner in July. Soon after, employees were asked to sign contracts that reduced benefits and included strict noncompete and non-disparagement clauses, the union said. When staffers refused, the new management relented and said they didn’t have to sign. Sarah Blansett—the site’s former publisher, who resigned in August—did not respond to requests for comment. 

The address listed on Iron Corp’s website is in Saint Petersburg, Florida, but as of early November, the company was hiring two marketing staffers based in Montreal, where Valnet is headquartered. Iron Corp’s website lists Brad Fleischman as its director, while Valnet’s website names him as vice president of business development for the company’s gaming portfolio. In practice, Rony Arzoumanian, Valnet’s head of mergers and acquisitions, has been running the show at Military.com since the sale, former staffers said. Neither Fleischman nor Arzoumanian responded to multiple requests for comment; attempts to reach a spokesperson for Valnet and Iron Corp went unanswered. 

In early August, after the sale but before the layoffs at Military.com began, Iron Corp recruiters reached out to Meghann Myers, who works at Defense One, in an apparent attempt to poach her. In her response, which was reviewed by CJR, Myers asked if the offer meant the new owner wasn’t planning to gut the site and if they were seeking to hire her for a union role. Myers said she never heard back. “The thing to me that was so shocking is that they approached people in the military trade news space as if we didn’t know all about what was going on,” Myers said.

In September, three newsroom staffers were let go in the first round of layoffs. As veteran journalists departed, Valnet “has begun to publish articles by freelancers who have little to no journalism experience,” the union said, concluding that “Military.com as we knew it is effectively dead.”

One former staffer described the mood as: “You’re almost certainly going to be laid off, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” In October, that person and ten others were let go. Adding insult to injury, a last-minute policy change meant departing staffers weren’t paid out for their unused vacation time, multiple former staffers said. “We were all floored,” the former staffer who left before the sale said. 

“It’s a freelance gig, not really any different than any other one I have done before,” one of the contract writers brought in amid the layoffs told CJR. “I wasn’t even aware that the site was under new ownership until a month or so after I started writing for them.” Military.com’s union described the practice of replacing staffers with contractors as “an aggressive union-busting campaign.” 

Over the past couple of years, according to the former member of the senior leadership team, Military.com has earned about five million dollars in annual profits. Some former staffers said the layoffs might have made sense if Valnet needed to keep the outlet afloat, but that clearly wasn’t the case. Perhaps, the former staffer who left before the sale wondered, all Valnet knows how to do is hack and slash. “It’s a real possibility that they just don’t know how to do anything other than fire everybody, replace them with independent contractors, and turn it into a content mill,” they said. 

Military.com’s new ownership has professed to care about service members and veterans, but as Wormuth put it, “if Valnet, or whatever the heck they’re called, is saying that they support veterans, but then laying off veterans, I think that points to a pretty significant gap in their rhetoric.” Jen Judson, the president of Military Reporters and Editors, an association of defense journalists, agreed: “It’s certainly hard to make a case that you care about veterans when you basically lay off or fire veterans.” 

That attitude isn’t unique to Valnet. The union for Military Times and Defense News, both of which are owned by Sightline Media, a subsidiary of the private equity firm Regent, has been struggling for months to negotiate a contract. Meanwhile, several staffers have been laid off, including the former union head, ex–Military Times reporter Zamone Perez, and Davis Winkie, who was deployed with the National Guard when he was let go from Military Times. At those outlets, too, some laid-off staffers have been replaced by contractors and freelancers. On Monday, the union said just one reporter—union president Stephen Losey—remained at Defense News, while only two full-time reporters and a videographer were left at Military Times. “This is a newsroom in free fall,” the union said. “It is a slow-motion murder of eighty-five years of journalistic excellence.” Sightline Media did not respond to a request for comment. 

“Private equity ownership is strongly motivated to squeeze every penny they can out of the machine,” Winkie said. “Same end result as Military.com.” To Judson, who worked at Defense News until leaving in October for Bloomberg, the upshot is “the death of some pretty strong defense news organizations.” 

Former Military.com staffers aren’t sure why Valnet wanted to buy their site in the first place, since it has little in common with the more than two dozen other sites Valnet owns, including Screen Rant, Polygon, HotCars, and TheRichest. Hard-news sites are not part of the portfolio. “That’s the puzzle of this whole thing,” Beynon said. 

Some former staffers wondered whether Valnet was really after Military.com’s lengthy mailing list, which could generate considerable revenue through lead generation and ad sales. Others told themselves that maybe Valnet wanted a legitimate news outlet as a way to polish its image—or, some hoped, as part of a pivot to serious reporting. “That’s definitely not what happened,” Beynon said. “We knew we were fucked pretty much a week or two after the purchase.” 

With Arzoumanian in control at Military.com, “this culture of fear persisted,” a staffer who was laid off in October said. “It was a continual void of information from the new company and the remaining contingent of Military.com staffers just trying to pick up the pieces and maintain some kind of quality product for the audience.” According to the former member of the senior leadership team, Arzoumanian didn’t commit to providing reporters with legal support if they were sued over their coverage—and that uncertainty, per two former staffers familiar with the circumstances, prompted newsroom leadership to kill a story about a senior military official who allegedly sexually assaulted subordinates. 

It soon became clear to some of the site’s remaining staffers that Arzoumanian was not interested in the kind of news coverage that Military.com had historically published. “The bulk of the news produced on Military is to be honest, average+,” Arzoumanian wrote in an August 15 email. The way forward, he wrote, was “not complicated,” and involved publishing fifteen to twenty pieces per day, employing three to four “AAA writers that regularly contribute” and a team of ten to twelve contractors to cover everything else and work nights and weekends. “Coverage: whatever is relevant, trending to our readers/community,” Arzoumanian wrote. “Forget the ‘newsroom’ concept—we are a simple and honest editorial operation.”

To Nick Mathews, an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, Valnet’s strategy is reminiscent of when hedge funds or giants like Gannett buy up local outlets and run operations from afar, with little understanding of their specific markets or of what audiences want. “Distance, in so many ways, breeds disconnection, and disconnection is one of the major things that damages journalism,” Mathews said. Valnet “seems very clearly not to understand the value of the work that’s been done in Military.com for a long time.” 

Five former Polygon staffers told me that Valnet was similarly ill-prepared when it acquired their site from Vox Media in May. “There are very clear motivators for Valnet, and I don’t think that understanding their audience and delivering worthwhile content is at the top of that list,” Alice Jovanée, who was laid off from Polygon when Valnet bought the site, said. 

That disconnect had visible implications for Military.com in October, when dozens of news outlets rejected the Pentagon’s new media restrictions. Military.com was noticeably absent from a collective statement made by military trade publications condemning the policy. The site no longer appears to have a Pentagon reporter, but its silence on what Wormuth described as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “jihad on reporters” underlined to former staffers how far—and how quickly—the outlet had fallen. “This sale and this transformation of Military.com couldn’t have happened at a worse time,” the former staffer who left before the sale said. 

Beynon, who was deployed with the National Guard when he was laid off, is still grieving the loss. “We built something really special over the years that did a lot of good, and it’s just sad that that’s gone so fast,” he said. “For reasons I don’t understand, it’s just gone.” 

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