“It’s the end of the marriage between social media and news.”

April 20, 2023 10:21 AM

Buzzfeed Shuts Down its News Division (NYT gift, archive.is), laying off 15% of its staff. Buzzfeed News won a Pulitzer (and was nominated on three other occasions), published the Steele dossier, and broke the story of Blippi pooping on his friend, but it was never profitable.

BuzzFeed's main site, and their other news site, will remain operational.

posted by box (27 comments total)

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posted by lalochezia at 10:32 AM on April 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh thank god, now they can get back to the serious business of telling me what jokes people made on Twitter yesterday.
posted by mittens at 10:43 AM on April 20, 2023 [17 favorites]

That's a bummer. I enjoyed some of their work.

I don't see anything on their webpage about the shutdown, though.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:45 AM on April 20, 2023

The ultra-right news organization that lied its thousand faces off takes a $787 million hit and sails on, but the left wing, highly esteemed and awarded out of all proportion to its tiny budget news organization gets shut down.
posted by jamjam at 10:50 AM on April 20, 2023 [68 favorites]

This feels legitimately bad, in terms of proper, focused journalistic enterprises being able to support themselves.

Also, largely unrelated except that Ben Smith, whose quote leads this FPP, is now editor of Semafor, but while checking who funded it (spoiler: to a significant extent, Sam Bankman-Fried!) I just found that the Wikipedia entry for Semafor says:

The name of the publication derives from the Ancient Greek word semaphore. According to The New York Times, the term refers to "a visual signaling apparatus often involving flags, lights and arm gestures".

Like, what the hell, wikipedia? I can believe that nobody writing the wikipedia page for Semafor necessarily speaks Ancient Greek (what the NYT actually says is that Semafor, like Axios, is a news site with a neologistic name based on Ancient Greek roots), but has the entry for Semafor been written by someone who does not know what semaphore is?
posted by running order squabble fest at 10:52 AM on April 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

running order squabble fest, that might be a by-product of Wikipedia rule that any factual assertions have to be based on something somebody else said (taken perhaps to a silly conclusion).
posted by joannemerriam at 11:18 AM on April 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

This is a bummer. I always hated regular BuzzFeed — just the most asinine content and advertising for Amazon products — but BuzzFeed News had some really, really good pieces.
posted by vanitas at 11:19 AM on April 20, 2023 [19 favorites]

And people wonder why Substack is growing.
posted by soundguy99 at 12:03 PM on April 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

Donate to ProPublica, people!
posted by lalochezia at 12:09 PM on April 20, 2023 [41 favorites]

What the hell is Mike McClintock going to do now?
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:26 PM on April 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

And people wonder why Substack is growing.

Rapidly depleting transphobe venture capital.
posted by Artw at 12:33 PM on April 20, 2023 [9 favorites]

And people wonder why Substack is growing

I think it's super worrying that theoretically accountable news organizations are being destroyed and replaced largely with media owned either by very rich (and often deeply conservative) people or stuff like Substack that in many cases is less about journalism than it is about vibes.
posted by an octopus IRL at 12:40 PM on April 20, 2023 [15 favorites]

.

I'm a book editor, and I have grown to rely on BuzzFeed News's style guide, which is still available for the time being. Will be very sorry to see it go (or continue to exist but not be updated) as it's a genuinely useful took for those who edit contemporary language.
posted by BlahLaLa at 12:52 PM on April 20, 2023 [17 favorites]

Oh thank god, now they can get back to the serious business of telling me what jokes people made on Twitter yesterday.

Not being a 90s kid, how will I know what their cultural touchstones are?

But seriously though, there have been a healthy number of articles linked from Buzzfeed News on the blue over the years.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:55 PM on April 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Buzzfeed News was actually unionized. I'm happy to say, as a union media worker at a different company, that I joined a rally outside their offices a few years ago to support their organizing campaign. And it's good to see that, under their contract, Buzzfeed must negotiate with the News Guild over the fate of those workers.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:15 PM on April 20, 2023 [14 favorites]

I've never paid much attention to the listicle side of Buzzfeed, but they did some genuinely good investigative journalism and I'm sorry to see that go.
posted by BlueNorther at 2:55 PM on April 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

FWIW, reporting on Blippi's scatty past did not benefit the common good. All the stupid shit I did as a young man predates the Internet's unwillingness to forget. All young people should have the same ability to get their stupidity forgotten. Otherwise, we really have to get better at forgiving.
posted by ocschwar at 3:08 PM on April 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ocschwar, I think we are already plenty forgiving of young men doing horrible things.
posted by NotAYakk at 4:15 PM on April 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

Horrible, yes. Embarrassing, no .
posted by ocschwar at 4:42 PM on April 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

FWIW, reporting on Blippi's scatty past did not benefit the common good.

I think this was mentioned to set up a classic three-beats joke. BuzzFeed News was overall good, certainly better than you would expect from the name, but it could be a little trashy at times. Hence, the three beats: "it won a Pulitzer", setting up the expectation of journalistic excellence, "published the Steele dossier", setting up an expectation that we're zooming into their finest journalistic work, and then the punchline, "broke the story of Blippi pooping on his friend", which breaks the pattern established by the first two beats, for comic effect

yes, yes, you know how jokes work, you say. But then why bring up that this was below the standard we should expect from an Internet news source, let alone a Pulitzer prize-winner? It's inherent to the premise of the joke. It is a waste of time, punishable by an extremely tedious reply and a thread derail, currently in progress
posted by Merus at 5:14 PM on April 20, 2023 [15 favorites]

This feels legitimately bad, in terms of proper, focused journalistic enterprises being able to support themselves.

Well journalism has never covered its costs in the sense of readers paying for the content. The business model for newspapers, radio and tv used to be a vehicle for advertising. In terms of the financial model, the journalism was just to ensure enough people paid attention to the advertising.

I wish more news organisations were funded like the Scott Trust funds the Guardian.
posted by plonkee at 1:06 AM on April 21, 2023

but it was never profitable.

Sad condemnation of civilization, can apply it to so so much. Journalism and profits are a disastrous mix, one of the worst big bullshits I've lived through.
posted by GoblinHoney at 7:39 AM on April 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Between the Steele Dossier and Ellie Hill’s “reporting”, I can see why profits weren’t forthcoming.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:49 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Defector: Greed is Still the Problem
posted by box at 10:18 AM on April 21, 2023

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A friend of a friend, Jina Moore, was their inaugural Women’s Rights and Gender reporter, and did amazing work, particularly in East Africa. It looks like they kept up that beat over the years.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:26 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

BlahLaLa, thanks for that style guide link! (A personal aside: surprised that it’s missing a note on using Nepali rather than “Nepalese”, which is surprisingly persistent.)
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:41 AM on April 21, 2023

The Definitive Oral History Of BuzzFeed News 2012–2023
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:35 PM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]