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BuzzFeed to Cut 15% of Its Workforce
- iagovar 8y agoId like them to cut 100%, honestly. IDK in english but their spanish version is complete garbage that brings nothing to the table, except clickbaity info and wannabe toxic political analysis, which is nothing more that uber biased confirmation bias feed. And Im not even sure if Im being hyperbolic here.
- daurnimator 8y agoThey cover Australian politics better than most of the "real" news outlets. Would be sad to see that go.
- shrewduser 8y agothey do? i've never heard of that, i waded into the clickbait but i can't even find their politics section
- hart_russell 8y agoEnglish website is pure click bait garbage as well.
- nqr 8y agoSo like the English version. I've yet to see anything more disgusting than buzzfeed. Maybe the ads on snapchat, because they prey on children.
- dylan604 8y agoInfluencers on any social platform rate highly on the disgusting meter as well. Even more so after recently watching the Fyre documentaries.
- praneshp 8y agoIf that means BuzzfeedNews has to shut down due to lack of money, it's a stupid idea.
- briandear 8y agoAlternate title: “9 reasons you might not have a job if you work at BuzzFeed (you won’t believe #4, it’s weird af!)” Maybe a business built around clickbait, millennial pandering, and questionable journalism isn’t sustainable?
- minimaxir 8y agoDisclosure: I work at BuzzFeed If you are curious how BuzzFeed's business model works (specifically, the diversification of revenue sources), see this post by BuzzFeed's CEO a year ago: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jonah/9-boxes https://www.buzzfeed.com/jonah/9-boxes
- solarkraft 8y agoIt's nice to see someone from BuzzFeed here. What's your job as a Data Scientist there? Maximizing the effectiveness of Clickbait? What's still burned into my mind about BuzzFeed's business model is some person high up saying something along the lines of "I don't care if they click to comment that the article is shit [because in 99,99% of cases it is], they're still seeing the ads".
- elektor 8y agoI know you're trying to be snarky but minimaxir has done a lot of great work with data science and visualization, particularly with his Reddit analysis.
- solarkraft 8y agoI'm not questioning that. I'd like to know what BuzzFeed used data scientists for and how well they must pay (or what hidden motive they have) for a person with self-respect to work there.
- briandear 8y agoThat doesn’t change BuzzFeed. Facebook has some brilliant and decent people working there too.
- minimaxir 8y agoDisclosure: I work at BuzzFeed. It's worth noting that other journalism companies have announced layoffs today with Gannett (https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2019/gannett-lays-off-journalists-across-the-country/ https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2019/gannett-lays-off-...) and Verizon/Yahoo/Oath (https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/23/tech/verizon-media-layoffs/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/23/tech/verizon-media-layoffs/in...). Tough day for the industry. :(
- maccio92 8y agoVerizon is a journalism company?
- philwelch 8y agoThey're a media company at the very least.
- coolspot 8y ago> With brands like Yahoo, HuffPost and TechCrunch, Verizon Media transforms how people stay informed and entertained, communicate and transact. [0] - https://www.verizonmedia.com/ https://www.verizonmedia.com/
- Blaaguuu 8y agoFrom the article: "Verizon Media Group, the portfolio of media brands that includes Yahoo, AOL and The Huffington Post"
- porpoisely 8y agoBuzzfeed is?
- ceejayoz 8y agoThey were finalists for the 2017 and 2018 Pulitzer prizes, so the answer's a pretty clear "yes".
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- pssdbt 8y ago"250 People We're Letting Go"
- iagovar 8y agoIs buzzfeed journalism?
- pje 8y agoBuzzfeed News certainly is, yes.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rgrieselhuber 8y agoNo snark intended but the bar is honestly pretty low these days.
- ehsankia 8y agoYou must be mixing Buzzfeed and Buzzfeed News. The former is low tier content that funds the actual investigative journalism in the latter.
- rgrieselhuber 8y agoI was actually referring to the journalism bar but Buzzfeed News doesn’t do anything to refute my point, as far as I can tell.
- DanBC 8y agoBuzzFeed News (Emily Dugan) have scooped some important stories about the justice system in the UK recently. That's the clearest example of great journalism from BuzzFeed News.
- aspaceman 8y agoBuzzfeed has both a click-baity division and Buzzfeed News, which has been breaking important investigative stories for the past several years.
- mysterydip 8y agoBuzzFeed employs ~1600 people? Maybe it's my ignorance on content companies, but that seems excessive for what they produce. Is there someone that can provide a bit of a breakdown of jobs so I'm more informed?
- winningcontinue 8y agoThey're defiintely administration and engineering heavy. It's a media company, so they should have budgets for reporters and actual reporting. Have one editor, get rid of all the engineers and put them on a contractual basis and then all reporters.
- asdff 8y ago>Have one editor And publish only 4 things a day at that rate. More editors = more edits per day = more publications per week = more eyes on ads.
- Topgamer7 8y agoThey cover a wide array of geographic regions.
- winningcontinue 8y agosure. Maybe it's impossible to operate so thinly on admin and engineering. But it'd be a really revolutionary way to operate a news organization: put it towards the people who gather news and budget appropriately for it. The listicles and reaggregations they've popularized have been the worst things about modern journalism.
- m0zg 8y agoThat's what's stunning to me. There are youtubers shooting videos from their kitchen or bedroom for approximately zero dollars who have larger audiences than these "mainstream" publications. I don't understand how they can still exist with 1600 people in their employ. Furthermore I don't understand what those 1600 people actually do other than make shit up and repost other, more legitimate news sources.
- jessaustin 8y ago"In response to the statement tonight from the Special Counsel's spokesman: We stand by our reporting and the sources who informed it, and we urge the Special Counsel to make clear what he's disputing." -- BuzzFeed News Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith Any chance that Smith, Leopold, or Cormier are in the 15%?
- apengwin 8y agozero
- porpoisely 8y agoEven if they were fired, another company would pick them up. The news industry reminds me of the catholic church with the news companies acting like the catholic dioceses. Instead of banishing "bad journalists", the news industry just shifts them from company to company like the catholic church moves around "bad priests" from diocese to diocese. It still amazes me that any "news" company would hire Leopold after his previous gaffs. I guess as long as they keep to the "faith", nothing can't be forgiven and they'll always have a job in the industry.
- jessaustin 8y agoThis seems a bit overblown. Lots of people still believe that priests have a role to play in society other than molesting children. In contrast, does anyone really believe that the media has a purpose other than afflicting politicians who are skeptical about some wars?
- zwaps 8y agoSorry to the people who lost their jobs, but I do not think that Buzzfeed has a good product.
- solarkraft 8y agoI propose a work force cut of 100% after spinning off BuzzFeed News under an untainted name.
- antisthenes 8y agoWell, maybe they finally figured out how to automate clickbait title/article generation. But I'm sure those 15% will find something more productive to do with their time. Sorry about the snark.
- thatguyagain 8y agoIt's a shame that such an important news source is not doing better. In this day and age, we NEED a website like this to bring us valuable information and help us navigate through all the noise and useless distractions out there. I mean just take a look at their front page today: "21 Secrets Wegmans Employees Would Never Tell You, But I Will". Who else would tell me if not Buzzfeed??
- um_ya 8y agoBuzzfeed is fake news.
- dave5104 8y agoYou can criticize BuzzFeed News, but you should at least look at BuzzFeed News' actual homepage, and not their sister site, when doing so: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/
- ksking 8y agokeep suckin, they’ll tap your head any minute now
- eruci 8y agoThe content creation for ads business is dead.
- _eht 8y agoThis is verifiably untrue.
- stcredzero 8y agoMaybe it's more like a zombie. Largely, there is no longer a moral creature with agency left inside. What's left is just a ravenous bundle of crude instincts shambling towards the next clickbait.
- puranjay 8y agoJournalism for ads business is dead Plenty of websites still make a killing creating content for ads. Just that the content is garbage and written by lowly paid "bloggers", not degree-holding journalists
- b_tterc_p 8y agoWhy doesn’t buzzfeed split the brand between buzzfeed and buzzfeed news. Clearly, as evidenced by these comments here, buzzfeed is doing massive damage to the reputation of the news section; and I highly doubt the target market of the non news section is there because of their competent news half.
- AmericanChopper 8y agoBased on recent events, it looks like buzzfeed news doesn’t need any help when it comes to damaging its own reputation.
- briandear 8y agoWhy is this being downvoted? They publish a false story, corroborated by nobody, and that is supposed to help the reputation? And no, “unnamed sources” aren’t corroboration. If these stories were about Obama, there’d be a lot more howling, but given it’s Trump, the attitude is that any story that confirms anyone’s bias is fine, regardless of truth. It’s disgusting and has made journalism into a tribal farce.
- favorited 8y ago> And no, “unnamed sources” aren’t corroboration. Yes, they are. Unnamed sources have brought down institutions ranging from the Nixon administration to the Boston archdiocese.
- CobrastanJorji 8y agoYou're both right. Unnamed sources have indeed released big stories on multiple occasions and are therefore useful, but citing them definitely discounts an article's reliability, since neither the reader nor any other news sources can seek clarification or verification.
- threeseed 8y agoThey are a serious journalism organisation so you can assume that they did have multiple sources (which they stated they did). And yes unnamed sources are corroboration just as they have been during every major news story that has ever broken. And pretty sure journalism started to become a tribal force about 20 years ago when Fox News launched. It is the same approach Murdoch took with papers in the UK and here in Australia.
- jakequade 8y agoGood. Their site is trash. Sure, they do _some_ news well, but it's a tiny part of a much wider, broken system.
- jhpriestley 8y agoWhat a nasty comment section. I'm not the target audience for Buzzfeed myself, but instead of crowing over people losing their jobs I just don't click their articles.
- strict9 8y agoThis is terrible news for journalists and others affected by this action. I sincerely hope BuzzFeed News lives on and the rest of the business model of repackaging content found on social media and reddit goes into the dustbin. They made a business of posting photos/jokes/memes without attribution and burned a lot of bridges. This is saying nothing about the quality of listicles and other content. As much as I detested the non-news part, I'm sure it was a click draw. I'm not optimistic of BuzzFeed News continuing without the rest of the garbage on buzzfeed.com.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 40four 8y agoWhile I don't disagree with any of it, maybe the Hate has gone too far in this thread, so I won't pile on. It is tempting though :p haha. I don't pay for WSJ, so I could only read 1st 2 paragraphs. It says they want to invest more in the more 'promising' areas of content licensing & e-commerce? What the hell does that mean in this context? Are the going to try to sell their articles to other smaller sites to publish? Not sure what products they sell, so how is e-commerce involved? Selling products for advertisers? And I also have a question for minimaxir who said he/she is a BuzzFeed employee. What does a data scientist do at a company like that? What kind of data are you crunching and hiw does it affect the companies descisions? Maybe this isn't information you can share publicly? But I'm interested in data science so I'm curious. Maybe you have some insight on what's happening?
- minimaxir 8y ago> What does a data scientist do at a company like that? BuzzFeed publishes a few things about that on the tech blog: https://tech.buzzfeed.com/ https://tech.buzzfeed.com/ For example, a few NLP tasks such as identifying trending topics (https://tech.buzzfeed.com/identifying-trending-topics-for-buzzfeed-news-d1759fac888e https://tech.buzzfeed.com/identifying-trending-topics-for-bu...) and topic clustering (https://tech.buzzfeed.com/how-we-tagged-14-000-buzzfeed-quizzes-using-k-means-clustering-95fc46bc6daf https://tech.buzzfeed.com/how-we-tagged-14-000-buzzfeed-quiz...). I haven't written any posts for the blog (due to time), but I do want to write posts there soon :) Anything beyond what's there I can't disclose publicly.
- 40four 8y agoCool, thanks for the articles, I'll check them out. I'm interested in learning more about data science, maybe pursing it in the future if I get ever get tired of web development.
- elicash 8y ago> I don't pay for WSJ, so I could only read 1st 2 paragraphs. I'm not arguing you SHOULD pay -- I don't -- but found this unintentionally hilarious in a thread about all the layoffs recently in the online news business. But more seriously, Google and Facebook take so much of the ad revenue it's not surprising to see so many unable to prosper.
- lazzlazzlazz 8y agoBuzzFeed is a great example of how focusing on short-term revenue-maximizing metrics (clicks) at all costs can create irreparable long-term reputation damage - a quiet, hard-to-detect debt that can sink a brand. BuzzFeed is the strongest example of the new generation of shallow, biased, predictable poli-trash media outlets and this will be impossible to overcome.
- rootusrootus 8y agoI would have said BuzzFeed is a great example of mixing up two sites together such that people who aren't capable of doing any actual research will just conflate the two. We live in a TL;DR headline-only world, so maybe this isn't that ironic.
- rblion 8y agoWhat do you think the article means by "shifting digital-media landscape"? I've been thinking about this a lot. There are a lot of interesting developments happening right now.
- throwaway12112 8y agoIt's weird people are defending Buzzfeed here. As a long time lurker, it seemed like the community here is for fact reporting and truth seeking. Buzzfeed has had at least two major blow ups in the past year. Perhaps two of the biggest blunders in years. On top of that, they have constantly reported things without all the facts causing major damage to innocent people. To all the people who keep saying 'Pulitzer prize'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Cooke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Cooke Not using the above to discredit the award or all people who have the award. But as recently seen with Der Spiegel, an award doesn't automatically give you immunity from criticism nor does it prove credibility. There are some awards and tests in life demonstrate objective truth, journalism has neither.
- reaperducer 8y agoWhile I'm not happy to see people lose their jobs, I hope this and other recent events signal a waning of amateur "disruptive" journalism. I've been transitioning back to traditional media — physical newspapers, DVRing the evening news, NPR, etc... and only visiting online news sites and Facebook one day a week. I'm not sad that I'm not bombarded with a constant stream of clickbait stories and headlines that don't reflect the content of the article. Buzzfeed is the poster child for all that is wrong with "new media." If it goes the way of the newspapers it killed, I won't cry. I feel mentally healthier, less anxious, better informed, and I sleep better. YMWV, but I encourage people to try to do the same to see if it works out for them. If not, there's still plenty of web sites out there peddling "free" news in exchange for peace of mind.
- hurr_durr 8y agoBuzzfeed, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, blah blah name your left leaning news orgs every day: ORANGE MAN BAD!
- mellow-lake-day 8y agoI think Buzzfeed News needs to rebrand itself from Buzzfeed so people stop getting the two confused
- winningcontinue 8y agoThis is news itself to me. If they're actually two separate organizations, are they really operating independently? If they rebranded, I'll eventually find out and find it suspicious they changed names.
- watersb 8y agoCrikey, the comments here... I have family who simply cannot believe in trusted relationships like journalistic integrity (news reporting), or fiduciary responsibility (finance), And yet there are thousands of people working every day, to keep their internet connections, photo and email services operational, minute by minute. It seems to me that none of us have a clear idea of the relationships of trust we believe in, or ignore, or deny, just to get through a normal day.
- asdff 8y agoPart of the huge effect power from all the social media propaganda was how people view this junk as legitimate when it was posted by a friend or family vs. a cold monolithic organization filled with, in Sarah Palin's infamous words, "the liberal media elite." I bet people would walk right past a headline in a tabloid at the grocery store, knowing its BS, but would repost the same exact story if Aunt Karen shared it on facebook.
- grey-sunshine 8y agoFinally some good news.
- sixtypoundhound 8y agoLaugh.... reading the comments, I feel like the guy in the star wars trench run that needs to keep saying "stay on target".... The real problem here is business model: expected average revenue per content piece vs. expected cost of production. There's a winner-take-most dynamic in publishing revenue and audience development; top X stories get Y% of total revenue (with a huge power law effect). If you don't win top 5, you probably get almost nothing. The cost of a newsroom scales linearly with articles; very hard to get productivity as you drive scale. Your odds of finding good topics drops according to a power law. Very hard to drive pageviews of additional content with a digital audience vs. print... print would pick up the paper and read an extra couple of pages, since they already have paid for the headline article. Most digital visitors clicks out after a page. Most of the sensationalism and wading into politics / drama is an effort to stretch that business model... find content which is stickier than objective reporting. The advertising model really does drive editorial strategy: - In traditional print, I need to build a publication brand to drive subscriptions => subscriber revenue & ad pageviews. Generally points to credibility-building as the best strategy. - In free digital, emotional crazy talk actually does better than responsible journalism...
- coryfklein 8y agoMy list so far: Apple, Tesla, Buzzfeed, Verizon/Yahoo/CNBC, HuffPost, SpaceX Doesn't look like the layoffs will be ending soon either. If it was just one or two that would be one thing, but this is forming a pattern. What do all these companies know? I keep hearing word of a potential recession or downturn. Is anybody here more keyed in than myself and can provide an explanation?