14 ms·

The Buzzfeed Lesson

121 points by misiti3780 8y ago

maccio92 8y ago
Why are we acting like a journo company laying off 1000 people is the end of the world? Are people not aware of how many other companies across many sectors have layoffs all the time? This isn't news. BuzzFeed sucks, their journalists were providing benefit to the business, so they pivoted. Can we move on?
- yuy910616 8y ago
  It's more than that. buzzfeed is essentially a type of media company, one that is suppose to 'survive' in the new landscape where aggregates like fb, and google dominates. to learn and understand why it is struggling has more implications not just to the long term viability of journalism, but also to how aggregators dominate and there fore, should be regulated, and what can company do in a age where controlling demand is much more important than controlling supply.
  - maccio92 8y ago
    maybe people are finally sick of trashy clickbait tabloid articles?
    - yuy910616 8y ago
      i'm not sure if you're trolling..but i'll bite. buzzfeed has done a lot of good, real journalism. the trashy, click-bait articles in a way is funding good journalism, which, if you purely consume buzzfeed through fb or something like that...you might think that is all there is. besides, you should read the article, not just the headline. as ben addresses your issue in the opening paragraph.
      - Aunche 8y ago
        From a branding perspective, that seems like it would be doomed to failure. They can capture some of the younger demographic but completely alienate anyone who already who already pays for the news. For example, I personally find Buzzfeed News articles to be more sensationalist than most reputable newspapers, but that's probably because I subconsciously am more skeptical of anything that comes out of buzzfeed.
      - swebs 8y ago
        Award winning reporting right here: http://archive.is/X4eRs http://archive.is/X4eRs
        thecatspaw 8y ago
        They have indeed gotten nominated multiple times for the pulitzer award https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news
        TheHypnotist 8y ago
        BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News are different in this respect.
      - reaperducer 8y ago
        the trashy, click-bait articles in a way is funding good journalism The problem is that the trash tarnishes the brand its reputation. Buzzfeed may do great things, but I won't read any of it because the overwhelming majority of what it publishes is crap, and I never know if a headline is important, or clickbait.
        mgfist 8y ago
        It's pretty easy to tell which side of Buzzfeed the article comes from. The investigative side has proper titles while the clickbait ones have a "Click here to see these 10 crazy news titles, #7 will blow your mind" kinda title
        Bartweiss 8y ago
        This is sort of true - you can at least discern the listicles - but even their Pulitzer-nominated work has titles like "From Russia with Blood" and "The Man Who Knew Too Much". I'm not inherently against those titles, even the NYT gets a bit cute with their longform stuff to draw in readers. But it is a bit more frustrating when there are lots of vacuous articles to sort through; it's still pretty hard to discern their investigative stuff from the fluffy longform pieces.
        Bartweiss 8y ago
        In principle, BuzzFeed could just be a site with deep news coverage alongside fluff, not much different than a newspaper with real news, comics, and 'society' pages. To some extent, Buzzfeed even managed that: their BuzzFeed News subheader has lots of award-winning content without garbage listicles. Of course, the BuzzFeed News imprint has a whole section devoted to R. Kelly right now, and seems to be aiming no higher than a CNN or USA Today mix of hard news and fluff. Add to that the occasional bout of serious hackwork written in their "real news" style, and I'm not overflowing with hope. Perhaps more to the point, it looks like this composite approach didn't actually balance the books, or we wouldn't be seeing layoffs right now.
      - Bartweiss 8y ago
        > the trashy, click-bait articles in a way is funding good journalism I used to be pretty optimistic about this model, starting around the time Buzzfeed hired Mike Giglio from Newsweek and started doing in-depth stories on Syria. After all, traditional newspapers run cartoons and ads; even the NYT runs an extensive Features section. BuzzFeed looked like a modernized version of that same practice, with its fluff model updated to interest an online, click-based audience instead of a subscriber on Sunday morning. But these layoffs call into question whether clickbait is in fact a way of funding good journalism, or whether Buzzfeed was just converting investment money into respectability. Buzzfeed overall is cutting staff 15% over multiple rounds of layoffs, but Buzzfeed News already dropped 17% of staff in round one. The entire teams for national news, national security, and health went, as did the Spain office. Maybe tellingly, the entertainment desk kept two staffers. I think it's still an open question what the role of serious longform work is for Buzzfeed. One narrative says that the individual readers value both investigative and fluffy content from one source. If that's true, good reporting isn't an act of charity. It's just low-margin content produced to keep readers (or maybe staff?) in the same way that grocery stores sell staples like eggs basically at-cost while they profit elsewhere. Another narrative says that listicle readers (and writers) don't care about the presence of serious coverage (at least from Buzzfeed), so if any part of Buzzfeed News isn't running a profit it's not advancing the company. (Even more broadly, I think it's an open question whether there's any known way to profit on mass distribution of investigative journalism. It seems to rely on patronage models, outright charity, or in a few areas contract work like Bloomberg Terminal.)
    - Xamayon 8y ago
      I think this is a large part of it. At some point I stopped falling for clickbait titles, unnecessarily drawn out slide show style articles, etc. These days, the automatic response I have is to block sites which waste my time. If that kills off sites which peddle such crap, maybe the media landscape will improve...
      - yuy910616 8y ago
        do you instead pay for a good, reputable source of news?
        mondo9000 8y ago
        I tried the Wall Street Journal Online, since I think news about money is more real, but their website wasn't very good [1], I think there's still hope to get paying subscribers if the online reading experience is more pleasant. 1) Right now WSJ has three columns of text because they want consistency with their hardcopy, but it doesn't feel right for a laptop.
        Varcht 8y ago
        Do you have any suggestions? Are there any reputable sources remaining? Not sure I could trust any single source ever again. Not enough to pay for it anyways.
        yuy910616 8y ago
        axios, economist, and this very article you're reading. i also read bill bishop's newsletter, very good as well
        swebs 8y ago
        Associated Press, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg.
        Varcht 8y ago
        AP has had a lot of "opinion..." in it's feeds over the last couple years. I used to be a big fan of their uncurated "Raw Feed" but they decided that was not something they wanted to expose any longer. The others are ok sources but still too much opinion mixed in for my money. Can't somebody just give us the facts?
    - ravenstine 8y ago
      Not only that, but we really don't need journalists in the traditional sense as much as we used to. It wasn't even that long ago that newspapers and TV were people's eyes and ears. Now anyone with a phone can record video of events as they happen, and anyone with a YouTube channel can report on the news and make political commentary for a mere fraction of the overhead that media firms operate on. This isn't to say that there isn't value in traditional journalism, and I think the viability of member-supported radio is a testament to that. But the old guard of for-profit journalism is obsolete, and it's quickening its own death by going hog-wild with unverified sources, hit pieces, and lack of fact checking.
      - ameister14 8y ago
        I actually think we need curation a great deal nowadays - there is definitely a market for it, if nothing else. The massive amount of chaff 'content' is hard to wade through. Your second paragraph is dead on, though.
        gnhrgkai 8y ago
        Curation is a solved problem: # of retweets/likes/upvotes.
        yabatopia 8y ago
        That's popularity tracking, not curation.
        gnhrgkai 8y ago
        It is curation of the most popular things, which in turn are the ones that matter to most people.
        jsgo 8y ago
        Maybe in the sense of articles it can be of benefit, but with video or images it can be bereft of context which can stray, intentionally or not, towards misinformation.
    - saberience 8y ago
      Are you totally clueless? Buzzfeed has some of best investigative reporting out and there and has been doing an amazing job covering the abortive Trump administration. You sound like a complete idiot with these sorts of comments.
    - bernardlunn 8y ago
      Yes
  - porpoisely 8y ago
    One way they could have survived was by not cheerleading for CNN, NYTimes, Washingtonpost, etc when the big boys were demanding fb, google, etc censor content and instead drive traffic to "authoritative" sources ( AKA themselves ). People forget that smaller media firms like Buzzfeed, Vox, Huffpo, etc all thrived under a neutral FB, Google, etc. Remember when these companies were supposed to be the "new media"? What changed? Buzzfeed did this to themselves. They demanded that fb, google, etc censor and pick favorites and they chose the big boys over buzzfeed. What buzzfeed didn't realize is that their competition isn't infowars, breitbart or foxnews. Nobody who read those sources would ever waste their time on buzzfeed. Their competition was the NYTimes, CNN, MSNBC, Washingtonpost, etc. Now that buzzfeed has successfully helped these large media companies get preferential treatment with FB, Google, etc, there is really no room for buzzfeed. The big boys took buzzfeed, vox, huffpo, etc's market share. I bet these large "authoritative" companies are seeing a rise in traffic and increasing ad revenue. I wonder where that increase is coming from? Infowar fans? Highly unlikely.
    - malvosenior 8y ago
      This is a very astute take. Buzzfeed had its interests more aligned with Breitbart than the NYT all along. Yet they continued to attack not just Breitbart but everything within a political event horizon surrounding it. There were arguments that Buzzfeed was attacking it's potential readers for political reasons to their own detriment. I think the meme "get woke, go broke" hints at this. The question is why did they and so many other new media outlets let ideology get in the way of their own success?
- pornel 8y ago
  It's worrying, because it's another indicator that journalism is fucked (BTW, BuzzFeed is known for clickbait meme-crap, but BuzzFeedNews was surprisingly serious publication). While it was easy to dismiss failures of pre-internet publications as merely failing to adapt to the new medium, BuzzFeedNews was Internet-native, and still failed.
  - brettnak 8y ago
    It's interesting to see so many new businesses forget the lessons that previous businesses learned. Brand identity and trust used to be the foundation of businesses, and at some level (I'm not sure what level) it still is. Even as someone educated on the differences between BF & BFN, I still never knew how to take BFN seriously with all the regular crap on BF. I don't really feel like it's my job to figure out how they fit together, and it would have been pretty simple just to completely split the brands if they actually wanted to have the two faces of the company. To the average internet reader, there was no difference between BF and BFN. People have either always known, or are learning (however slowly) that they can't vet every story themselves and they have to trust. BF corrupted that with their two faces.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      > Brand identity and trust used to be the foundation of businesses, and at some level (I'm not sure what level) it still is. I think that was much more the case when the brand was the only brand. When the company lived or died by its chocolate, or single brand of appliances etc, even if the founder was gone, I think a lot of care was taken. Now a brand is commonly one of 10 or 30 in a portfolio, I don't think there's much care left. When the parent has a dozen appliance brands you can play loose with the trust of any or all. Half the product may be little more than badge engineering. When there's dozens of food brands in the book, or the market leading brand gets bought, it's virtually certain they will be worse than they used to be. Often quite a lot. The perception of the brand might carry that for years. BF is an odd one as it's trying to become a respectable news outlet, without letting go of the junk that made them. Now the perception has to go the other way, up. A much more difficult move.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  The layoffs in this case are especially unusual as they are indiscriminate: BF employees with years of experience at the company and championed the company’s growth have been hit. Here’a a new post by the Director of Quizzes who was laid off: http://www.fluxblog.org/2019/01/how-laid-off-are-you/ http://www.fluxblog.org/2019/01/how-laid-off-are-you/
  - sct202 8y ago
    I love how fun his former title of Director of Quizzes sounds, but it's so sad to read his reflection that a random user in Michigan has been producing free content that has driven so much traffic to Buzzfeed that he's redundant.
- monksy 8y ago
  They're good at getting their message out and submarining things.
- berberous 8y ago
  https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/1089185071490387969 https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/1089185071490387969
drugme 8y ago
BuzzFeed sucks, their journalists were providing benefit to the business, so they pivoted. This isn't about BuzzFeed "sucking". But rather, about its screwing over its employees while trying to appear "hip" and "anti-establishment". Can we move on? Until Jonah digs into his piggybank and coughs up the backpay owed to his laid-off employees - no.
- maccio92 8y ago
  What backpay is owed to employees? If you're referred to unpaid PTO, if it was in their employement contract I agree. Otherwise, just another case of clueless millennials signing contracts without reading them.
  - r_smart 8y ago
    "We have no vacation policy, you get as many vacation days as you want!"
  - jhayward 8y ago
    What contract? Why do you mention one?
johnvanommen 8y ago
The author lost me at "Back in 2015 I wrote that BuzzFeed [Was] the Most Important News Organization in the World."
- yuy910616 8y ago
  do you know who this author is?
  - devmunchies 8y ago
    who is it? i don't see an author listed on the page.
    - yuy910616 8y ago
      ben thompson, this is his site
    - canadianwriter 8y ago
      Well it's a one author site. It's Ben Thompson, he has been doing this for quite some time and is an important figure. Here is the about page: https://stratechery.com/about/ https://stratechery.com/about/ There is also his Wikipedia which gives a good amount of info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Thompson_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Thompson_(writer)
  - dingo_bat 8y ago
    How is that relevant?
asabjorn 8y ago
The article is correct that competing for the kind of content that you find on the front page of glossy magazines in the supermarket lines is a race towards the bottom on the internet. The article is also correct that this is because online aggregators unlike supermarket tabloid stands present no supply line incumbent advantage. Offline content is a combination of ads plus upfront price. That requires some form of friction and seems to be where content is moving. This fits better with the necessary expectations of incumbent content providers that their way of reaching customers should have some incumbent distribution advantage, because in the end it needs to be a stable job for people providing the content and for the shareholders taking the risk of providing the company that create those jobs.
mudil 8y ago
There is a reason why we don’t have any VC investments in the media, or for that matter, in the content creation on the internet. The reason is because Google and FB monopolized search, advertising, and more importantly, surveillance of individuals. So, the website that caters clinical information to doctors competes with Candy Crush, because doctors get served relevant ads on games, etc. In the early days of internet, we had plethora of new media networks. No more. The same with science websites, smart websites for children, hobby websites, etc etc. Big tech is killing content on the internet, and instead we have fake news controversies and privacy scandals. This is very serious stuff for society and democracy and knowledge. PS https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/28/tech-monopolies-are-killing-journalism-ocasio-cortez-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/28/tech-monopolies-are-killing-... Edit. Think about it: Google and FB have 80% share of the ad market, and they actually don’t create the content. The rest 20% goes to all the publishers from the entire world.
- throwaway427 8y ago
  Who is "we"? There are tons of VC investments in media.
  - mudil 8y ago
    Ok, which ones? Give me examples.
    - throwaway427 8y ago
      The Athletic, Gimlet, Cheddar, Scroll, Piano, Tastemade...
      - drdeadringer 8y ago
        Out of these, I have heard of only Gimlet Media and that's because I'm neck deep into podcasts.
  - nopriorarrests 8y ago
    No, they are drying up quite quickly. Consider this: ---cut--- For the media industry, with the investment group shutting down, one of the biggest backers of digital media companies over the past decade has backed out. “What are the bets being made in publishing and content companies and ad tech right now?” said a former executive at a company that was invested in by Time Warner Investments. “There’s zero. It’s just not happening.” [1] ---cut--- And it makes sense, tbh. Most of such investment failed - mashable, mic, buzzfeed, huffpost. Problem is, it seems that media just does not produce unicorns which will allow you to pay for failed investments. [1] https://digiday.com/media/warnermedia-shuts-investment-arm-that-backed-mashable-maker-studios-others/ https://digiday.com/media/warnermedia-shuts-investment-arm-t...
anongraddebt 8y ago
A number of HN comments have pointed to the internet-native advantage Buzzfeed (BF) had, and that the layoffs are disconcerting or puzzling in this respect. It's a fair and natural point. However, there are a number of fundamental shifts occurring as the digital economy grows as a percentage of the total economy. Many companies misaligned to these on-going shifts will either change or go under. Shouldn't an internet-native company already be well aligned to these shifts? Not necessarily. For instance, one of the shifts underway is the increasing transience of markets. That is, markets are created, undergo change, and die-off at an accelerating pace. This is just one fundamental shift underway, there are others, and companies will not exist very long if merely a portion of the company is aligned for this new environment.
- neuronic 8y ago
  I always wonder how one arrives at such conclusions with this kind of confidence. Are you reading and essentially consolidating a lot of your acquired knowledge? Is this the tenor observant people are agreeing upon at conferences? Are you in some kind of overview position? I am merely asking because from my perspective I feel I could never conclude such things and I have no idea how it happens?
  - anongraddebt 8y ago
    I don't understand your question. Alternatively, if you're making an argument, then I don't what your argument is.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
bhauer 8y ago
I am still waiting for a good micropayments platform to allow me to support arbitrary web sites with relatively low-friction (and high-privacy) small payments to consume their content. I would happily pay $0.25 or thereabouts to read articles on some of the sites I consider to be good content creators. That said, I have somewhat high expectations. E.g., I would hope that such a platform doesn't take too large a cut (e.g., Apple app-store sized cut) because that's offensive to both readers and creators.
- crowbahr 8y ago
  It's a great use-case for Cryptocurrencies: low transaction fees to send micro-amounts of goods across the network. That seems like part of what Brave is trying to do with the BAT: Use BAT split among websites based on the amount of time you spend on each site. I'd rather see a self contained library that allows websites to easily insert a button which lets you tip 0.02c or whatever to them with a single click. No idea what you'd need to do to create something like that, but it seems like a really compelling way to get people to spend on sites they like. A tiny amount of pennies sent via crypto with the press of a single button could be a sizable stream when you've got scale to it.
  - noxToken 8y ago
    Wouldn't the volatility of cryptocurrency be a reason that companies wouldn't want this as a primary method? Don't get me wrong, the value of USD, GBP, or YEN can rise and fall relatively quickly. The conversion rate of GBP to USD dropped from about 1.40 GBP/USD to 1.20 GBP/USD in the span of a year. But cryptocurrencies can cause devastating losses. BTC dropped nearly 30% from Dec 2017 to late Jan 2018, and it has been on the decline ever since. It seems that the only way for a business to confidently convert BTC into the 0.25 USD would be to do nightly-ish transactions. I'm familiar but not well versed in BTC operations. I don't know how much overhead (fees) would go into nightly transactions, and how much the fees would rise with the volume of each transaction.
    - thisisweirdok 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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olivermarks 8y ago
'journalism' and publishing is always about advertising revenue, and historically the big platforms with the most reach (Murdoch's tabloid newspaper empire, TV) were the big money earners because of number of eyeballs and ears served. There are no barriers to publishing online today but it is still all about the platform and number of people using it, and that platform today is arguably Google and FB/Insta/WA. Who creates and writes the 'journalism', however cogent, perceptive and well thought out is largely irrelevant. How often do you remember who specifically actually wrote an article on a site like Buzzfeed? You do a lot better building a niche brand like stratechery as Ben has done...
cwkoss 8y ago
We need to stop calling people who write articles about memes or what random people are saying on twitter "Journalists". Your listicle is not defending democracy, and confusing these two groups has led to a great devaluation of trust in the remaining real journalists.
- simonsarris 8y ago
  That was the takeaway I got from reading this thread, a BuzzFeed person discussing BuzzFeed contributions: https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos/status/1089629940226629632 https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos/status/10896299402266296... > Wonder why suddenly quizzes took over your Facebook? That was because of @LouisPeitzman, who made one viral quiz that unleashed everything else (he probably can apologize to you personally for that). This isn't a layoff of journalists, its a layoff of custodians of low-brow content farm writing. If that's all, then the main problem in the journalism-apocalypse is that these people were called journalists in the first place.
  - gnhrgkai 8y ago
    Ah, the sexist editor. http://i.imgur.com/nnLvJxa.png http://i.imgur.com/nnLvJxa.png
    - SquareWheel 8y ago
      I don't disagree with your sentiment, but I've flagged this comment because it's the sort of drama bait I'd expect to see on other sites.
  - rdtsc 8y ago
    I clicked on the twitter link, I don't know why really, I probably shouldn't have > "A bunch of people were laid off (and more to come! Fuck!) who quite literally created and shaped the internet as we know it today." I think this what people mean when they talk about Poe's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law. For a short while I thought I was reading a parody. > "BuzzFeed changed the internet, for better or worse (if you say worse to me right now please eat my ass)," ... "They gave moral clarity, heart, and a mission that was never craven click-lust, but driven by serious consideration of humans" It seems the team builders there failed on the moral clarity bit. At least there is more work to be done, but time has run out it seems. It's interesting to observe how confident they are that they shaped the internet for the better. Something tells this is not an anomaly and most of them share that belief. This is a great example self and group brainwashing. And notice the part where if you disagree with them, you get immediately attacked. Clearly the qualities of a sophisticated investigative journalist, ready to report news in an unbiased and objective manner.
burfog 8y ago
It's a bunch of people with insane degrees (literally a PhD in "romantic comedies", WTF why is this even possible) living in places they can't afford and writing nonsense. These people loved telling factory workers and especially coal miners to "learn to code". You could tell there was a certain smug glee, taking perverse pleasure in the fact that aging white males (can't imagine any of the other coal miners) in MAGA hats (all coal miners wear them all day long, right?) would have to get educated and somehow enlightened. Now these writers are annoyed that people on Twitter are saying they should learn to code. Well... that's just funny, and very well deserved. Personally, I'd rather they didn't all learn to code. Steel mills are hiring. Mao said to make steel.
- gnhrgkai 8y ago
  The last thing in the world those people want is a job.
  - Phlarp 8y ago
    What makes you say that? And why do you need to use a burner account to voice this opinion?
- jriot 8y ago
  In short - this is real Karma.
- afarrell 8y ago
  How is a PhD in romantic comedies any more ridiculous than a PhD focusing on the works of Ovid, Aristophanes, or Shakespeare?
  - danmg 8y ago
    The basis of western thought and canonical English literature versus 'You've Got Mail'. Yes there is a difference.
    - oh_sigh 8y ago
8bitsrule 8y ago
"The inferior product is advertising" Got that right. Partly because adverts are boring and uncreative ... much like Buzzfeed "now advertisers ... can reach the exact customers [at] Facebook and Google." That has yet to be demonstrated. Was it ever true? Is it still? "Back in 2015 I wrote that BuzzFeed [Was] the Most Important News Organization in the World... So what went wrong?" I glance at many newsfeeds every day. I found little value in Buzzfeed. So, you were wrong.
massysett 8y ago
Earlier he said the world needs good journalism and therefore journalism needs a good business model. I see this sentiment often but I see no support for it. There is no link between the premise and the conclusion. Plenty of things in the world have no business model: much fits under the umbrella of philanthropy. Others are provided by government, which provides some things for which there used to be a business model but now isn’t (public transportation for instance). So it is with journalism. Philanthropy for instance could support it. So could government. In the US the idea of government doing this raises hackles, but it’s not uncommon worldwide; see the BBC for instance. Even in the US you see some journalism funded with government and philanthropy (Frontline on PBS.)
edwinjose 8y ago
The simultaneous layoffs in many news outlets prove they lost access to a common source of funding, perhaps that source was something like Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act which recently expired.

121 points by misiti3780 8y ago

Why are we acting like a journo company laying off 1000 people is the end of the world? Are people not aware of how many other companies across many sectors have layoffs all the time? This isn't news. BuzzFeed sucks, their journalists were providing benefit to the business, so they pivoted. Can we move on?

yuy910616 8y ago
It's more than that. buzzfeed is essentially a type of media company, one that is suppose to 'survive' in the new landscape where aggregates like fb, and google dominates. to learn and understand why it is struggling has more implications not just to the long term viability of journalism, but also to how aggregators dominate and there fore, should be regulated, and what can company do in a age where controlling demand is much more important than controlling supply.
- maccio92 8y ago
  maybe people are finally sick of trashy clickbait tabloid articles?
  - yuy910616 8y ago
    i'm not sure if you're trolling..but i'll bite. buzzfeed has done a lot of good, real journalism. the trashy, click-bait articles in a way is funding good journalism, which, if you purely consume buzzfeed through fb or something like that...you might think that is all there is. besides, you should read the article, not just the headline. as ben addresses your issue in the opening paragraph.
    - Aunche 8y ago
      From a branding perspective, that seems like it would be doomed to failure. They can capture some of the younger demographic but completely alienate anyone who already who already pays for the news. For example, I personally find Buzzfeed News articles to be more sensationalist than most reputable newspapers, but that's probably because I subconsciously am more skeptical of anything that comes out of buzzfeed.
    - swebs 8y ago
      Award winning reporting right here: http://archive.is/X4eRs http://archive.is/X4eRs
      - thecatspaw 8y ago
        They have indeed gotten nominated multiple times for the pulitzer award https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news
      - TheHypnotist 8y ago
        BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News are different in this respect.
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      the trashy, click-bait articles in a way is funding good journalism The problem is that the trash tarnishes the brand its reputation. Buzzfeed may do great things, but I won't read any of it because the overwhelming majority of what it publishes is crap, and I never know if a headline is important, or clickbait.
      - mgfist 8y ago
        It's pretty easy to tell which side of Buzzfeed the article comes from. The investigative side has proper titles while the clickbait ones have a "Click here to see these 10 crazy news titles, #7 will blow your mind" kinda title
        Bartweiss 8y ago
        This is sort of true - you can at least discern the listicles - but even their Pulitzer-nominated work has titles like "From Russia with Blood" and "The Man Who Knew Too Much". I'm not inherently against those titles, even the NYT gets a bit cute with their longform stuff to draw in readers. But it is a bit more frustrating when there are lots of vacuous articles to sort through; it's still pretty hard to discern their investigative stuff from the fluffy longform pieces.
      - Bartweiss 8y ago
        In principle, BuzzFeed could just be a site with deep news coverage alongside fluff, not much different than a newspaper with real news, comics, and 'society' pages. To some extent, Buzzfeed even managed that: their BuzzFeed News subheader has lots of award-winning content without garbage listicles. Of course, the BuzzFeed News imprint has a whole section devoted to R. Kelly right now, and seems to be aiming no higher than a CNN or USA Today mix of hard news and fluff. Add to that the occasional bout of serious hackwork written in their "real news" style, and I'm not overflowing with hope. Perhaps more to the point, it looks like this composite approach didn't actually balance the books, or we wouldn't be seeing layoffs right now.
    - Bartweiss 8y ago
      > the trashy, click-bait articles in a way is funding good journalism I used to be pretty optimistic about this model, starting around the time Buzzfeed hired Mike Giglio from Newsweek and started doing in-depth stories on Syria. After all, traditional newspapers run cartoons and ads; even the NYT runs an extensive Features section. BuzzFeed looked like a modernized version of that same practice, with its fluff model updated to interest an online, click-based audience instead of a subscriber on Sunday morning. But these layoffs call into question whether clickbait is in fact a way of funding good journalism, or whether Buzzfeed was just converting investment money into respectability. Buzzfeed overall is cutting staff 15% over multiple rounds of layoffs, but Buzzfeed News already dropped 17% of staff in round one. The entire teams for national news, national security, and health went, as did the Spain office. Maybe tellingly, the entertainment desk kept two staffers. I think it's still an open question what the role of serious longform work is for Buzzfeed. One narrative says that the individual readers value both investigative and fluffy content from one source. If that's true, good reporting isn't an act of charity. It's just low-margin content produced to keep readers (or maybe staff?) in the same way that grocery stores sell staples like eggs basically at-cost while they profit elsewhere. Another narrative says that listicle readers (and writers) don't care about the presence of serious coverage (at least from Buzzfeed), so if any part of Buzzfeed News isn't running a profit it's not advancing the company. (Even more broadly, I think it's an open question whether there's any known way to profit on mass distribution of investigative journalism. It seems to rely on patronage models, outright charity, or in a few areas contract work like Bloomberg Terminal.)
  - Xamayon 8y ago
    I think this is a large part of it. At some point I stopped falling for clickbait titles, unnecessarily drawn out slide show style articles, etc. These days, the automatic response I have is to block sites which waste my time. If that kills off sites which peddle such crap, maybe the media landscape will improve...
    - yuy910616 8y ago
      do you instead pay for a good, reputable source of news?
      - mondo9000 8y ago
        I tried the Wall Street Journal Online, since I think news about money is more real, but their website wasn't very good [1], I think there's still hope to get paying subscribers if the online reading experience is more pleasant. 1) Right now WSJ has three columns of text because they want consistency with their hardcopy, but it doesn't feel right for a laptop.
      - Varcht 8y ago
        Do you have any suggestions? Are there any reputable sources remaining? Not sure I could trust any single source ever again. Not enough to pay for it anyways.
        yuy910616 8y ago
        axios, economist, and this very article you're reading. i also read bill bishop's newsletter, very good as well
        swebs 8y ago
        Associated Press, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg.
        Varcht 8y ago
        AP has had a lot of "opinion..." in it's feeds over the last couple years. I used to be a big fan of their uncurated "Raw Feed" but they decided that was not something they wanted to expose any longer. The others are ok sources but still too much opinion mixed in for my money. Can't somebody just give us the facts?
  - ravenstine 8y ago
    Not only that, but we really don't need journalists in the traditional sense as much as we used to. It wasn't even that long ago that newspapers and TV were people's eyes and ears. Now anyone with a phone can record video of events as they happen, and anyone with a YouTube channel can report on the news and make political commentary for a mere fraction of the overhead that media firms operate on. This isn't to say that there isn't value in traditional journalism, and I think the viability of member-supported radio is a testament to that. But the old guard of for-profit journalism is obsolete, and it's quickening its own death by going hog-wild with unverified sources, hit pieces, and lack of fact checking.
    - ameister14 8y ago
      I actually think we need curation a great deal nowadays - there is definitely a market for it, if nothing else. The massive amount of chaff 'content' is hard to wade through. Your second paragraph is dead on, though.
      - gnhrgkai 8y ago
        Curation is a solved problem: # of retweets/likes/upvotes.
        yabatopia 8y ago
        That's popularity tracking, not curation.
        gnhrgkai 8y ago
        It is curation of the most popular things, which in turn are the ones that matter to most people.
        jsgo 8y ago
        Maybe in the sense of articles it can be of benefit, but with video or images it can be bereft of context which can stray, intentionally or not, towards misinformation.
  - saberience 8y ago
    Are you totally clueless? Buzzfeed has some of best investigative reporting out and there and has been doing an amazing job covering the abortive Trump administration. You sound like a complete idiot with these sorts of comments.
  - bernardlunn 8y ago
    Yes
- porpoisely 8y ago
  One way they could have survived was by not cheerleading for CNN, NYTimes, Washingtonpost, etc when the big boys were demanding fb, google, etc censor content and instead drive traffic to "authoritative" sources ( AKA themselves ). People forget that smaller media firms like Buzzfeed, Vox, Huffpo, etc all thrived under a neutral FB, Google, etc. Remember when these companies were supposed to be the "new media"? What changed? Buzzfeed did this to themselves. They demanded that fb, google, etc censor and pick favorites and they chose the big boys over buzzfeed. What buzzfeed didn't realize is that their competition isn't infowars, breitbart or foxnews. Nobody who read those sources would ever waste their time on buzzfeed. Their competition was the NYTimes, CNN, MSNBC, Washingtonpost, etc. Now that buzzfeed has successfully helped these large media companies get preferential treatment with FB, Google, etc, there is really no room for buzzfeed. The big boys took buzzfeed, vox, huffpo, etc's market share. I bet these large "authoritative" companies are seeing a rise in traffic and increasing ad revenue. I wonder where that increase is coming from? Infowar fans? Highly unlikely.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    This is a very astute take. Buzzfeed had its interests more aligned with Breitbart than the NYT all along. Yet they continued to attack not just Breitbart but everything within a political event horizon surrounding it. There were arguments that Buzzfeed was attacking it's potential readers for political reasons to their own detriment. I think the meme "get woke, go broke" hints at this. The question is why did they and so many other new media outlets let ideology get in the way of their own success?
pornel 8y ago
It's worrying, because it's another indicator that journalism is fucked (BTW, BuzzFeed is known for clickbait meme-crap, but BuzzFeedNews was surprisingly serious publication). While it was easy to dismiss failures of pre-internet publications as merely failing to adapt to the new medium, BuzzFeedNews was Internet-native, and still failed.
- brettnak 8y ago
  It's interesting to see so many new businesses forget the lessons that previous businesses learned. Brand identity and trust used to be the foundation of businesses, and at some level (I'm not sure what level) it still is. Even as someone educated on the differences between BF & BFN, I still never knew how to take BFN seriously with all the regular crap on BF. I don't really feel like it's my job to figure out how they fit together, and it would have been pretty simple just to completely split the brands if they actually wanted to have the two faces of the company. To the average internet reader, there was no difference between BF and BFN. People have either always known, or are learning (however slowly) that they can't vet every story themselves and they have to trust. BF corrupted that with their two faces.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    > Brand identity and trust used to be the foundation of businesses, and at some level (I'm not sure what level) it still is. I think that was much more the case when the brand was the only brand. When the company lived or died by its chocolate, or single brand of appliances etc, even if the founder was gone, I think a lot of care was taken. Now a brand is commonly one of 10 or 30 in a portfolio, I don't think there's much care left. When the parent has a dozen appliance brands you can play loose with the trust of any or all. Half the product may be little more than badge engineering. When there's dozens of food brands in the book, or the market leading brand gets bought, it's virtually certain they will be worse than they used to be. Often quite a lot. The perception of the brand might carry that for years. BF is an odd one as it's trying to become a respectable news outlet, without letting go of the junk that made them. Now the perception has to go the other way, up. A much more difficult move.
minimaxir 8y ago
The layoffs in this case are especially unusual as they are indiscriminate: BF employees with years of experience at the company and championed the company’s growth have been hit. Here’a a new post by the Director of Quizzes who was laid off: http://www.fluxblog.org/2019/01/how-laid-off-are-you/ http://www.fluxblog.org/2019/01/how-laid-off-are-you/
- sct202 8y ago
  I love how fun his former title of Director of Quizzes sounds, but it's so sad to read his reflection that a random user in Michigan has been producing free content that has driven so much traffic to Buzzfeed that he's redundant.
monksy 8y ago
They're good at getting their message out and submarining things.
berberous 8y ago
https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/1089185071490387969 https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/1089185071490387969

drugme 8y ago

BuzzFeed sucks, their journalists were providing benefit to the business, so they pivoted. This isn't about BuzzFeed "sucking". But rather, about its screwing over its employees while trying to appear "hip" and "anti-establishment". Can we move on? Until Jonah digs into his piggybank and coughs up the backpay owed to his laid-off employees - no.

maccio92 8y ago
What backpay is owed to employees? If you're referred to unpaid PTO, if it was in their employement contract I agree. Otherwise, just another case of clueless millennials signing contracts without reading them.
- r_smart 8y ago
  "We have no vacation policy, you get as many vacation days as you want!"
- jhayward 8y ago
  What contract? Why do you mention one?

johnvanommen 8y ago

The author lost me at "Back in 2015 I wrote that BuzzFeed [Was] the Most Important News Organization in the World."

yuy910616 8y ago
do you know who this author is?
- devmunchies 8y ago
  who is it? i don't see an author listed on the page.
  - yuy910616 8y ago
    ben thompson, this is his site
  - canadianwriter 8y ago
    Well it's a one author site. It's Ben Thompson, he has been doing this for quite some time and is an important figure. Here is the about page: https://stratechery.com/about/ https://stratechery.com/about/ There is also his Wikipedia which gives a good amount of info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Thompson_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Thompson_(writer)
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  How is that relevant?

asabjorn 8y ago

The article is correct that competing for the kind of content that you find on the front page of glossy magazines in the supermarket lines is a race towards the bottom on the internet. The article is also correct that this is because online aggregators unlike supermarket tabloid stands present no supply line incumbent advantage. Offline content is a combination of ads plus upfront price. That requires some form of friction and seems to be where content is moving. This fits better with the necessary expectations of incumbent content providers that their way of reaching customers should have some incumbent distribution advantage, because in the end it needs to be a stable job for people providing the content and for the shareholders taking the risk of providing the company that create those jobs.

mudil 8y ago

There is a reason why we don’t have any VC investments in the media, or for that matter, in the content creation on the internet. The reason is because Google and FB monopolized search, advertising, and more importantly, surveillance of individuals. So, the website that caters clinical information to doctors competes with Candy Crush, because doctors get served relevant ads on games, etc. In the early days of internet, we had plethora of new media networks. No more. The same with science websites, smart websites for children, hobby websites, etc etc. Big tech is killing content on the internet, and instead we have fake news controversies and privacy scandals. This is very serious stuff for society and democracy and knowledge. PS https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/28/tech-monopolies-are-killing-journalism-ocasio-cortez-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/28/tech-monopolies-are-killing-... Edit. Think about it: Google and FB have 80% share of the ad market, and they actually don’t create the content. The rest 20% goes to all the publishers from the entire world.

throwaway427 8y ago
Who is "we"? There are tons of VC investments in media.
- mudil 8y ago
  Ok, which ones? Give me examples.
  - throwaway427 8y ago
    The Athletic, Gimlet, Cheddar, Scroll, Piano, Tastemade...
    - drdeadringer 8y ago
      Out of these, I have heard of only Gimlet Media and that's because I'm neck deep into podcasts.
- nopriorarrests 8y ago
  No, they are drying up quite quickly. Consider this: ---cut--- For the media industry, with the investment group shutting down, one of the biggest backers of digital media companies over the past decade has backed out. “What are the bets being made in publishing and content companies and ad tech right now?” said a former executive at a company that was invested in by Time Warner Investments. “There’s zero. It’s just not happening.” [1] ---cut--- And it makes sense, tbh. Most of such investment failed - mashable, mic, buzzfeed, huffpost. Problem is, it seems that media just does not produce unicorns which will allow you to pay for failed investments. [1] https://digiday.com/media/warnermedia-shuts-investment-arm-that-backed-mashable-maker-studios-others/ https://digiday.com/media/warnermedia-shuts-investment-arm-t...

anongraddebt 8y ago

A number of HN comments have pointed to the internet-native advantage Buzzfeed (BF) had, and that the layoffs are disconcerting or puzzling in this respect. It's a fair and natural point. However, there are a number of fundamental shifts occurring as the digital economy grows as a percentage of the total economy. Many companies misaligned to these on-going shifts will either change or go under. Shouldn't an internet-native company already be well aligned to these shifts? Not necessarily. For instance, one of the shifts underway is the increasing transience of markets. That is, markets are created, undergo change, and die-off at an accelerating pace. This is just one fundamental shift underway, there are others, and companies will not exist very long if merely a portion of the company is aligned for this new environment.

neuronic 8y ago
I always wonder how one arrives at such conclusions with this kind of confidence. Are you reading and essentially consolidating a lot of your acquired knowledge? Is this the tenor observant people are agreeing upon at conferences? Are you in some kind of overview position? I am merely asking because from my perspective I feel I could never conclude such things and I have no idea how it happens?
- anongraddebt 8y ago
  I don't understand your question. Alternatively, if you're making an argument, then I don't what your argument is.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

bhauer 8y ago

I am still waiting for a good micropayments platform to allow me to support arbitrary web sites with relatively low-friction (and high-privacy) small payments to consume their content. I would happily pay $0.25 or thereabouts to read articles on some of the sites I consider to be good content creators. That said, I have somewhat high expectations. E.g., I would hope that such a platform doesn't take too large a cut (e.g., Apple app-store sized cut) because that's offensive to both readers and creators.

crowbahr 8y ago
It's a great use-case for Cryptocurrencies: low transaction fees to send micro-amounts of goods across the network. That seems like part of what Brave is trying to do with the BAT: Use BAT split among websites based on the amount of time you spend on each site. I'd rather see a self contained library that allows websites to easily insert a button which lets you tip 0.02c or whatever to them with a single click. No idea what you'd need to do to create something like that, but it seems like a really compelling way to get people to spend on sites they like. A tiny amount of pennies sent via crypto with the press of a single button could be a sizable stream when you've got scale to it.
- noxToken 8y ago
  Wouldn't the volatility of cryptocurrency be a reason that companies wouldn't want this as a primary method? Don't get me wrong, the value of USD, GBP, or YEN can rise and fall relatively quickly. The conversion rate of GBP to USD dropped from about 1.40 GBP/USD to 1.20 GBP/USD in the span of a year. But cryptocurrencies can cause devastating losses. BTC dropped nearly 30% from Dec 2017 to late Jan 2018, and it has been on the decline ever since. It seems that the only way for a business to confidently convert BTC into the 0.25 USD would be to do nightly-ish transactions. I'm familiar but not well versed in BTC operations. I don't know how much overhead (fees) would go into nightly transactions, and how much the fees would rise with the volume of each transaction.
  - thisisweirdok 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

olivermarks 8y ago

'journalism' and publishing is always about advertising revenue, and historically the big platforms with the most reach (Murdoch's tabloid newspaper empire, TV) were the big money earners because of number of eyeballs and ears served. There are no barriers to publishing online today but it is still all about the platform and number of people using it, and that platform today is arguably Google and FB/Insta/WA. Who creates and writes the 'journalism', however cogent, perceptive and well thought out is largely irrelevant. How often do you remember who specifically actually wrote an article on a site like Buzzfeed? You do a lot better building a niche brand like stratechery as Ben has done...

cwkoss 8y ago

We need to stop calling people who write articles about memes or what random people are saying on twitter "Journalists". Your listicle is not defending democracy, and confusing these two groups has led to a great devaluation of trust in the remaining real journalists.

simonsarris 8y ago
That was the takeaway I got from reading this thread, a BuzzFeed person discussing BuzzFeed contributions: https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos/status/1089629940226629632 https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos/status/10896299402266296... > Wonder why suddenly quizzes took over your Facebook? That was because of @LouisPeitzman, who made one viral quiz that unleashed everything else (he probably can apologize to you personally for that). This isn't a layoff of journalists, its a layoff of custodians of low-brow content farm writing. If that's all, then the main problem in the journalism-apocalypse is that these people were called journalists in the first place.
- gnhrgkai 8y ago
  Ah, the sexist editor. http://i.imgur.com/nnLvJxa.png http://i.imgur.com/nnLvJxa.png
  - SquareWheel 8y ago
    I don't disagree with your sentiment, but I've flagged this comment because it's the sort of drama bait I'd expect to see on other sites.
- rdtsc 8y ago
  I clicked on the twitter link, I don't know why really, I probably shouldn't have > "A bunch of people were laid off (and more to come! Fuck!) who quite literally created and shaped the internet as we know it today." I think this what people mean when they talk about Poe's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law. For a short while I thought I was reading a parody. > "BuzzFeed changed the internet, for better or worse (if you say worse to me right now please eat my ass)," ... "They gave moral clarity, heart, and a mission that was never craven click-lust, but driven by serious consideration of humans" It seems the team builders there failed on the moral clarity bit. At least there is more work to be done, but time has run out it seems. It's interesting to observe how confident they are that they shaped the internet for the better. Something tells this is not an anomaly and most of them share that belief. This is a great example self and group brainwashing. And notice the part where if you disagree with them, you get immediately attacked. Clearly the qualities of a sophisticated investigative journalist, ready to report news in an unbiased and objective manner.

burfog 8y ago

It's a bunch of people with insane degrees (literally a PhD in "romantic comedies", WTF why is this even possible) living in places they can't afford and writing nonsense. These people loved telling factory workers and especially coal miners to "learn to code". You could tell there was a certain smug glee, taking perverse pleasure in the fact that aging white males (can't imagine any of the other coal miners) in MAGA hats (all coal miners wear them all day long, right?) would have to get educated and somehow enlightened. Now these writers are annoyed that people on Twitter are saying they should learn to code. Well... that's just funny, and very well deserved. Personally, I'd rather they didn't all learn to code. Steel mills are hiring. Mao said to make steel.

gnhrgkai 8y ago
The last thing in the world those people want is a job.
- Phlarp 8y ago
  What makes you say that? And why do you need to use a burner account to voice this opinion?
jriot 8y ago
In short - this is real Karma.
afarrell 8y ago
How is a PhD in romantic comedies any more ridiculous than a PhD focusing on the works of Ovid, Aristophanes, or Shakespeare?
- danmg 8y ago
  The basis of western thought and canonical English literature versus 'You've Got Mail'. Yes there is a difference.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago

8bitsrule 8y ago

"The inferior product is advertising" Got that right. Partly because adverts are boring and uncreative ... much like Buzzfeed "now advertisers ... can reach the exact customers [at] Facebook and Google." That has yet to be demonstrated. Was it ever true? Is it still? "Back in 2015 I wrote that BuzzFeed [Was] the Most Important News Organization in the World... So what went wrong?" I glance at many newsfeeds every day. I found little value in Buzzfeed. So, you were wrong.

massysett 8y ago

Earlier he said the world needs good journalism and therefore journalism needs a good business model. I see this sentiment often but I see no support for it. There is no link between the premise and the conclusion. Plenty of things in the world have no business model: much fits under the umbrella of philanthropy. Others are provided by government, which provides some things for which there used to be a business model but now isn’t (public transportation for instance). So it is with journalism. Philanthropy for instance could support it. So could government. In the US the idea of government doing this raises hackles, but it’s not uncommon worldwide; see the BBC for instance. Even in the US you see some journalism funded with government and philanthropy (Frontline on PBS.)

edwinjose 8y ago

The simultaneous layoffs in many news outlets prove they lost access to a common source of funding, perhaps that source was something like Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act which recently expired.