6 ms·

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 hav

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

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