16 ms·

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

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