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BuzzFeed News Has Won Its First Pulitzer Prize
- chrisseaton 5y agoBuzzFeed? The 'Ten Disney Characters That Represent You' people? Just take a look at this scroll of doom: https://www.buzzfeed.com/news https://www.buzzfeed.com/news
- Seirdy 5y agoBuzzfeed and Buzzfeed News share a parent and brand, but they are quite different. The former is the Web equivalent of junk food; the latter is a decent news org.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoNewspapers print news, sports, comics, and celebrity gossip. I guess we were wrong for ever looking at the news since they also publish fluff? Same for news on television, honestly. It is quite possible for a company to do more than one type of article and be decent-to-excellent at both.
- awillen 5y agoCan you imagine if someone had told you BuzzFeed was going to win a Pulitzer in 2007? Kudos to them - from listicles to some really important journalism.
- andreareina 5y agoBuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News are different organizations with separate standards.
- kube-system 5y agoIt is a separate division of the same Buzzfeed, Inc.
- whymauri 5y agoI think they're basically saying that the listicles walked so the investigative journalism could run.
- awillen 5y agoYes, I'm aware of that, but BuzzFeed started as a company that made dumb viral listicles then turned the brand awareness and money generated by that into an organization that's doing serious, important journalism.
- EverywhereTrip 5y ago10 reasons why BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer Prize. (You wont believe number 7!)
- yoloyoloyoloa 5y agoWhat is this world coming to
- listless 5y agoPeak Idiocracy?
- MarkMc 5y agoBuzzfeed News have been writing serious, in-depth news articles for years now. Here's a great one from 2016 about how Facebook is the internet in Myanmar: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-trump-around-the-world https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sheerafrenkel/fake-news... Unfortunately their brand is tainted by the reddit-meme listicle crap of their sister site. I'm surprised they haven't changed their name yet.
- Abishek_Muthian 5y agoTIL Buzzfeed & Buzzfeed News are separate websites, When ever I saw a URL pointing to Buzzfeed News I assumed its the former - A daily mail with lesser NSFW images, So never bothered to click. Good to know that the latter is doing some good journalism, But perhaps a rebranding is due?
- dannyw 5y agoMaybe it's a generational thing? I'm in my 20s and I'm much more likely to click on buzzfeed news than the new York times or something. Also like many of my friends, I get about 90-100% of my news from Reddit. I just don't care about visiting individual publications. Doesn't appeal to me.
- tomcam 5y ago> I get about 90-100% of my news from Reddit What subs?
- 5etho 5y agonot op but me, politics and worldnews, also other anti-capitalistic subs
- skinnymuch 5y agoDid you mean “also other” as in different actual anti capitalist subs? The two mentioned are huge subs that are at best neoliberal and do not stray far from actual status quo quandaries. As a casual Reddit user, I know Chapo got banned. I know technically the reasons weren’t for its politics, but lol... Anyway. Are other anti capitalist subs that much against the status quo? Edit: I liked your pithy comment about being lower class and nothing wrong with that in the Pine phone thread.
- nichos 5y agoThese awards are all meaningless.
- booleandilemma 5y agoDo they work in the same office as BuzzFeed? Would be funny to think they’re busy writing hard-hitting journalism while in the other room the BuzzFeed guys are crafting “Eat Through This A-Z Buffet And We'll Reveal The Dog Breed You Are On The Inside”.
- jonp888 5y agoIn the UK The Times and The Sun share a building despite having similarly different Tones.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoI don't really see an issue with this - and hope it is the case. I imagine hard-hitting journalism takes some thought, while clickbait lists take a different type of work and can be more relaxed and creative. The two probably compliment each other fairly well.
- YeBanKo 5y agoVery strange to see these low effort negative comments on HN. BuzzFeed News is not BuzzFeed and it’s not the first time they are recognized by journalistic awards. They actually did something very interesting: built a team of investigative journalists inside a click-bait factory. Usually trend is the opposite - to go down from journalism to churning as many clicks-generating titles as possible. The actual series of articles that got them the Pulitzer Prize: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-internment-camps-xinjiang-uighurs-muslims https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-inter...
- whymauri 5y agoIt's ironic because when the series of Pulitzer winning articles were posted on HN they collected over 1000 votes and were on the frontpage twice. Now every is surprised_pikachu.jpg that they won a Pulitzer...
- makomk 5y agoThey were previously a Pulitzer finalist for a series of articles on supposed Russian assassinations in western countries that went firmly into conspiracy theory territories. The one I personally spotted was an article about the death of a British scientist which made it sound like the police were covering up by treating it as a suicide - except their entire evidence for it being a Russian assassination was some of his relatives not knowing he was suicidal and Buzzfeed massively overstating his role in the Litvinenko investigation as justification for why Russia wanted him dead. They even eventually admitted he had been suicidally depressed, those close to him were aware of this, and there was no evidence of foul play - and then claimed it could've been caused by secret undetectable Russian mind control chemicals as justification for continuing to treat this as an assassination. I'm not even kidding. It sounds like this series of articles might've been better than their last attempt, but long form is not the same as actually good investigative reporting and the Pulitzer isn't worth what it once was (if it ever was worth much - there have been some pretty dodgy winners in the past too).
- xmprt 5y agoI remember one of the first incidents they were involved in was the witch hunt for the Boston bombers. It's nice that they've come a long way since then.
- Crazyontap 5y ago> They ultimately identified more than 260 structures that appeared to be fortified detention camps. Some of the sites were capable of holding more than 10,000 people and many contained factories where prisoners were forced into labor. All BuzzFeed jokes aside, this is an exceptional piece of journalism. They managed to identify the exact spots where China was holding the Uyghurs, Kazakhs. "They began with an enormous dataset of 50,000 locations. Buschek built a custom tool to sort through those images." In a time when even mentioning anything remotely to China can get you in really hot waters, kudos to them for pursuing such news.
- bigyikes 5y agoNot disagreeing with your main point, but isn’t hating on China the new hotness? Anything anti-CCP is almost guaranteed upvotes.
- skinkestek 5y ago> Not disagreeing with your main point, but isn’t hating on China the new hotness? Be precise: many of us loves China and Chinese people. > Anything anti-CCP is almost guaranteed upvotes. Because we love Chinese people. Weird but true. In the same way that we want to stop boats before they cross the Mediterranean so that less people will die crossing. (However I admit that I think I'm probably in the minority who actually wants to increase spending to support people where they live so they don't have to move.)
- fighterpilot 5y agoNot for anyone working for a company with ties to China. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/26/john-cena-very-sorry-for-saying-taiwan-is-a-country https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/26/john-cena-very...
- jokethrowaway 5y agoMaybe on HN? In the real world China has ties with a lot of western companies and probably countries. Look for people not recognising Taiwan or the world not sanctioning China for COVID or for the aforementioned concentration camps where they detain 8M people.
- ffggvv 5y agoNever forget they wholesale fabricated a story such that Robert Mueller had to come out of the woodoworks and debunk it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/2019/01/18/b9c40d34-1b85-11e9-8813-cb9dec761e73_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/2019/... https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/18/politics/mueller-statement-buzzfeed/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/18/politics/mueller-statement-bu... But that gets you a pulitzer as long as its anti-trump. "journalists" make me sick.
- whymauri 5y ago>BuzzFeed News won for its innovative series exposing China’s mass detention of Muslims and was named a finalist for its colossal FinCEN Files investigation into the global banking industry. Not related to Trump.
- tikwidd 5y ago> Alison Killing conducted this reporting with a grant and further assistance from the Open Technology Fund. The Open Technology Fund was previously part of Radio Free Asia [1], and continues today as a project of the US Agency for Global Media (the Orwellian name given to the US' external propaganda networks) [2]. Given the current US-China tensions, it is hard to imagine how this work could not be extremely biased. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Agency_for_Global_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Agency_for_Global_Media
- freewizard 5y agoSurprised there’s no mention of Shawn Zhang[1] and his discovery of dozens of camps via satellite images[2] in 2018. Chinese govt started to censor the satellite images after Zhang published his discovery on medium and Twitter, which gave Buzzfeed News a new source to compare and led to more than 200 sites described in its winning piece. [1] https://shawnzhang.ca/ https://shawnzhang.ca/ [2] https://medium.com/@shawnwzhang https://medium.com/@shawnwzhang
- throwawaysea 5y agoThe factually incorrect 1619 project won a Pulitzer Prize previously, so I’m not sure that it means much anymore. It could be that Buzzfeed News did excellent work here, but I also feel like the Pulitzer is an insular awards show that reflects biases inherent to the news industry.
- kingofpandora 5y agoI wish news outlets would stop describing it as the imprisonment (oppression, etc) of Muslims. What's happening there is because the Uyghurs are an ethnic minority.
- CerebralCerb 5y agoDo you have any source or reasoning for the claim that the persecution of Uyghurs is ethnic?
- kingofpandora 5y agoWell there are millions of ethnic Chinese Muslims who aren't put in concentration camps (there is apparently discrimination). The Uyghurs are an ethnic minority like the Tibetans with a large population in a distant part of the country and have been seen as a threat for a long time.
- exporectomy 5y agoAre you sure about that? It's not as if they don't persecute ethnically Han Chinese practitioners of other religions. Why would Islam get a free pass?
- kingofpandora 5y agoThat's the point ... others are discriminated against (Muslims, Christians, etc) but what's happening in Xinjiang is specifically targeting an ethnic minority who has separatist inclinations. Millions of Chinese Muslims are not being put in "reeducation" camps.
- exporectomy 5y agoNor are presumably millions of ethnic Uyghurs scattered all over the country. Maybe they're just not a threat when they're thinly spread or maybe those who are detained have said naughty things online or some other signal of having higher separatist risk.
- sebow 5y agoSays more about the Pulitzer Prize more than anything else.Look at the winners in the previous years... sadly a joke
- axiosgunnar 5y agoDo I understand correctly that the Buzzfeed „Trash & Memes“ website is what earns money (through ads etc) to finance the Buzzfeed News „Pulitzer-Worthy hard-hitting investivations“ website, which by itself is a losing money endeavour? If so, that business structure alone is worth a price!