21 ms·

BuzzFeed News is shutting down

444 points by jbegley 4y ago

riadsila 4y ago
https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1649066484277051394 https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1649066484277051394
notatoad 4y ago
buzzfeed news shut down a while ago. they were doing really good work for a few years, but for the last couple years the "buzzfeed news" site has been taken over by the regular buzzfeed content and the actual journalism has dried up. shutting it down just seems like a formality at this point.
- i80and 4y ago
  I remember visiting the BuzzFeed office back in '13 and hearing about how the BuzzFeed-y entertainment stuff was just a means to fund the actual hard hitting journalism. "Funny" how it panned out.
  - hbn 4y ago
    That was the line that was repeated for years, but it just made me wonder why they didn't put out the news under a completely separate branding. The word "BuzzFeed" inherently sounds like low-brow, unprofessional shlock. You should not be experiencing a "buzz" when reading the news. It shouldn't be an endless "feed" of throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks content to keep my monkey brain stimulated.
    - notatoad 4y ago
      i followed a bunch of buzzfeed news people on twitter during their heyday and always got the impression that a lot of it was a vanity thing to prove that buzzfeed could do real news. picking a name that wasn't intentionally buzzfeed-y would have been admitting defeat.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
rvz 4y ago
[flagged]
- danso 4y ago
  Buzzfeed is already using GPT to generate listicles and quizzes: https://futurism.com/buzzfeed-publishing-articles-by-ai https://futurism.com/buzzfeed-publishing-articles-by-ai This announcement is about Buzzfeed News, the investigative division which was already facing cuts last year: https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/buzzfeed-news-editors-resign-job-cuts-1235211375/ https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/buzzfeed-news-editors-...
  - rvz 4y ago
    That is even worse. Journalists still replaced and offshored to AI generated articles and clickbait. What would take 15 journalists would now take one manager to generate these articles and quizzes. It doesn't really help them at all. Out goes investigative journalists, in comes AI generated click bait at scale.
    - throwaway049 4y ago
      Manager? A script and a chronjob should cover it.
    - flippinburgers 4y ago
      The only thing that comes to mind is that the journalists should probably learn to code.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      I don't care who does it, same shit either way.
  - add-sub-mul-div 4y ago
    That's the point. The "data science" enshittening won the battle over real journalism.
danso 4y ago
Looks like this is the last time I’ll have to point out on HN that BuzzFeed News was the “serious news” side of BuzzFeed, not the main listicle side of the business. They won a Pulitzer in 2021 for International Reporting, and 2 Polk Awards [0] They also had one of the best news org GitHub repos, with the code and data and documentation for their investigations: https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/everything https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/everything [0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-news-wins-george-polk-award https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-news-wins-ge...
- spacemadness 4y ago
  It’s a pretty scathing omen for the ad run internet that this is the part that shuts down while their flaming dumpsterfire of a content mill lives on.
  - iamerroragent 4y ago
    Content mill runs rage content all day too. Unfortunately those get eyes and thus revenue. More a comment on us as a species than anything else. On an individual to individual basis we might recognize bad content meant to feed off of our base emotional instincts versus content meant for accuracy and to inform. However collectively it appears there's more of us that rather get sucked into the rage content than try for objective or accurate reporting. This mirrors the transition of television News from not needed to be profitable to needing to be profitable. Look at the success of cable news.
    - spacemadness 4y ago
      Our ids tend to run wild on the internet, so it’s not surprising. It is extremely disappointing that there is always someone willing to take advantage, but that is the story of humanity I suppose. My hope is somehow we are capable of creating something better than this.
    - klodolph 4y ago
      > More a comment on us as a species than anything else. I think this is less of a comment about us as a species and more a comment about the economic systems that we have in place. Our economic systems used to support journalism.
amanaplanacanal 4y ago
Journalism is expensive. Has anybody really figured out sustainable funding for it?
- seanhunter 4y ago
  It's hard. The guardian newspaper in the UK is funded by a trust that was endowed by one rich dude https://www.theguardian.com/about https://www.theguardian.com/about
  - throwaway049 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - Stevvo 4y ago
      There's more than four people on the internet, you know?
      - throwaway049 4y ago
        Sure, but Chiles has friends in high places!
    - Mizza 4y ago
      Adrian Chiles is a midwit savant and I cherish him.
  - secondcoming 4y ago
    [flagged]
- SllX 4y ago
  Yes, the same as before: subscriptions and ads. There’s just less direct competition within the industry for those still standing and a lot more competition from outside of the industry for the time and money that would have gone to journalism.
- 4y ago
bananapub 4y ago
that is a big shame, it was a good and serious news organisation for years. I was going to link to some of their good stories, but hilariously they have their own listicle of some: "17 Explosive BuzzFeed News Investigations That Made Waves In 2019" [0] [0]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/heidiblake/17-explosive-buzzfeed-news-investigations-from-2019 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/heidiblake/17-explosive...
- tootie 4y ago
  The business was based around Ben Smith and it was downhill when he left. His new jam is Semafor which is also really good.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - n4r9 4y ago
    The linked articles appear to refer to "BuzzFeed" rather than "BuzzFeed News". I wonder if you caught the topmost post which points out they're different? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35641611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35641611
    - gjsman-1000 4y ago
      If you read the actual sources used in the comment, they are referring to BuzzFeed News, not BuzzFeed the tabloid. The FAIR specifically calls this out and says the large majority of articles assessed were from the News division. The Steele Dossier incident denounced by WaPo, FAIR, and other Pulitzer-prize-winning left-wing journalists, was also the News division. Ryan Broderick was a News division scandal. None of the sources in the comment address the tabloid side.
spraveenitpro 4y ago
[dead]
sdfghswe 4y ago
[flagged]
alexander-wilms 4y ago
[flagged]
Eumenes 4y ago
[flagged]
guender 4y ago
[dead]
AlbertCory 4y ago
[flagged]
pcurve 4y ago
Had no idea they went public. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BZFD:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BZFD:NASDAQ The finance trend is going south. :-/
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Some background - they didn't IPO. They deSPAC'd, the idea being to raise a load of cash and then go on an acquisition spree, get scale, and therefore get leverage with ad buyers. So they did this thinking they'd raise $300m. But due to the weird way SPACs work, 94% of the investors walked away rather than close the deal, so rather than raise 300, they raised 16mil. So suddenly they're a public company, they've raised basically no money, they've got no scale - which was their entire plan. They've just been bleeding to death since then, and Buzzfeed News is something the CEO loves, but loses money hand over fist and he's finally had to let his baby die.
  - pcurve 4y ago
    ah.. thanks for the detailed explanation. That's unfortunate. :-/
  - majani 4y ago
    Jesus Christ, and this was at the height of the covid bubble. Faith in content sites is currently at rock bottom
- drak0n1c 4y ago
  They also had a big unionization effort in 2019 and new contract negotiations in 2021. An honest effort, but it led to financially limiting conditions for a company that was increasingly lacking revenue. https://fortune.com/2019/02/13/buzzfeed-union-layoffs/ https://fortune.com/2019/02/13/buzzfeed-union-layoffs/ https://www.nyguild.org/front-page-details/buzzfeed-news-union-ratifies-monumental-first-contract https://www.nyguild.org/front-page-details/buzzfeed-news-uni...
clarle 4y ago
> Furthermore, Peretti told the remaining staff that he would be focusing more of the company’s energy going forward on AI. “We will empower our editorial teams at all of our brands to do the very best creative work and build an interface where that work can be repacked and brought to advertisers more effectively,” he said. “And we will bring more innovation to clients in the form of creators, AI, and cultural moments than can only happen across BuzzFeed, Complex, HuffPost, Tasty and First We Feast.” What the heck does that mean? It sounds like someone is talking about AI as purely a buzzword without really understanding what it is.
- jackvezkovic 4y ago
  actually, I think the guy knows exactly what it means: automate stuff with AI and replace jobs
- seanalltogether 4y ago
  Or worse, they've found they can point an AI bot at other news organizations articles and plagiarize them without any effort.
- notatoad 4y ago
  It's a slightly friendlier way of telling your staff "chatGPT is going to replace most of your jobs"
- hackernewds 4y ago
  you need only see BuzzFeed's stock skyrocket 150% in 1 day to understand when the CEO mentioned they would leverage ChatGPT, and now you see why the CEO is playing the AMC playbook now. next comes the insiders liquidating their holdings, while the leaders rambles on with BUZZwords first it was EVs, now it's AI
  - classified 4y ago
    Are economists still claiming the market is rational? This is proof to the contrary.
  - 4y ago
imwillofficial 4y ago
[flagged]
aww_dang 4y ago
One reader's truths are the next reader's debunked misinformation. The next reader's sacred news outlet is a propaganda outlet for someone else. I know people like their favorite news outlets. They'll swear by the legitimacy of the reportage. Others dispute the same. Why bother disputing it here? Everyone has an opinion. Many will share their thoughts for free online. The value add of journalism isn't there anymore. I can click through to vapid takes all day. Few readers have the attention span to consume more than a paragraph at most. Pulitzer was a tabloid publisher, political activist and later politician. Who really cares about these awards? It isn't a sports league play-off or a golden cup. It is an appeal to authority. Muckraking has never been cheaper to achieve or consume. Inflammatory content has always grabbed eyeballs. Now those eyeballs have even more inflammatory, muckraking, outrage inducing content pursuing them. If trends continue, soap-boxers will need to pay their audience. Meanwhile traditional journalists are locking themselves behind paywalls, auto-play videos, and 20mb page weights. If you've read this far, please invoice me for 2 cents.
dangerboysteve 4y ago
And BuzzFeed will be delisted from the Nasdaq within months at this pace.
rchaud 4y ago
The bubble era of digital news startups is well and truly over. There was never going to be a happy ending for an industry entirely reliant on the whims of social media algorithms to drive traffic, and ad impressions to monetize said traffic. This applies to serious news sites, like BN that don't have the cachet of the Washington Post...which itself couldn't operate independently and was acquired by Bezos. Organic reach for brands on social is dead, it's pay to play (promote posts, that is). Google giveth once but now they'll just gently nudge your towards spending more on ads.
kaliszad 4y ago
Oh no, my joke registration of busfeetnews.com was totally in vain. :-(
robswc 4y ago
This is a genuine question and its going to sound silly and offensive but how much "news" do we actually need? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ - Help, The World Is On Fire And I Feel Like My Life Is Over At 24 - Multiple Women Are Reportedly Cooperating With The Criminal Investigation Into Jonathan Majors, And His Attorney Again Said He’s Innocent - Two Former New Mexico State Basketball Players Accused Their Teammates Of Sexual Assault And Blamed The University For Doing Nothing To Stop It In A New Lawsuit - A 34-Year-Old Man Who’d Recently Been Released From Prison Is Accused Of Killing His Parents, Two Of Their Friends, And Injuring Three Others In A Shooting Rampage These are "featured" articles right now. I know interest is subjective but it just seems like none of that really matters for your day to day life. I stopped watching national news around 7 years ago and I have felt _immensely_ better since doing so and I don't at all feel like I've missed out on a thing. My life has seemed to slow down (in a good way). The only news I pay any attention to is HN and my local news but even that is really only a few minutes a day. Who is the target demographic for this news? All those stories could have been randomly generated and it wouldn't make a difference for the majority of visitors to that site. I have a slight bias against journalism because I've personally been effected by a twisting of truth and being in finance (I run a trading firm) just the way investing/stocks are presented blows my mind (in a bad way)... that said, I'm never one to rejoice at people losing their jobs. I just really am curious as to why and what Buzzfeed news hoped to accomplish.
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  > I have a slight bias against journalism because I've personally been effected by a twisting of truth and being in finance (I run a trading firm) just the way investing/stocks are presented blows my mind (in a bad way) This is kind of like saying "I have a slight bias against maps because one sent me in the wrong direction." People need a way to know what's going on in the world.
  - Clubber 4y ago
    I stopped watching news for the most part as well. If anything is important enough for me to know, someone will tell me, guaranteed. Most of it is not even news, it's fear peddling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny If you must watch the news, limit yourself to the old fashioned 30 minute nightly news shows on the major channels. Everything else is bad for you.
Apocryphon 4y ago
Wonder if they used the Vaulter playbook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnYVH_Rrp00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnYVH_Rrp00
majani 4y ago
As an insider in the industry I can tell you the digital news era is well and truly over. We are in the influencer age now. And this has all been part of a purposefully executed plan by the big web platforms to keep people on their sites and apps rather than have them leave and go to external domains. Any online publication that wants to survive will have to run with a skeleton team full of workaholics. And that will be just to break even and get by.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tootie 4y ago
  It's not over entirely but that fight for clicks and eyeballs thankfully is. We're back to the subscription model and it's going to take time to get consumers full back to where we were 30 years ago. Companies like NY Times and Axios have been thriving. Very interesting listen from How I Built This interviewing Jim Vandehei who built both Axios and Politico. https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-politico-amp-axios-jim-vandehei/ https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-pol...
Z7YCx5ieof4Std 4y ago
- Furthermore, Peretti told the remaining staff that he would be focusing more of the company’s energy going forward on AI - Here we go. AI generated content. At this moment it's not there yet. Going forward on AI is as dumb as removing (nude)images on imgur.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  It's not like their company can get any deader. Buzzfeed, if you're reading this thread I'll put together a system that scrapes Reddit, Twitter, and stock market data. The system will detect unusual price moves up or down, grab whatever people are saying about the company on social media today, and then hit a GPT-4 endpoint to synthesize it into a story.
ouraf 4y ago
The company will proabaly scrap the brand and rebuild it around the Huffington Post. not just "select roles", like change the facade and keep the guts. They bought it in 2020 and the HuffPo brand itself is way less maligned than buzzfeed. It's also a chance of re-hiring the best staff for cheaper wages.
cynicalsecurity 4y ago
Good.
moi2388 4y ago
Good. Let’s hope the rest of buzzfeed follows immediately.
ogou 4y ago
Folks might not understand the context of this milestone. I worked as a web developer at newspapers from 2006-2014. As the industry collapsed and publications scrambled to make use of the new social web, everybody was trying to figure out what to do. Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Vice, and the NYT web team were closely watched as the future of the industry. David Carr was a thought leader back then and wrote a lot about Buzzfeed, especially on Twitter. The very idea of clickbait aggregation that polluted the journalism sites you see now came from that era. Buzzfeed in particular perfected the recipe of blending garbage posts with actual news to increase pageviews and fund the journalism. I think the reason the story is getting so much attention is that Buzzfeed was really arrogant about it all. They had regular features pointing out how great they were and how the rest of journalism was doomed. Same with Vice. Mainstream outlets are probably enjoying a little schadenfreude right now.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

444 points by jbegley 4y ago

https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1649066484277051394 https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1649066484277051394

buzzfeed news shut down a while ago. they were doing really good work for a few years, but for the last couple years the "buzzfeed news" site has been taken over by the regular buzzfeed content and the actual journalism has dried up. shutting it down just seems like a formality at this point.

i80and 4y ago
I remember visiting the BuzzFeed office back in '13 and hearing about how the BuzzFeed-y entertainment stuff was just a means to fund the actual hard hitting journalism. "Funny" how it panned out.
- hbn 4y ago
  That was the line that was repeated for years, but it just made me wonder why they didn't put out the news under a completely separate branding. The word "BuzzFeed" inherently sounds like low-brow, unprofessional shlock. You should not be experiencing a "buzz" when reading the news. It shouldn't be an endless "feed" of throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks content to keep my monkey brain stimulated.
  - notatoad 4y ago
    i followed a bunch of buzzfeed news people on twitter during their heyday and always got the impression that a lot of it was a vanity thing to prove that buzzfeed could do real news. picking a name that wasn't intentionally buzzfeed-y would have been admitting defeat.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

rvz 4y ago

[flagged]

danso 4y ago
Buzzfeed is already using GPT to generate listicles and quizzes: https://futurism.com/buzzfeed-publishing-articles-by-ai https://futurism.com/buzzfeed-publishing-articles-by-ai This announcement is about Buzzfeed News, the investigative division which was already facing cuts last year: https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/buzzfeed-news-editors-resign-job-cuts-1235211375/ https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/buzzfeed-news-editors-...
- rvz 4y ago
  That is even worse. Journalists still replaced and offshored to AI generated articles and clickbait. What would take 15 journalists would now take one manager to generate these articles and quizzes. It doesn't really help them at all. Out goes investigative journalists, in comes AI generated click bait at scale.
  - throwaway049 4y ago
    Manager? A script and a chronjob should cover it.
  - flippinburgers 4y ago
    The only thing that comes to mind is that the journalists should probably learn to code.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    I don't care who does it, same shit either way.
- add-sub-mul-div 4y ago
  That's the point. The "data science" enshittening won the battle over real journalism.

danso 4y ago

Looks like this is the last time I’ll have to point out on HN that BuzzFeed News was the “serious news” side of BuzzFeed, not the main listicle side of the business. They won a Pulitzer in 2021 for International Reporting, and 2 Polk Awards [0] They also had one of the best news org GitHub repos, with the code and data and documentation for their investigations: https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/everything https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/everything [0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-news-wins-george-polk-award https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-news-wins-ge...

spacemadness 4y ago
It’s a pretty scathing omen for the ad run internet that this is the part that shuts down while their flaming dumpsterfire of a content mill lives on.
- iamerroragent 4y ago
  Content mill runs rage content all day too. Unfortunately those get eyes and thus revenue. More a comment on us as a species than anything else. On an individual to individual basis we might recognize bad content meant to feed off of our base emotional instincts versus content meant for accuracy and to inform. However collectively it appears there's more of us that rather get sucked into the rage content than try for objective or accurate reporting. This mirrors the transition of television News from not needed to be profitable to needing to be profitable. Look at the success of cable news.
  - spacemadness 4y ago
    Our ids tend to run wild on the internet, so it’s not surprising. It is extremely disappointing that there is always someone willing to take advantage, but that is the story of humanity I suppose. My hope is somehow we are capable of creating something better than this.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    > More a comment on us as a species than anything else. I think this is less of a comment about us as a species and more a comment about the economic systems that we have in place. Our economic systems used to support journalism.

amanaplanacanal 4y ago

Journalism is expensive. Has anybody really figured out sustainable funding for it?

seanhunter 4y ago
It's hard. The guardian newspaper in the UK is funded by a trust that was endowed by one rich dude https://www.theguardian.com/about https://www.theguardian.com/about
- throwaway049 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - Stevvo 4y ago
    There's more than four people on the internet, you know?
    - throwaway049 4y ago
      Sure, but Chiles has friends in high places!
  - Mizza 4y ago
    Adrian Chiles is a midwit savant and I cherish him.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  [flagged]
SllX 4y ago
Yes, the same as before: subscriptions and ads. There’s just less direct competition within the industry for those still standing and a lot more competition from outside of the industry for the time and money that would have gone to journalism.
4y ago

bananapub 4y ago

that is a big shame, it was a good and serious news organisation for years. I was going to link to some of their good stories, but hilariously they have their own listicle of some: "17 Explosive BuzzFeed News Investigations That Made Waves In 2019" [0] [0]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/heidiblake/17-explosive-buzzfeed-news-investigations-from-2019 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/heidiblake/17-explosive...

tootie 4y ago
The business was based around Ben Smith and it was downhill when he left. His new jam is Semafor which is also really good.
gjsman-1000 4y ago
[flagged]
- n4r9 4y ago
  The linked articles appear to refer to "BuzzFeed" rather than "BuzzFeed News". I wonder if you caught the topmost post which points out they're different? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35641611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35641611
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    If you read the actual sources used in the comment, they are referring to BuzzFeed News, not BuzzFeed the tabloid. The FAIR specifically calls this out and says the large majority of articles assessed were from the News division. The Steele Dossier incident denounced by WaPo, FAIR, and other Pulitzer-prize-winning left-wing journalists, was also the News division. Ryan Broderick was a News division scandal. None of the sources in the comment address the tabloid side.

spraveenitpro 4y ago

[dead]

sdfghswe 4y ago

[flagged]

alexander-wilms 4y ago

[flagged]

Eumenes 4y ago

[flagged]

guender 4y ago

[dead]

AlbertCory 4y ago

[flagged]

pcurve 4y ago

Had no idea they went public. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BZFD:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BZFD:NASDAQ The finance trend is going south. :-/

SilverBirch 4y ago
Some background - they didn't IPO. They deSPAC'd, the idea being to raise a load of cash and then go on an acquisition spree, get scale, and therefore get leverage with ad buyers. So they did this thinking they'd raise $300m. But due to the weird way SPACs work, 94% of the investors walked away rather than close the deal, so rather than raise 300, they raised 16mil. So suddenly they're a public company, they've raised basically no money, they've got no scale - which was their entire plan. They've just been bleeding to death since then, and Buzzfeed News is something the CEO loves, but loses money hand over fist and he's finally had to let his baby die.
- pcurve 4y ago
  ah.. thanks for the detailed explanation. That's unfortunate. :-/
- majani 4y ago
  Jesus Christ, and this was at the height of the covid bubble. Faith in content sites is currently at rock bottom
drak0n1c 4y ago
They also had a big unionization effort in 2019 and new contract negotiations in 2021. An honest effort, but it led to financially limiting conditions for a company that was increasingly lacking revenue. https://fortune.com/2019/02/13/buzzfeed-union-layoffs/ https://fortune.com/2019/02/13/buzzfeed-union-layoffs/ https://www.nyguild.org/front-page-details/buzzfeed-news-union-ratifies-monumental-first-contract https://www.nyguild.org/front-page-details/buzzfeed-news-uni...

clarle 4y ago

> Furthermore, Peretti told the remaining staff that he would be focusing more of the company’s energy going forward on AI. “We will empower our editorial teams at all of our brands to do the very best creative work and build an interface where that work can be repacked and brought to advertisers more effectively,” he said. “And we will bring more innovation to clients in the form of creators, AI, and cultural moments than can only happen across BuzzFeed, Complex, HuffPost, Tasty and First We Feast.” What the heck does that mean? It sounds like someone is talking about AI as purely a buzzword without really understanding what it is.

jackvezkovic 4y ago
actually, I think the guy knows exactly what it means: automate stuff with AI and replace jobs
seanalltogether 4y ago
Or worse, they've found they can point an AI bot at other news organizations articles and plagiarize them without any effort.
notatoad 4y ago
It's a slightly friendlier way of telling your staff "chatGPT is going to replace most of your jobs"
hackernewds 4y ago
you need only see BuzzFeed's stock skyrocket 150% in 1 day to understand when the CEO mentioned they would leverage ChatGPT, and now you see why the CEO is playing the AMC playbook now. next comes the insiders liquidating their holdings, while the leaders rambles on with BUZZwords first it was EVs, now it's AI
- classified 4y ago
  Are economists still claiming the market is rational? This is proof to the contrary.
- 4y ago

imwillofficial 4y ago

[flagged]

aww_dang 4y ago

One reader's truths are the next reader's debunked misinformation. The next reader's sacred news outlet is a propaganda outlet for someone else. I know people like their favorite news outlets. They'll swear by the legitimacy of the reportage. Others dispute the same. Why bother disputing it here? Everyone has an opinion. Many will share their thoughts for free online. The value add of journalism isn't there anymore. I can click through to vapid takes all day. Few readers have the attention span to consume more than a paragraph at most. Pulitzer was a tabloid publisher, political activist and later politician. Who really cares about these awards? It isn't a sports league play-off or a golden cup. It is an appeal to authority. Muckraking has never been cheaper to achieve or consume. Inflammatory content has always grabbed eyeballs. Now those eyeballs have even more inflammatory, muckraking, outrage inducing content pursuing them. If trends continue, soap-boxers will need to pay their audience. Meanwhile traditional journalists are locking themselves behind paywalls, auto-play videos, and 20mb page weights. If you've read this far, please invoice me for 2 cents.

dangerboysteve 4y ago

And BuzzFeed will be delisted from the Nasdaq within months at this pace.

rchaud 4y ago

The bubble era of digital news startups is well and truly over. There was never going to be a happy ending for an industry entirely reliant on the whims of social media algorithms to drive traffic, and ad impressions to monetize said traffic. This applies to serious news sites, like BN that don't have the cachet of the Washington Post...which itself couldn't operate independently and was acquired by Bezos. Organic reach for brands on social is dead, it's pay to play (promote posts, that is). Google giveth once but now they'll just gently nudge your towards spending more on ads.

kaliszad 4y ago

Oh no, my joke registration of busfeetnews.com was totally in vain. :-(

robswc 4y ago

This is a genuine question and its going to sound silly and offensive but how much "news" do we actually need? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ - Help, The World Is On Fire And I Feel Like My Life Is Over At 24 - Multiple Women Are Reportedly Cooperating With The Criminal Investigation Into Jonathan Majors, And His Attorney Again Said He’s Innocent - Two Former New Mexico State Basketball Players Accused Their Teammates Of Sexual Assault And Blamed The University For Doing Nothing To Stop It In A New Lawsuit - A 34-Year-Old Man Who’d Recently Been Released From Prison Is Accused Of Killing His Parents, Two Of Their Friends, And Injuring Three Others In A Shooting Rampage These are "featured" articles right now. I know interest is subjective but it just seems like none of that really matters for your day to day life. I stopped watching national news around 7 years ago and I have felt _immensely_ better since doing so and I don't at all feel like I've missed out on a thing. My life has seemed to slow down (in a good way). The only news I pay any attention to is HN and my local news but even that is really only a few minutes a day. Who is the target demographic for this news? All those stories could have been randomly generated and it wouldn't make a difference for the majority of visitors to that site. I have a slight bias against journalism because I've personally been effected by a twisting of truth and being in finance (I run a trading firm) just the way investing/stocks are presented blows my mind (in a bad way)... that said, I'm never one to rejoice at people losing their jobs. I just really am curious as to why and what Buzzfeed news hoped to accomplish.

jakelazaroff 4y ago
> I have a slight bias against journalism because I've personally been effected by a twisting of truth and being in finance (I run a trading firm) just the way investing/stocks are presented blows my mind (in a bad way) This is kind of like saying "I have a slight bias against maps because one sent me in the wrong direction." People need a way to know what's going on in the world.
- Clubber 4y ago
  I stopped watching news for the most part as well. If anything is important enough for me to know, someone will tell me, guaranteed. Most of it is not even news, it's fear peddling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny If you must watch the news, limit yourself to the old fashioned 30 minute nightly news shows on the major channels. Everything else is bad for you.

Apocryphon 4y ago

Wonder if they used the Vaulter playbook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnYVH_Rrp00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnYVH_Rrp00

majani 4y ago

As an insider in the industry I can tell you the digital news era is well and truly over. We are in the influencer age now. And this has all been part of a purposefully executed plan by the big web platforms to keep people on their sites and apps rather than have them leave and go to external domains. Any online publication that wants to survive will have to run with a skeleton team full of workaholics. And that will be just to break even and get by.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tootie 4y ago
It's not over entirely but that fight for clicks and eyeballs thankfully is. We're back to the subscription model and it's going to take time to get consumers full back to where we were 30 years ago. Companies like NY Times and Axios have been thriving. Very interesting listen from How I Built This interviewing Jim Vandehei who built both Axios and Politico. https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-politico-amp-axios-jim-vandehei/ https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-pol...

Z7YCx5ieof4Std 4y ago

- Furthermore, Peretti told the remaining staff that he would be focusing more of the company’s energy going forward on AI - Here we go. AI generated content. At this moment it's not there yet. Going forward on AI is as dumb as removing (nude)images on imgur.

ALittleLight 4y ago
It's not like their company can get any deader. Buzzfeed, if you're reading this thread I'll put together a system that scrapes Reddit, Twitter, and stock market data. The system will detect unusual price moves up or down, grab whatever people are saying about the company on social media today, and then hit a GPT-4 endpoint to synthesize it into a story.

ouraf 4y ago

The company will proabaly scrap the brand and rebuild it around the Huffington Post. not just "select roles", like change the facade and keep the guts. They bought it in 2020 and the HuffPo brand itself is way less maligned than buzzfeed. It's also a chance of re-hiring the best staff for cheaper wages.

cynicalsecurity 4y ago

Good.

moi2388 4y ago

Good. Let’s hope the rest of buzzfeed follows immediately.

ogou 4y ago

Folks might not understand the context of this milestone. I worked as a web developer at newspapers from 2006-2014. As the industry collapsed and publications scrambled to make use of the new social web, everybody was trying to figure out what to do. Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Vice, and the NYT web team were closely watched as the future of the industry. David Carr was a thought leader back then and wrote a lot about Buzzfeed, especially on Twitter. The very idea of clickbait aggregation that polluted the journalism sites you see now came from that era. Buzzfeed in particular perfected the recipe of blending garbage posts with actual news to increase pageviews and fund the journalism. I think the reason the story is getting so much attention is that Buzzfeed was really arrogant about it all. They had regular features pointing out how great they were and how the rest of journalism was doomed. Same with Vice. Mainstream outlets are probably enjoying a little schadenfreude right now.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]