4 ms·

"BuzzFeed itself — a financial play as much as Uber is — has key investors who are investors in Uber's main competitor, Lyft. Those investors are, too, investor

by wakemc 12y ago

"BuzzFeed itself — a financial play as much as Uber is — has key investors who are investors in Uber's main competitor, Lyft. Those investors are, too, investors in PandoDaily. Does this have any bearing at all on the cost of tea in China? I don't know. But I know that little in this world is what it seems." That's directly from the end of the linked article in Applecore's post. I haven't been following this "scandal" particularly closely, but from what I have read, I haven't seen many people talking about this. If the identity of the author of the OP article causes you to take said article with a grain of salt, does a financial connection between Lyft and BuzzFeed produce another, similarly sized grain of salt?

lotsofmangos 12y ago
About as big as the one created by the relationship between Uber and Buzzfeed via Chris Dixon, perhaps slightly bigger, but they sort of balance. edited to add - those two are much smaller grains though. As far as I am aware, the journalist has investments in neither and investors tend to have their fingers in lots of pies.
- wakemc 12y ago
  Good point. There's a lot of money going a lot of different ways in this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/11/20/uber-investor-connections-lyft-pandodaily-buzzfeed/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/11/20/uber-investor... I suppose I'm somewhat inclined to discount BuzzFeed's reporting. It's probably not fair of me, but my opinion of them has definitely been dragged down by the general "clickbait-y" property of the site as a whole.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    I've never been able to take them seriously as they are called "BuzzFeed", but I take stories as I find them and this one is at least actual reporting of an event, sensationalized or not, rather than just the usual inane supposition glued to random crap scraped from the far flung corners of the web.
- mikehearn 12y ago
  The bigger conflict of interest, and seemingly the lesser reported connection, is between Buzzfeed and Sidecar. Buzzfeed's Executive Chairman Ken Lehrer (listed second on their team page[1] after CEO Jonah Peretti) was a seed investor in Sidecar[2][3]. He would unequivocally benefit from Uber's downfall. And he seems pretty outraged by this story – he's only tweeted 113 times since 2012, but the last 13 of them have been on this issue.[4] I have no idea how Buzzfeed works internally, so I don't know if their Exec. Chairman's connections could influence their reporting, but I feel like it's a significant enough conflict that it should have been disclosed. [1]: http://www.buzzfeed.com/about/team http://www.buzzfeed.com/about/team [2]: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/side-cr http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/side-cr [3]: http://lererhippeau.com/companies/ http://lererhippeau.com/companies/ [4]: https://twitter.com/kenlerer https://twitter.com/kenlerer
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    It seems evident that Emil did suggest setting up a rather Orwellian coalition for responsible journalism that would be nothing of the sort. Even the nicer account details that rather well, amusingly blind to the fact that her version still sounds shady as hell. Now given that this was said to a reporter at dinner, the fact it came to be published represents normality and you do not really need to go digging through the investor list of the news organization involved to see why it got published. If buzzfeed hadn't carried it, someone else would. edit - remember, this is the half-heard sympathetic version: "The last comment that I heard was when Emil hypothesized about creating a coalition for responsible journalism. Ben said that would likely fail because companies have no expertise in journalism. Emil flippantly said he could hire professional journalists for $1 million to get the expertise to make sure that they could respond when negative articles come out." "I heard a mention of a Sarah Lacy and overheard Emil say that he felt terrible that by writing an article, Sarah had actually suggested that people choose less safe alternatives based on a charge of sexism that was really a personal attack on the CEO with no basis in fact. Emil then said that Sarah wouldn't like it if someone wrote false things about her or published an article that was factually wrong because we all have done things in our private lives we are not proud of." Even this version still sounds much like a plan for a well funded astro-turf operation with an implicit threat to go after journalists, specifically Sarah Lacy, no matter how flippantly, casually or politely it was said.

by wakemc 12y ago

lotsofmangos 12y ago

About as big as the one created by the relationship between Uber and Buzzfeed via Chris Dixon, perhaps slightly bigger, but they sort of balance. edited to add - those two are much smaller grains though. As far as I am aware, the journalist has investments in neither and investors tend to have their fingers in lots of pies.

wakemc 12y ago
Good point. There's a lot of money going a lot of different ways in this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/11/20/uber-investor-connections-lyft-pandodaily-buzzfeed/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/11/20/uber-investor... I suppose I'm somewhat inclined to discount BuzzFeed's reporting. It's probably not fair of me, but my opinion of them has definitely been dragged down by the general "clickbait-y" property of the site as a whole.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  I've never been able to take them seriously as they are called "BuzzFeed", but I take stories as I find them and this one is at least actual reporting of an event, sensationalized or not, rather than just the usual inane supposition glued to random crap scraped from the far flung corners of the web.
mikehearn 12y ago
The bigger conflict of interest, and seemingly the lesser reported connection, is between Buzzfeed and Sidecar. Buzzfeed's Executive Chairman Ken Lehrer (listed second on their team page[1] after CEO Jonah Peretti) was a seed investor in Sidecar[2][3]. He would unequivocally benefit from Uber's downfall. And he seems pretty outraged by this story – he's only tweeted 113 times since 2012, but the last 13 of them have been on this issue.[4] I have no idea how Buzzfeed works internally, so I don't know if their Exec. Chairman's connections could influence their reporting, but I feel like it's a significant enough conflict that it should have been disclosed. [1]: http://www.buzzfeed.com/about/team http://www.buzzfeed.com/about/team [2]: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/side-cr http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/side-cr [3]: http://lererhippeau.com/companies/ http://lererhippeau.com/companies/ [4]: https://twitter.com/kenlerer https://twitter.com/kenlerer
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  It seems evident that Emil did suggest setting up a rather Orwellian coalition for responsible journalism that would be nothing of the sort. Even the nicer account details that rather well, amusingly blind to the fact that her version still sounds shady as hell. Now given that this was said to a reporter at dinner, the fact it came to be published represents normality and you do not really need to go digging through the investor list of the news organization involved to see why it got published. If buzzfeed hadn't carried it, someone else would. edit - remember, this is the half-heard sympathetic version: "The last comment that I heard was when Emil hypothesized about creating a coalition for responsible journalism. Ben said that would likely fail because companies have no expertise in journalism. Emil flippantly said he could hire professional journalists for $1 million to get the expertise to make sure that they could respond when negative articles come out." "I heard a mention of a Sarah Lacy and overheard Emil say that he felt terrible that by writing an article, Sarah had actually suggested that people choose less safe alternatives based on a charge of sexism that was really a personal attack on the CEO with no basis in fact. Emil then said that Sarah wouldn't like it if someone wrote false things about her or published an article that was factually wrong because we all have done things in our private lives we are not proud of." Even this version still sounds much like a plan for a well funded astro-turf operation with an implicit threat to go after journalists, specifically Sarah Lacy, no matter how flippantly, casually or politely it was said.