11 ms·

BuzzFeed Says Posts Were Deleted Because of Advertising Pressure

101 points by tomkwok 12y ago

lifeisstillgood 12y ago
This is one area, as a Brit, that I see government as vital in the provision of independant journalism. Which is pretty much a tautology but it can work - cf BBC. Have a specialised tax, ring fenced solely for journalism, and let it fund a small number of statutory independant organisations. It's probably my most socialist leaning.
- peteretep 12y ago
  The govt doesn't (just) give you independent news via the Beeb - all TV news is required to be editorially neutral. Sky News is (amazingly) a pretty good news source
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    Sorry - the U.S. Does not?!
    - peteretep 12y ago
      Require non-neutrality in broadcast news? On the assumption that that's a sincere question, no, no it doesn't. Fox News and MSNBC being particularly egregious examples of "news" that push right and left wing views respectively.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  If you think the BBC is not influenced by its funding source, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
RickHull 12y ago
So Ben Smith lied, right? I'm surprised the Times piece doesn't highlight that fact. > An internal review by BuzzFeed last week found three instances when editors deleted posts after advertisers or employees from the company’s business side complained about their content > Mr. Smith later reinstated the two posts, saying he had overreacted when asking editors to delete them. He told staff members in a note that the posts had been erased after he took issue with their opinionated tone and not because of complaints from advertisers.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- pbreit 12y ago
  No. The three posts referenced in this article were not the 2 posts Smith referenced.
vonklaus 12y ago
Well, if people would fucking pay for content, these conflicts wouldn't happen. However, people have largely decided not to pay for content. I personally don't pay for content very often, I also don't expect unbiased journalism from buzzfeed.
- Ollinson 12y ago
  I do pay for content. I pay for The New York Times, The Economist, American Scientist, Lapham's Quarterly, Nautilus and The New York Review of Books. I encourage Buzzfeed to put up a paywall. They will find out quickly how little people value their low quality content.
  - peteretep 12y ago
    I pay for NYT and The Spectator, used to pay for The Economist. Pretty sure the speccie was the only one that didn't continue to blast me with ads anyway
  - patrickaljord 12y ago
    > I encourage Buzzfeed to put up a paywall. They will find out quickly how little people value their low quality content Has it occured to you that people reading Buzzfeed probably don't have the money to subscribe to any media in general and are probably more interested in Buzzfeed than the NYT or The Economist? Some people enjoy Buzzfeed and the fact that it's free, nothing wrong with that.
- pbreit 12y ago
  Paying for content is pretty much idiotic. You want your content to spread, it costs zero to spread, and so hanging some ads around it is by far the most effective way to monetize.
  - Ollinson 12y ago
    Relying on ad revenue is exactly how buzzfeed got into this mess.
manigandham 12y ago
This is nothing new and happens all the time, they were just caught so it became a big story. Advertiser pressure vs editorial freedom has existed since the beginning of press when the first publisher sold ads. The content marketing/native format of BuzzFeed makes it a little more susceptible to this but I am surprised a publisher with revenues over 100M were so worried about a few critical posts. Then again this is BuzzFeed which, while it's trying to move upmarket with some really amazing news pieces, is still massively in the mainstream world of producing viral social content lacking in substance and doesn't have the reputation of higher end publications yet. Combine that with the highly political and sensitive world of digital advertising where young media buyers who control millions of ad spend and the lack of other solid revenue opportunities for publishers and this conflict will only increase in the coming years.
theVirginian 12y ago
Its not like I ever looked at BuzzFeed as a trusted news source. Honestly I am surprised that they aren't paid directly for every one of their articles.
- DanBC 12y ago
  Buzzfeed is experimenting with better journalism. I agree that I usually pass Buzzfeed because of their reputation, but there have been a couple of good articles recently.
- peteretep 12y ago
  «When the conversation turns to a vivid story from Liberia, where Ebola has overtaken a particular neighborhood in Monrovia, one editor proudly reports that she believes the [New York] Times is the only outlet with a reporter on the ground, which makes everyone happy until another editor says, "I think BuzzFeed actually has somebody there." There is momentary silence.» http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a14030/how-the-new-york-times-works/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a14030/how-the-ne...
  - pki 12y ago
    To be fair, that reads like "did you know twitter has journalists there too" -- it's not really a apples to apples comparison
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  If they were paid directly for all (or even some) of their articles, it would be important for readers to know that, right? Buzzfeed is trying to present itself as a legitimate journalistic endeavor, lately. That is indeed the only thing that can make this a scandal of any sort. If they are not living up to how they present themselves, then, like any other journalistic outlet, they should be exposed. For better or for worse (and I suspect we agree it's probably worse), a lot of people are getting their 'news' from buzzfeed and similar outlets these days. The audience should be educated as to what they are getting.
  - 12y ago
dewitt 12y ago
I read this expecting something super shady, but to be totally fair to BuzzFeed, the incidents cited (all three of them) were surprisingly benign. According to the NYT, one of the articles was taken down because it accused Axe (the body spray people), who happened to also be an advertiser, of "advocating worldwide mass rape", which the editor-in-chief decided was beyond even BuzzFeed's questionable writing standards. Another article, about Internet Explorer, was written by a editor who had recently worked on an ad campaign for Microsoft while on another job. BuzzFeed took the IE article down (again, according to the NYC) to avoid the appearance of conflict, and instituted a policy against such rotating-door behavior going forward. And finally the last case involved removing an editorial piece that criticized a Pepsi advertisement created by BuzzFeed itself. If those were really the only three cases of content being changed because of the relationship with advertising, I'm not sure even I think there's a major issue here. At least at this time. While reputable papers like the NYT or WSJ of course have firm policies in place to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest, I don't think anyone is putting BuzzFeed anywhere near their level yet. To be honest, when I heard the rumors last week that "BuzzFeed was manipulating content due to pressure from advertisers", I admit I just assumed the worst of them, too. But this might be a case of me (and probably a lot of people) expecting poor behavior from a company simply because we're not fans of their product. Maybe that's actually the biggest lesson from this? (Or maaaybe... the NYT is in on it too, and this is all part of an elaborate cover up by Big Advertising.)
- seanp2k2 12y ago
  Interesting re: policies; didn't know about that. It seems like such a policy, if actually followed, would help with things like this. Further, this type of thing makes me sad that ads are the biggest winning revenue model for web companies, and as more people turn to the web as their primary news source, it becomes harder to differentiate between "eyeballs-for-sale" and "somewhat unbiased" news. TL;DR follow the money
- notahacker 12y ago
  Yeah, this seems like a non-story compared with, for example, advertiser interference allegations at the Daily Telegraph, a 160-year old British broadsheet with a reputation for investigative journalism. The Telegraph saw its politics editor resign after claiming that the newspaper had suppressed stories other reporting investigations into money laundering against HSBC, a major advertiser, run the Chinese government's version of the repression of Hong Kong protests to similarly protect its relationship with HSBC and carried paid Russian and Chinese government propaganda supplements (although the newspaper proper did take an anti-Russian editorial stance). When the Guardian gleefully reported the troubles at their right wing rival, the Telegraph responded with an anonymous front page story insinuating the Guardian's advertising sales management were responsible for suicides on their team. A content mill deleting some questionable opinion pieces that wouldn't have passed editorial review at other media companies doesn't seem to fall into the same level of scandal...
aikah 12y ago
So other journalists and newspapers are now holding BuzzFeed to the same high standards as theirs ? Do they really consider BuzzFeed "news" ? If it is the case, then their own standards are dramatically low. Next in the nytimes, "outrage as TMZ deletes posts" ? That article says more about the state of "legit online news" than it says about the state of BuzzFeed. Nytimes shouldn't even talk about BuzzFeed, it makes them look stupid and click baity.
kmfrk 12y ago
I think semantics are important here, especially in a technical context. There are several way to "unpublish" an article: - Retract it - Delete it - Completely erase it from the web What BuzzFeed did in at least two cases was delete the articles and include them in their robots.txt, which, at least to me, is completely bonkers. It is one thing for a publication to retract an article, but it is an entirely different thing to make an effort of making it seem as if they never existed to begin with. It's that kind of mentality that leads you to think that even BuzzFeed don't think highly of their own articles, where you can always make it up in volume.
- jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
  Putting the article URL in robots.txt stops the Wayback machine from displaying it - that's why they do it, just in case the Internet Archive happened to have a cached copy of the article.
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    And that's an attempt to re-write history or at least remove something from it.
mbrutsch 12y ago
I know another website that does this...
jrochkind1 12y ago
> In the memo, Mr. Smith wrote that he had not considered that a BuzzFeed writer would write a post critical of advertising content being created by other BuzzFeed employees. They won't need to delete such posts again, they are making it clear to their writers that they should not write them in the first place.

101 points by tomkwok 12y ago

This is one area, as a Brit, that I see government as vital in the provision of independant journalism. Which is pretty much a tautology but it can work - cf BBC. Have a specialised tax, ring fenced solely for journalism, and let it fund a small number of statutory independant organisations. It's probably my most socialist leaning.

peteretep 12y ago
The govt doesn't (just) give you independent news via the Beeb - all TV news is required to be editorially neutral. Sky News is (amazingly) a pretty good news source
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  Sorry - the U.S. Does not?!
  - peteretep 12y ago
    Require non-neutrality in broadcast news? On the assumption that that's a sincere question, no, no it doesn't. Fox News and MSNBC being particularly egregious examples of "news" that push right and left wing views respectively.
cbd1984 12y ago
If you think the BBC is not influenced by its funding source, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

RickHull 12y ago

So Ben Smith lied, right? I'm surprised the Times piece doesn't highlight that fact. > An internal review by BuzzFeed last week found three instances when editors deleted posts after advertisers or employees from the company’s business side complained about their content > Mr. Smith later reinstated the two posts, saying he had overreacted when asking editors to delete them. He told staff members in a note that the posts had been erased after he took issue with their opinionated tone and not because of complaints from advertisers.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pbreit 12y ago
No. The three posts referenced in this article were not the 2 posts Smith referenced.

vonklaus 12y ago

Well, if people would fucking pay for content, these conflicts wouldn't happen. However, people have largely decided not to pay for content. I personally don't pay for content very often, I also don't expect unbiased journalism from buzzfeed.

Ollinson 12y ago
I do pay for content. I pay for The New York Times, The Economist, American Scientist, Lapham's Quarterly, Nautilus and The New York Review of Books. I encourage Buzzfeed to put up a paywall. They will find out quickly how little people value their low quality content.
- peteretep 12y ago
  I pay for NYT and The Spectator, used to pay for The Economist. Pretty sure the speccie was the only one that didn't continue to blast me with ads anyway
- patrickaljord 12y ago
  > I encourage Buzzfeed to put up a paywall. They will find out quickly how little people value their low quality content Has it occured to you that people reading Buzzfeed probably don't have the money to subscribe to any media in general and are probably more interested in Buzzfeed than the NYT or The Economist? Some people enjoy Buzzfeed and the fact that it's free, nothing wrong with that.
pbreit 12y ago
Paying for content is pretty much idiotic. You want your content to spread, it costs zero to spread, and so hanging some ads around it is by far the most effective way to monetize.
- Ollinson 12y ago
  Relying on ad revenue is exactly how buzzfeed got into this mess.

manigandham 12y ago

This is nothing new and happens all the time, they were just caught so it became a big story. Advertiser pressure vs editorial freedom has existed since the beginning of press when the first publisher sold ads. The content marketing/native format of BuzzFeed makes it a little more susceptible to this but I am surprised a publisher with revenues over 100M were so worried about a few critical posts. Then again this is BuzzFeed which, while it's trying to move upmarket with some really amazing news pieces, is still massively in the mainstream world of producing viral social content lacking in substance and doesn't have the reputation of higher end publications yet. Combine that with the highly political and sensitive world of digital advertising where young media buyers who control millions of ad spend and the lack of other solid revenue opportunities for publishers and this conflict will only increase in the coming years.

theVirginian 12y ago

Its not like I ever looked at BuzzFeed as a trusted news source. Honestly I am surprised that they aren't paid directly for every one of their articles.

DanBC 12y ago
Buzzfeed is experimenting with better journalism. I agree that I usually pass Buzzfeed because of their reputation, but there have been a couple of good articles recently.
peteretep 12y ago
«When the conversation turns to a vivid story from Liberia, where Ebola has overtaken a particular neighborhood in Monrovia, one editor proudly reports that she believes the [New York] Times is the only outlet with a reporter on the ground, which makes everyone happy until another editor says, "I think BuzzFeed actually has somebody there." There is momentary silence.» http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a14030/how-the-new-york-times-works/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a14030/how-the-ne...
- pki 12y ago
  To be fair, that reads like "did you know twitter has journalists there too" -- it's not really a apples to apples comparison
jrochkind1 12y ago
If they were paid directly for all (or even some) of their articles, it would be important for readers to know that, right? Buzzfeed is trying to present itself as a legitimate journalistic endeavor, lately. That is indeed the only thing that can make this a scandal of any sort. If they are not living up to how they present themselves, then, like any other journalistic outlet, they should be exposed. For better or for worse (and I suspect we agree it's probably worse), a lot of people are getting their 'news' from buzzfeed and similar outlets these days. The audience should be educated as to what they are getting.
- 12y ago

dewitt 12y ago

I read this expecting something super shady, but to be totally fair to BuzzFeed, the incidents cited (all three of them) were surprisingly benign. According to the NYT, one of the articles was taken down because it accused Axe (the body spray people), who happened to also be an advertiser, of "advocating worldwide mass rape", which the editor-in-chief decided was beyond even BuzzFeed's questionable writing standards. Another article, about Internet Explorer, was written by a editor who had recently worked on an ad campaign for Microsoft while on another job. BuzzFeed took the IE article down (again, according to the NYC) to avoid the appearance of conflict, and instituted a policy against such rotating-door behavior going forward. And finally the last case involved removing an editorial piece that criticized a Pepsi advertisement created by BuzzFeed itself. If those were really the only three cases of content being changed because of the relationship with advertising, I'm not sure even I think there's a major issue here. At least at this time. While reputable papers like the NYT or WSJ of course have firm policies in place to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest, I don't think anyone is putting BuzzFeed anywhere near their level yet. To be honest, when I heard the rumors last week that "BuzzFeed was manipulating content due to pressure from advertisers", I admit I just assumed the worst of them, too. But this might be a case of me (and probably a lot of people) expecting poor behavior from a company simply because we're not fans of their product. Maybe that's actually the biggest lesson from this? (Or maaaybe... the NYT is in on it too, and this is all part of an elaborate cover up by Big Advertising.)

seanp2k2 12y ago
Interesting re: policies; didn't know about that. It seems like such a policy, if actually followed, would help with things like this. Further, this type of thing makes me sad that ads are the biggest winning revenue model for web companies, and as more people turn to the web as their primary news source, it becomes harder to differentiate between "eyeballs-for-sale" and "somewhat unbiased" news. TL;DR follow the money
notahacker 12y ago
Yeah, this seems like a non-story compared with, for example, advertiser interference allegations at the Daily Telegraph, a 160-year old British broadsheet with a reputation for investigative journalism. The Telegraph saw its politics editor resign after claiming that the newspaper had suppressed stories other reporting investigations into money laundering against HSBC, a major advertiser, run the Chinese government's version of the repression of Hong Kong protests to similarly protect its relationship with HSBC and carried paid Russian and Chinese government propaganda supplements (although the newspaper proper did take an anti-Russian editorial stance). When the Guardian gleefully reported the troubles at their right wing rival, the Telegraph responded with an anonymous front page story insinuating the Guardian's advertising sales management were responsible for suicides on their team. A content mill deleting some questionable opinion pieces that wouldn't have passed editorial review at other media companies doesn't seem to fall into the same level of scandal...

aikah 12y ago

So other journalists and newspapers are now holding BuzzFeed to the same high standards as theirs ? Do they really consider BuzzFeed "news" ? If it is the case, then their own standards are dramatically low. Next in the nytimes, "outrage as TMZ deletes posts" ? That article says more about the state of "legit online news" than it says about the state of BuzzFeed. Nytimes shouldn't even talk about BuzzFeed, it makes them look stupid and click baity.

kmfrk 12y ago

I think semantics are important here, especially in a technical context. There are several way to "unpublish" an article: - Retract it - Delete it - Completely erase it from the web What BuzzFeed did in at least two cases was delete the articles and include them in their robots.txt, which, at least to me, is completely bonkers. It is one thing for a publication to retract an article, but it is an entirely different thing to make an effort of making it seem as if they never existed to begin with. It's that kind of mentality that leads you to think that even BuzzFeed don't think highly of their own articles, where you can always make it up in volume.

jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
Putting the article URL in robots.txt stops the Wayback machine from displaying it - that's why they do it, just in case the Internet Archive happened to have a cached copy of the article.
- aw3c2 12y ago
  And that's an attempt to re-write history or at least remove something from it.

mbrutsch 12y ago

I know another website that does this...

jrochkind1 12y ago

> In the memo, Mr. Smith wrote that he had not considered that a BuzzFeed writer would write a post critical of advertising content being created by other BuzzFeed employees. They won't need to delete such posts again, they are making it clear to their writers that they should not write them in the first place.