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:
I really don't know why they kept the BuzzFeed branding. I intentionally _ignored_ anything that came from BuzzFeed News as likely tabloid-esque news because of the branding, and I honestly do not think that's the wrong perspective to take.
We have to filter out noise in some ways, and BuzzFeed has made no considerable effort to position themselves as a platform worth listening to.
I agree with you and take it one leg further: I didn't even know there was a difference between "BuzzFeed News" and the rest of Buzzfeed. As in, my first reaction to the article was "What else do they do?"
I thought Buzzfeed was online "tabloid journalism" like The National Inquirer.
No, hilariously Buzzfeed News was top tier investigative journalism, and at their best was as good as anything done by NYT or WaPo.
The business model seemed to be "what if we have truly great investigative journalism, funded by clickbait listicales that we, inexplicablly, use the same brand for".
It's easy to mock the branding decisions they made (and not entirely unfair) but it's still a loss to the internet to see them go.
Buzzfeed News _was_ tabloid journalism. They published demonstrably fake news, most notably the infamous Steele Dossier. Buzzfeed News claimed the document was "unverified," when in reality it was verifiably false. Every other major media outlet had access to this document and refused to publish it because its claims were unsubstantiated. But not Buzzfeed News -- skepticism of this outlet's seriousness was completely warranted.
It was a colossal blunder to keep the Buzzfeed branding. Every time I saw one of Buzzfeed News' excellent investigative journalism projects published or talked about online, the conversation about them vs. Buzzfeed was the dominant one.
I literally ignored all BuzzFeed content so completely that I have never seen that conversation happen ever before. I only clicked this because it was about it shutting down.
This is strangely the only website that I’ve had to completely turn off in all of my news feeds. Credit to the tech companies, because it worked. Haven’t seen a BuzzFeed listicle in almost a decade.
Seems like a huge leadership blunder. They didn't even know how their own audience would react to a serious news organisation being part of their existing brand. Some simple user research would have highlighted this before the venture even started.
I agree with you. I'm aware that they have very serious, legitimate, award winning news coverage, and I applaud them for that - but if Hustler Magazine released a Hustler Weekly News magazine, I would not fault people for shrugging it off. Listicle BuzzFeed did such a good job at lodging itself in our awareness it colored the brand in one shade.
Which is what makes it a stupid idea. Credibility is hard to get, easy to lose. It seems obvious that the poor reputation of Buzzfeed would bring the news part down rather than the news bringing the rest of the operation up.
Not trying to make this political, but BuzzFeed news was the first outlet to publish the Steele dossier, we know that didnt end well. Then the editor and Chief and the time left, for the NYT, wound up founding Semafor, took some money from SBF and failed to disclose it.
I believe what happened was they reported the SBF put 100+M in the twitter acquisition, Musk called them out on lying, and on not disclosing that SBF was an investor:
> BuzzFeed has made no considerable effort to position themselves as a platform worth listening to.
Well, they did win a Pulitzer. That sounds like it would position them as a platform worth listening to and also like something that took some considerable effort.
> It’s demise goes to show that humans do not want fact-finding journalism.
Isn't it a more accurate description to say that this goes to show that if you dilute your fact-finding journalism brand with clickbait nonsense, then people will ignore all of it?
I don't know how you came out of my comment with this response.
What I'm saying is there is already plenty of better (or just-as-good, or near-good) sources of journalism. I did not even know BuzzFeed News was separate from BuzzFeed, so why would I waste my time even looking into them when:
* There are already decent news outlets
* My only perception of BuzzFeed is that their quality is extremely sub-par, which is by their own doing.
In the competition for my attention, I'd rather lose out on a possible diamond in the rough that is BuzzFeed News, then subject myself to the far likelier possibility that BuzzFeed News was really just more "BuzzFeed".
In this edge case, that filter is wrong, but ask yourself - if Fox News came out with a new source that was of Pulitzer-worthy quality and was honestly unbiased, would you still give it the time of day? I still wouldn't, because the chances it adds something of value higher than my current level of journalism consumption is much lower then the chances that this magical "Fox News" offshoot is actually something decent.
“In the 1890s the fierce competition between his World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal caused both to develop the techniques of yellow journalism, which won over readers with sensationalism, sex, crime and graphic horrors. The wide appeal reached a million copies a day and opened the way to mass-circulation newspapers that depended on advertising revenue (rather than cover price or political party subsidies) and appealed to readers with multiple forms of news, gossip, entertainment and advertising.
Pulitzer's name is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes established in 1917 as a result of his endowment to Columbia University. The prizes are given annually to recognize and reward excellence in American journalism, photography, literature, history, poetry, music, and drama. Pulitzer founded the Columbia School of Journalism by his philanthropic bequest; it opened in 1912.”
Good stories take months (sometimes years), so you need hundreds of good journalists to make good stories in a high enough frequency that people would even consider paying for a subscription.
You're either chasing public grants (and people always question your impartiality), or you die. You can count on one hand the ones that have been in this game for longer than a decade and even then you'll have fingers to spare.
Today we lost a great one.
Disclaimer: I work for OCCRP.org which I would (subjectively) put in the same basket. No Pulitzer yet, but we got a Nobel Peace Prize nomination this year!
Let's not kid ourselves, for every decent journalist in these organizations there's five useless ones who are primarily employed to remind us non-physicists of Murray Gell-Man
To the extent that publications like The Atlantic have declined, I think it's because clickbait works, or at least it seems to if you're dependent on the online ads business model, so legacy publications have chosen to become more like Buzzfeed.
> It’s demise goes to show that humans do not want fact-finding journalism.
I don't think it shows that at all. What it shows is that if you take something good and slap a brand on it that people associate with crap, people will think your good thing is crap and avoid it, too.
I think the most “negative toward the general populace” take I can get behind here is that our heuristic for “respectable journalistic institutions” is based too much on name-brands. I mean people could have skimmed BuzzFeed News and realized they were not BuzzFeed lists or whatever, and that’s a point against us all, but it isn’t that surprising.
It doesn’t really indicate that we don’t want serious journalism, just that we’re not really willing to give every service the benefit of the doubt.
True, but Buzfeed News was at least trying to do journalism for a couple years. At some point I’d expect a really engaged public to update their expectations.
But "Buzzfeed" as a brand has always meant schlock, and their main effort never changed from that. Applying the "Buzzfeed" brand to the news signals that the news is also schlock. If you didn't like Buzzfeed's primary work, why would you even look once at Buzzfeed News?
> demise goes to show that humans do not want fact-finding journalism. Even highly paid humans like HN developers refuse to pay for journalism
Non sequitur. People didn’t realise Buzzfeed News was fact-finding journalism because Buzzfeed proper was everything but. Plenty of people on HN pay for news, as evidenced by the constant complaining about paywalls.
I'd be curious on data for this - if that's actually true, or just your perception.
Not wanting "BuzzFeed" to be someone's source of journalism is not the same thing as that person not wanting to consume high-quality journalism/news.
That said, I could understand the argument that if someone is generally well-read in this world, they would definitely know BuzzFeed News was, for the most part, a separate entity. I can only speak for myself - I'm fairly happy with my mix of Propublica, The Economist, USA Today, and NYT, but I've also not really analyzed that mix much since 2019, and I definitely don't read everything all the time (it's too much to consume).
Huh? I'm very familiar with ProPublica, but didn't know that Buzzfeed News was a legit journalistic organization. I just thought it was, you know, Buzzfeed's take on news.
ProPublica reporting is economically illiterate and has convinced everyone in NYC that landlords are somehow making money by buying apartments and not renting them out.
Curious what news organization you can think of that doesn't have a single miss. Bloomberg had "The Big Hack", the New York Post had the Hunter Biden emails, the New York Times basically invented a crime wave, etc.
Buzzfeed News never understood the medium. They couldn't support themselves. It turns out chasing social media and search clicks for free ad-supported journalism is not a great business model.
The freemium models of the New York Times and Washington Post are the ones that are cleaning up. You get a few free ad-supported articles a month to pique your interest, and if you are really into it, you need to pay a subscription. But Buzzfeed never had a brand people would pay for.
Buzzfeed, the non-news part, certainly knows how to produce cheap content, which makes it easier to ad support. They also do sponsored content.
But I'd hesitate to say that Buzzfeed understood the medium. They knew how to game traffic. They didn't know how to make money.
A lot of news outlets chased clicks. They thought they understood the medium. Making money and supporting yourself is the ultimate understanding the medium. Turns out The Gray Lady understands it the best.
> It turns out chasing social media and search clicks for free ad-supported journalism is not a great business model.
And it's an even worse business model if you rely on social media for your business model and one day Twitter (or any other platform eventually) decides that if you're going to make money sharecropping in their fields, you need to start turning over revenue to the landlord in the shape of checkmark payola for reach and gatekeeping fees for access to the API.
It's the classic platform enshittification end-game: Social media embraced companies like Buzzfeed for providing the content that they used to build critical mass, then turned around and viewed them as ATMs to be plundered. Same story as app developers in walled gardens.
Twitter never drove any traffic to news media. Facebook did, but Twitter was just where the journalists themselves hung out and sometimes collected stories.
I'm not sure that that should insulate them from criticism? In fact I think much of the criticism towards Buzzfeed is precisely around how good they were at the medium, and what they used that medium for/what that medium could be used for at all (to take the McLuhan angle). To put it more obnoxiously and splashily, Goebbels was also a master of his medium.
And it's a shame Buzzfeed news needed that substrate to survive on.
They are the ones who published and relentlessly pushed the now-debunked Steele Dossier, aka 'Pee Tape". They went out of their way to spread misinformation and create political divisions for clicks at every opportunity. RIP Buzfeed but you won't be missed.
The concept of debunking doesn't apply here, outside of the right-wing media bubble. The author estimated that 75% of the information was likely accurate. Is that what you think was debunked?
Why don't you ask Erik Wemple of the Washington Post? He's had a lot to say about the bogusness of the so-called dossier, and the media (including his own newspaper) that publicized it far and wide. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/media-steele-dossier...>
Do you know which organization you're referring to? I suggest you read the reporting from the major outlets at the time, it's purely factual information about the dossier.
"After BuzzFeed News and ICIJ published a joint investigation, officials across the globe began taking action to finally thwart illicit financial activity and the criminals who move money through Western banks." - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/fincen-files
> they won a Pulitzer in 2021 for International Reporting
The team that won it is also very interesting:
- Megha Rajagopalan, probably the only one that is a journalist by profession. She left for the NYT [1]
- Alison Killing, an architecture and urban planning investigator [2]
- Christo Buschek, a data and computation investigator [3]
It was such an interesting mix of disciplines and expertises, and is reflected in the award for reporting in international affairs::
For a series of clear and compelling stories that used satellite imagery and architectural expertise, as well as interviews with two dozen former prisoners, to identify a vast new infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims. [4]
Worth checking out, although it is from that era when web sites made your mouse wheel overheat from scrolling:
> Earlier this year, when BuzzFeed announced plans to start publishing AI-assisted content, its CEO Jonah Peretti promised the tech would be held to a high standard...
> This month, we noticed that with none of the fanfare of Peretti's multiple interviews about the quizzes, BuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated articles that are produced by non-editorial staff — and they sound a lot like the content mill model that Peretti had promised to avoid...
> The 40 or so articles, all of which appear to be SEO-driven travel guides, are comically bland and similar to one another. Check out these almost-copied lines:
> "Now, I know what you're thinking - 'Cape May? What is that, some kind of mayonnaise brand?'" in an article about Cape May, in New Jersey.
> "Now I know what you're thinking - 'but Caribbean destinations are all just crowded resorts, right?'" in an article about St Maarten, in the Caribbean.
> "Now, I know what you're thinking. Puerto Rico? Isn't that where all the cruise ships go?" in an article about San Juan, in Puerto Rico.
>The company-wide layoffs and elimination of the news operation come just months after BuzzFeed had laid off 12 percent of its staff in a cost-cutting measure. That penny-pinching move, which Peretti said was necessary due to an “ongoing audience shift to vertical video,”
Inside scoop is that Janine Gibson (who handled all the war crimes Assange uncovered as was editor of The GuardianUS) was supposed to be the editor of The Graun (Guardian) after Alan Rusbridger stepped down, but wasn't well liked. They gave the job to Kath Viner instead, Janine took her bat and (James) Ball with her and ran Buzzfeed News. All second hand of course.
Here’s an example of fake news with a touch of racism https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/popeyes-...
The family followed up and said this was nothing to do with a fried chicken sandwich. They did not correct the story (apart from to correct the location of the store which was also wrong).
Online communities should cultivate some discipline around those crowd-sourced background checks. Is the issue relevant to the project or topic? Where is the explanation and evidence? Can only people with a perfect record do anything now?
Maybe the intention is to make half of HN go search for "<name> and <accusation>" to try and get the accusation auto-complete in future searches for <name>?
They have an obsession with anal which is ... a lot. I get that they're pivoting, but the "anal and abortion" magazine probably shouldn't be targeting the underage.
Do any teens actually read it now? It seems like it's just another one of the online news media that have all changed to being exactly the same content written by highly neurotic people living in NYC.
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.
> 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.
"it's just human nature" can be a powerfully self-fulfilling prophecy
We ought to exercise what agency we have in shaping social systems, but not only this, we need to remind ourselves regularly that we do have agency in order to exercise it
Our economic systems used to be very bad at scaling. They also used to be very bad at incentivizing value-add economic activity. Which system do you want?
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.
To some extent, proper journalism, especially investigative journalism, was always a sort of loss-making luxury even for traditional media. You don’t want your ad beside the story breaking Watergate, because people might associate you with Watergate. You want it with the fluff; sports or gossip or soft local news or whatever depending on demographic.
The main change is that web media seems far more comfortable than traditional with being _just_ fluff, so the journalism is increasingly endangered.
What is the alternative? And I do mean an alternative that would incentivize and yield the same creative explosion we've seen with the web over the last 30 years.
The early to mid 90's through the very early 2000's were a /real/ creative explosion, before the vultures descended on the Internet and took it in a revenue-seeking direction. Most netizens had personal webpages, chock full of their passions and sharing information. Now it's a vast wasteland of constantly regenerated rage-inducing content and vapid self-promotion and attention seeking. Our search engines have become ad businesses. Our "social media" only exists to siphon off our information and build dossiers on us to more precisely target ads to us and get us to buy worthless crap. There's been an explosion all right, but one more akin to a burst sewer pipe.
I am an Old. Pre-ads, before the <img> tag made someone out there think banners (and then animated banners, and then Flash, and then flash ads at the side of dancing silhouettes that sent your CPU fans whirring), this was still Someone Else's Hardware. Typically a university.
Most of those old IRC networks ended in .edu, as a good example. We never really paid for what we got on the internet, it just switched from an "under the table" scam off of universities to ad-supported.
The internet then was an elite group of people that had 1. Disposable income for computers (or access at University) 2. Disposable income for Internet (or access at University) 3. The ability to put together the skills to create the things you listed. The more I reflect on the changes the more classist I realize this statement/argument is (not making a moral judgement just highlighting the reality).
As a fairly lower class rural kid I had internet in the late 90s. I was just lucky my dad decided to start up a local dialup ISP and sell internet to farmers.
If what we're seeing now is the logical outcome of this "creative explosion," I prefer no alternative. I would be willing to sacrifice quantity for quality at this point. Any sort of reversion of what it used to be, driven scholars, hobbyists, tech nerds, entrepreneurs, and so forth, would be welcome. Like back in the '00s. If you have something to say, by God say it, but generating or aggregating nonsense in order to farm clicks should die.
I don't think there's anything to be done about this, at least apart from letting this transparently monstrous era of the internet slowly tear itself apart.
It's unfortunate the internet went this way, but as you said, it happened because people "wanted" it to.
I challenge your axiom that there has been an ad-fueled creative explosion. Yes, there has been an explosion in volume and perhaps in drama, but creativity specifically? Above and beyond what already existed in free, OSS, or subscription based media? A return to other models might mean less profits, fewer ultra-wealthy founders and VCs, but I'm not at all convinced that it would lead to less creativity.
There were a huge amounts of niche sites written to answer questions on niche topics. All with the aim of being helpful enough to get google to send them traffic they could monetise with ads. Many of these sites were peoples hobbies which they could further explore or even dedicate themselves to based on the income from their website.
This wouldn't have happened without ads, no other alternative has ever been found that got the author of a website paid while not directly charging the reader.
The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web without, hell without ads there probably wouldn't even be a search engine to find anything on the web and without a search engine nobody would be able to find anything of any use.
> All with the aim of being helpful enough to get google to send them traffic
All? That's such a ridiculous generalization that it's practically a lie. If that's all you remember, then I suggest that your experience has been too short and/or limited. Before Google even existed there were tons of sites that were there for reasons other than ads. (I've been involved with the internet since before it became public BTW, plus Usenet and other things before that, so I have some perspective.) Even after Google became the ad behemoth it is today, plenty of sites flourished while having nothing to do with it. I had my own blog from 2000 until last year, moderately well known in some circles, but neither I nor most of the other bloggers I interacted with had anything to do with ads. There were forums without ads, e-commerce sites without ads (not counting their own), etc. The current situation, where everything seems to be a walled garden or infested with ads, is pretty recent ... and even now, there are plenty of sites that decline to play that game. Like the one we're having this conversation on.
Well I got online around 98ish so I've been around for a while and seen close to around 25 years worth of development, which I'd say is the majority of the webs lifespan.
And I re-iterate, whatever and however many sites there were knocking around on the early internet pale in comparison to the breadth of sites and information that came onto the web fueled by ads when people realised they could fund their hobbies and write about topics they loved at the same time.
It's really very simple, if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense and it will vastly outpace the output of the contingent who simply wish to write for the sake of it.
Ads supercharged the webs development and I see nothing that could've replaced them, I say that as someone who's never been involved in the ad industry.
> the breadth of sites and information that came onto the web fueled by ads
Confuse correlation with causation much? The internet has certainly grown, but not just because of ads. In some ways it has shrunk because of ads. Innumerable forums and blogs and even social-media sites like MySpace were shunted aside as VC- and ad-funded walled gardens like Facebook became dominant. That's a loss (and I say that as someone who worked at Facebook for a while). As I said, the volume has increased but the creativity hasn't. I'll take ten truly creative people over a hundred YouTube or TikTok "influencer" types any day.
> if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense
It makes me sad when I see people who can't even imagine a motive other than profit. Seems particularly common here, and I've learned not to engage with such. Have a nice day.
> It's really very simple, if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more
And most of what people write in order to get ad revenue is pure garbage. And even the stuff that isn't garbage is constrained by what advertisers approve of.
Vanishingly little of the "creative explosion" has made the creators meaningful amounts of money. A fuckton of that was going on well before there was much money in Web ads, period.
Literally all the time, in functional administrative systems.
You have to think a little harder than "where the funding comes from" (yes that's important, everyone knows it's important to follow the money... but it's not the full picture). Sophisticated administrative structures can insulate you against certain risks by altering how power is normally or naturally distributed. When you design these systems, you create the accountability mechanisms that you want: almost anything is possible.
Similarly, when issues come up with existing structures, the answer doesn't have to be an ideological pole (in whichever direction). The most reasonable answer is usually just to tweak the administrative structures / accountability mechanisms. In other words, you don't have to try and reason about this in purely theoretical, vague terms: it's a very practical and concrete problem that can have as much context and nuance as you want.
That doesn't mean it's easy, but I hate that almost everyone seems to not even spend a minute being creative. Similarly, I hate how people confuse the issue of "is the media free to editorialize" with "do I agree with this piece of editorial content", which is >90% of the criticism I seem to see in general.
I mean, I love me some BBC, but there are plenty of publicly funded media outlets that are essentially just state propaganda. I don't think public funding is a panacea.
It's obviously not a panacea, but it solves or can solve a specific set of problems.
For anyone that has trouble imagining what I could possibly be talking about, there are some examples discussed here [1], from which I highlight a handful of bullet points, which may not all be mutually exclusive:
- financial stability
- the need to "chase the algorithm"
- sensationalism as a perverse incentive of the market
- a lack of incentivization of quality content
- the perverse disincentivization of long-form content
- the perverse incentivization of cheap editorial content over expensive investigative journalism
- the availability of quality information to people who can't afford to pay for an expensive news subscription or who may simply not have access to news where they are
- editorial independence from commercial or industrial interests
- long-term viability of more local news
- collapsing advertising revenue due to macro, social and tech trends
- parasitic audience capture by social media platforms
Maybe. The catch-22 of this is that subscription models more-or-less can't work while ad-based business models exist. If someone can profit by taking your paywalled content, slapping ads on it, and putting that up on a free site, then someone will do that, destroying your business model.
We need to destroy ads as a viable business model before we can even try exploring other models. Installing an ad blocker is ethical.
> The catch-22 of this is that subscription models more-or-less can't work while ad-based business models exist.
I suspect this dynamic also applies to software, including, perhaps counterintuitively, FOSS software. "Free" (but ad-supported) competes for attention with both paid and free (actually free). Interest in developing FOSS is lower, I would wager, when interest in using FOSS is lower, so we likely get less and worse FOSS in a world with lots of ad-supported (mostly spyware) software, than one without it.
Sounds like a big branding fail. Not the critics' fault for not recognizing the literary awards here. Next time don't splatter the Internet with You Won't Believe What This Celebrity Looks like Now!
Here's a headline from today:
"Victoria Justice Addressed The “Stupid” Rumor That She Was “Jealous” Of Ariana Grande During Their Time On “Victorious” Years After That “I Think We ALL” Meme Went Viral
And the exerpt:
“This is so dumb. Ten years later. How is this even a story? This is so stupid.”"
Could be the last time I have to point out that a tabloid news outlet will always (and rightly so) lack credibility, even if they attempt to create a “serious news” department, and hire a few actually good journalists. BuzzFeed News has about as much credibility as the McDonalds salad.
That's not how credibility works. It is very easy to lose credibility but creating it is a long and arduous process. One credible brand tied to a noncredible brand leaves you with two noncredible brands.
> That's not how credibility works. It is very easy to lose credibility but creating it is a long and arduous process. One credible brand tied to a noncredible brand leaves you with two noncredible brands.
BuzzFeed (the listicle site) never had any credibility, so the only direction they had to go was up.
Seems like they could have just pivoted buzzfeed.com to actual journalism and stop doing the culture war tabloid stuff altogether? Instead buzzfeednews.com links to buzzfeed.com all over the place with no obvious distinction between news and gossip https://www.buzzfeednews.com/topic/twitter
The tabloid gossip and listicles paid the bills for the journalism.
Plus they would still have the problem where people see "Buzzfeed" and immediately turn away because they have a preconceived notion of what kind of content they produce.
Who was behind that thought process… why did it need to be elevated? Was it even possible to do so? I think that answer to both of those is an obvious no. Somebody really liked the name they came up with, I guess.
I think they counted on people in the comments section of every thread about BuzzFeed News bringing up the fact that they won a Pulitzer Prize once and that means it totally different from regular BuzzFeed.
Linking to BuzzFeed always has been an uphill battle because of it's association to the, well, more light-hearted part of the business.
At the same time, it's sad to see yet another an independent news outlet go. As the recent meltdown over the (well deserved) Government Sponsored labels on Twitter showed, it's becoming increasingly difficult to run independent news when a lot of your competitors are state-backed, meaning they don't actually have to turn a profit.
> BuzzFeed News was the “serious news” side of BuzzFeed, not the main listicle side of the business
I just learned this from your comment. Sounds like something I would have appreciated. Unfortunately, the "BuzzFeed" in the name likely acted as negative-marketing, here.
Could you imagine if you're an actual journalist, with integrity and all that comes with the title, and you're now being offered a job at BuzzFeed or HuffPost? Talk about a true value test...
I'm not going to miss them. The News Division put their foot into bad journalism repeatedly.
For starters, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), a left-wing watchdog with Progressive right in their website title, denounced BuzzFeed News' coverage of Obama during his term as "almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic," and even "creepy" for literally having only one negative article about him in their assessment out of one hundred random samples from Google (though they specifically call out the majority assessed were News Division, not BuzzFeed the tabloid). Their top tech reporter, Ryan Broderick, was fired after plagiarizing for almost a decade, and basically the entire time he was working there. And publishing the Steele Dossier as though it was actual news at first, even though even Wikipedia says many of the statements in it were false, was also a low point; even the Washington Post in 2017 said it was bad journalism. So bad actually, that the editor of BuzzFeed felt the need to publish an opinion piece in The Atlantic today (yes, today, 6 years later) defending his actions. Another Pulitzer-prize winning journalist (Barry Meier) called the whole event a "media clusterfuck of epic proportions."
BuzzFeed News also lost credibility to me during the Trump administration, when the Mueller team publicly disputed the outlet's report on a Cohen-Trump story.
From The New Yorker [0]:
"The story was sourced to “two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.” However, once it was published, other federal officials spoke up. Mueller’s office released a rare public statement, saying that “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.” BuzzFeed, and its editor, Ben Smith, have stood by the story."
[...]
"I recently spoke by phone with Leopold about his reporting of this story and his other work on the Trump-Russia affair. Leopold, who was previously at Vice News, is considered an expert at using Freedom of Information Act requests and was part of a team of BuzzFeed reporters who were Pulitzer Prize finalists in 2018. He has also been the subject of controversy. In 2002, Salon removed an article from its Web site after Leopold was accused of inaccuracy and plagiarism. Four years later, he incorrectly reported that Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, had been indicted in the investigation into the outing of the C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame. (Leopold was open about past substance abuse and mental health issues in a 2006 memoir, “News Junkie.”)"
I still respect the outlet's FIFA story, but BuzzFeed News remained a step below mainstream outlets with investigations like The Washington Post.
My take is that Mueller was trying so hard not to find Trump guilty that he bent over backwards to interpret Cohen's testimony in an unrealistically benign light, splitting hairs over whether Trump's coaching amounted to "directing" or not.
The whole "Buzzfeed News is actually good" was pushed after they released the Trump dossier (which multiple other news orgs passed on) while including a statement basically saying "we haven't corroborated any of this, good luck". They were basically used as a dumping ground for "sources close to the matter" journalism which WaPo and CNN then could use as a source to make it look more legitimate (same with business insider).
Industry awards are pure wankery, particularly in media/publishing. Why are people so sure such awards confer credibility? Few industries are as self-celebrating as journalism, they shamelessly self-suck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness When industries like this give themselves awards, it's meaningless noise.
Journalism awards are total bullshit. Look at the Pulitzers given out for the investigations into Trump and Russia and made up Critical Race Theory. This polk award for exposing right wing misinformation does not mention the suppression of the Hunter Biden story which the faithful mainstream media, including Buzzfeed news, decided to censor.
lol it may well have changed the outcome of the election and it was a real story by any objective measure. if trumps children had photographic and documented evidence of federal crimes and picking up money from corrupt regimes around the world, we all know the coverage would have been different.
Just because a news outlet received a couple of awards does not mean that it was an overall quality outlet. That is a terrible metric and your recursive citation really shows how poor your judgement is in general.
Bottom line is that Buzzfeed news was a far left rag. The world will be better of with less polarizing news outlets.
- 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.
> 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.
Exactly. I'm not suggesting everyone be uninformed... just that they don't need to be informed about the majority of what is considered "news" these days.
>Most of it is not even news, it's fear peddling.
Wow! Not even a joke. I just went to what CNN considers relevant "United States" news and this is the page:
I'm in the same boat as I haven't read or watched the news deliberately for years. The important stuff is going to get through to me anyway.
But people need to have an option to know. You need access to information for healthy society, even if you mostly don't consume it. News is information, even the articles you posted.
>You need access to information for healthy society, even if you mostly don't consume it. News is information, even the articles you posted.
I don't disagree that people should be able to post news, 100% they should post whatever they want.
I just don't understand who the news is for. It seems to be news for the sake of news.
If almost everyone could live their lives without the news and remain largely unaffected, what is the point of it? Why not have niche sites handle the topics vs national outlets?
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]
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?
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.
> 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.
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
It means they're going all out on a pure garbage, 100% manipulative content format. With no pretense of any intent to actually inform, or connect the reader with other human beings in any meaningful way.
The very essence of generative AI applied to profit-driven journalism, in other words. And the ultimate realization of BuzzFeed's business model from the very beginning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
First, you need organizations interested in sustainable and not more and more shareholder returns. Sustainable is a different way to look at the financial planning.
Second, newspapers have long been funded by ads. But, the current structure of the ad business puts most of the profits in the pockets of the middlemen. Newspapers would need to re-evaluate ads and how to functionally be successful.
Third, you only need so many national or international level news organizations. Local news brings a of opportunity. Investment there may be worth while (I'd like to think so).
Basically, we need to change the way we think about it. Innovation.
> Third, you only need so many national or international level news organizations. Local news brings a of opportunity. Investment there may be worth while (I'd like to think so).
Yeah, I agree. Lots of local papers have been bought up and hollowed out by national organizations. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. Smaller & more focused is the key. One reason I don't pay for the big news outlets, and even the local big-name newspapers, is because they are owned by and employ some really disgusting people, who I don't want to financially support. The bigger you are, the more likely that is to happen. More choice of many smaller outlets means you can be choosier.
As a single example, here in the Twin Cities a handful of journalists are trying out the model at Racket[1]. They're mostly reader-funded, and because they're not doing big national stories, they don't need a shitload of subscribers or scummy ad money to keep the lights on. There's some hope to be found here.
Freakonomics I believe it was, had a podcast on how Journalism is a public service. Meaning, it should be funded by grants.
Why and how is it a public service? I wish I could remember the episode.
1. When journalists investigate their local politicians it helps keep those politicians clean.
2. Strong local papers and journalism is taken into account by loan officers who in turn save the municipalities tons of money by shaving off a percentage of a loan. This is massive returns when it takes 20million to build a local high schools, Libraries, etc.
Unlike many news orgs, ProPublica's funding has managed to stay solid during the post-President Trump years — $60M according to their 2021 990, vs. $51M in 2019. I worked there in its first years, when nearly its entire $10M budget came from its founding donor.
But PP, along with Axios and Politico, is an exception that proves the rule. The NYT is probably the only legacy news org that has an optimistic long-term future, due to its last-man-standing position and diversification into tech and games.
(TV news is a different situation, obviously Fox News has done very well. CNN had major cuts during the Discovery-Warner merger, but I don't think they're on a downward spiral)
Fox News has done very well because they aren't a journalism organization. They just repeat what their audience wants to hear and laugh all the way to the bank. If what they're talking about is in any way related to the truth it is entirely coincidental. They have in multiple lawsuits now argued that they are not a news organization and can not be held to any journalistic standards.
Real journalism is difficult and ultimately expensive. Telling people what they want to hear is cheap and easy.
> Fox News has done very well because they aren't a journalism organization. They just repeat what their audience wants to hear and laugh all the way to the bank.
This could be stated for all news organizations, especially those that claim to be impartial on paper. You could argue Fox News is worse, but don't pretend that the New York Times or Washington Post don't have a slant - or a 30 degree angle. Especially after the Nicholas Sandmann debacle in which they paid settlements for defamation. Or another example, MSNBC was banned from the Rittenhouse trial after being caught following the Jury Bus.
It could be said that free markets are bad for journalism. Markets optimize for cost, so if you can create a product that looks like journalism but is less expensive to produce, it is likely to be the winner in a market system.
This is why it is fascinating to watch what happens to experiments like NPR, although even in that case it was only a partial success.
> Real journalism is difficult and ultimately expensive.
I'm not certain that that's the case, at least in Canada.
Time and time again, much of the lowest-quality reporting/journalism I've seen has been from the largest Canadian news organizations that have significant resources at their disposal.
On the other hand, most of the best journalism I've seen has been from the organizations that are far smaller, and with far fewer resources.
It has even gotten to the point where relatively average individuals who are merely live streaming or sharing videos/photos of events end up providing more detailed, representative, objective, and timelier reporting than the large news organizations.
This is... not good at all.. it is basically a tiny blog that runs 90% on donations from a few rich people. I've seen single tweets with more views than what they get in a month, propublica sadly can't be sustainable for much longer I wouldn't think.
This subject has been giving me anxiety since about 2006. Nothing seems to stem the decline and I am scared what kind of world we will end up in soon as a result.
Their business model isn't based on website CPM, but on producing "impact" that gets them recognition and appreciation. Their recent stories on Clarence Thomas [0] dominated the news cycle last week. Even if the website story page got just 1M hits, far more people saw the story via other media outlets and government officials citing it. When PP puts out fundraising pitches, the Thomas story will be a highlight for this year.
It's worth noting that investigative work has always been like this. Even before news orgs had web analytics, they knew that a multi-month investigation into government spending/corruption might be a few thousand or just hundred readers, but as long as those readers included people in positions of power and influence -- e.g. a member of congress who can call for a congressional hearing -- then that boosts the newspaper brand and influence as much as any popular story.
PP focuses on investigative work rather than general news. It doesn't publish frequently enough, or about any specific topic, to drive regular annual readership (i.e. subscribers) -- I doubt there are many people who'd check PP's homepage on a daily or even weekly basis. So, better to attract charitable foundation grants and small donor contributions than to do a subscriber paywall.
We've been working on it for https://forth.news -- essentially a newsfeed for news.
The thinking is that in the old days, when you had a print newspaper, there were ads and articles, but they were completely decoupled. You could read an article, or just the headline, or just glance at a photo, but regardless, you would see the ads. Now, of course, you have to decide to click through.
BUT -- and this is the key part -- the newspaper-style ads still exist, they just exist upstream in the flow, and giving the revenue to the aggregators, not the people doing the reporting. (It also leads to incredibly misaligned incentives between the aggregators and the publishers, leading to things like clickbait...)
Our hope is to be able to close that loop, share the revenue from in-feed ads with the reporting partners, and try to get away from the Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc model.
Is it? Why? Journalists don't make a lot of money. A lot of them are trust fund babies because you can't write for the New York Times and live in NY without outside help.
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.
cute talking point. but it actually turns out that Google was helping them. see the countries that have implemented laws demanding that Google pay news outlets, the news outlets got dropped and their traffic plummeted, so they demanding things go back the way they were before
Of course, critical analysis is beyond the average know-it-all who gets their opinions from headlines with no real analysis
Create content people are willing to pay for. Most national level reporting is simply partisan garbage. They find stories to support an agenda rather than reporting stories without an agenda. Everyone is so jaded because every story has an agenda. For example, how many stories about Trump finances have been written by mainstream outlets? Countless. How many stories about Biden’s finances? Very few — unless they are right wing outlets. Is any journalist digging into the fact that we have US soldiers in direct combat in Ukraine? Has any outlet dug into violations of the War Powers Act? How many outlets have dug deeply into the corruption of Houston city and county government? How many stories about corruption in municipal initiatives? Garbage contracts? Or how congressmen are paying consulting companies that hire their spouses for no-show jobs? (As in the case of Dan Crenshaw.) How many news outlets have done anything in depth about election irregularities other than simply writing stories that claim it doesn’t happen? How many news outlets have written stories about Covid corruption? Pfizer corruption? Vaccine research lies?
Very few. But we know all about Trump’s dealings with porn stars.
I personally like Breaking Points and I am happy to pay for it. [1]
You wont find good journalism in NYT and Washington Post anymore bc they have not figured out that high quality, subscriber-only content is more sustainable than advertising. You will increasingly find good journalism if you subscribe to individual journalists that are not beholden to their advertisers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-news-wins-ge...