The actual facts being referred to in the interview — that is, the posts that were deleted and BuzzFeed’s justification for why it did this, as well as editor-in-chief Ben Smith’s admission that he made a mistake — has been written about<\/a> quite a bit (including a post by me<\/a>). The interview post, however, is so gigantic and disjointed and rambling that I found it hard to follow, so I tried to pull some of the really interesting parts out.<\/p>\n The interview was triggered by the deletion of two posts, both of which were removed by Smith in what he later admitted was<\/a> a breach of the site’s standards guide. Those deletions and the attention they drew in turn convinced the site to review all of the posts that had been deleted in the past. At the beginning of the interview, Peretti and Smith talk about why some earlier posts were deleted, including the hundreds that Gawker writer Keenan Trotter wrote about<\/a> last year:<\/p>\n Jonah: This was a period where we didn\u2019t have a deletion policy. If you were an editor and you wrote something and then you thought later, oh, this is kind of dumb and I was to delete it, you could delete the post.<\/p>\n Ben: And that was fine. And there\u2019s not huge numbers of them, but there\u2019s a fair number of those, there were posts that were dup\u2014<\/p>\n Jonah: Duplicates, or errors, or text tests, or stuff like that.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n According to BuzzFeed, the Dove post and the Monopoly post<\/a> were deleted because they were “hot takes” and the site is trying to cut down on those, not because they involved an advertiser. But Smith admits that there were a couple of posts that were deleted that did<\/em> cross the boundaries between editorial and advertising in an unpleasant way, both of which involved Pepsi and were written by Samir Mezrahi. And the discussion of this decision-making process is interesting. One post was a humorous take on what might be under Pharrell Williams’ hat:<\/p>\n Ben: It was actually a great post. There were many hilarious things under his hat, including doge. And Samir had taken the GIF of doge coming out from under Pharrell\u2019s hat. Or, I\u2019m not even sure if he\u2019d seen it. But I got a complaint from the creative side that editors were taking their stuff and remixing it and not crediting their post or Pepsi. It was a confusing situation. Not\u2014it was just a confusing situation. And I said to him, hey, we\u2019re working, our creative team\u2014which at this point is across the hall\u2014is working with Pepsi on this social stuff, so don\u2019t take their stuff, don\u2019t use it in an editorial context. Church and state.<\/p>\n Jonah: One of the concerns is the impression that an editor was posting positive things about a brand because they were an advertiser. And that\u2019s something I think, you know, as we grow, I don\u2019t have much experience with church and state stuff. But as we grow, you start thinking, ok, if someone really loves pumpkin-spice lattes and they write a whole post about it and then it turns out that Starbucks is an advertiser, does that create the impression that they were influencing editorial, even though they had no idea that someone was an advertiser, and so there was\u2014<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The second post by Mezrahi was a critical one about accounts you should unfollow on Twitter, and that included Pepsi. What is most fascinating about this whole situation is that — as Smith points out — when Mezrahi posted about the soft-drink company, the Twitter account for Pepsi was actually being operated by his BuzzFeed colleagues across the hall<\/em>. In other words, staffers from the advertising and marketing part of BuzzFeed, the part that operates like a digital ad agency, were in charge of the account that he was criticizing and\/or praising. And this is what Smith and Peretti seemed most concerned about — that this would look bad.<\/p>\n Ben: It depends how you look. But when the priest wants to reach over\u2014I\u2019m sorry, I\u2019m [unintelligible], block that metaphor. When church, when edit, what is our rule about edit playing in our advertising? Not in advertising in general, not around advertisers, but specifically with advertising being created across the hall by people at our company. And this is something I had never in my life considered, but seemed actually like a thing that we should absolutely not do. So we deleted the post, which at the time was what we did with posts that were inappropriate.<\/p>\n Keenan: What was the problem? Say more about what the problem was.<\/p>\n Ben: That you had an editor who was engaging specifically with things that were created\u2014specifically with stuff that our creative team was working on, twice that week, with the same project.<\/p>\n Keenan: What\u2019s wrong with that, exactly? What do you mean by \u201cengaging\u201d? It was clearly critical of it.<\/p>\n Ben: Well, no, the first one he was promoting. The second one, he was critical but\u2014maybe the post is lost, but there was other celebratory stuff in there. He was just, like, touching it, you know? He was writing about advertising that was created by BuzzFeed that he knew, or that I believed, that was…<\/p>\n Ben: It\u2019s obviously an appearance issue. It\u2019s something that I feel really strongly about, it\u2019s in our standards, you\u2019ve probably seen it. There\u2019s an exception to that, which is news. If there\u2019s an ad on BuzzFeed, if there\u2019s an ad\u2014you know, if The New York Times carries an open letter, and it\u2019s news, New York Times reporters will write about it as news. But the bar is at least as high, and probably a little higher, I think, just for\u2014because, what are you doing? It seems really obvious to me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nWhich is church and which is state?<\/h2>\n
![\"8692674197_87dc05ba0c_b\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/media\/8692674197_87dc05ba0c_b.jpg?resize=525%2C350\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"dsc_5899\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/media\/dsc_5899.jpg?resize=525%2C336\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"DSC_5696](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/media\/DSC_5696-Case-Conflict-1024x653.jpg?resize=525%2C335\")
<\/a><\/p>\n