{"id":255365,"date":"2023-05-08T15:23:50","date_gmt":"2023-05-08T19:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=255365"},"modified":"2023-05-08T15:23:50","modified_gmt":"2023-05-08T19:23:50","slug":"does-the-end-of-buzzfeed-news-mean-the-death-of-social-journalism-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/05\/08\/does-the-end-of-buzzfeed-news-mean-the-death-of-social-journalism-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Does the end of BuzzFeed News mean the death of social journalism?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Note<\/strong>: This was originally published as<\/a> the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The past few weeks have not been kind to the giants of digital news. On April 20, Insider<\/em>\u2014which is owned by the German publishing company Axel Springer\u2014said that<\/a> it was laying off ten percent of its staff in the US. On April 27, Vice Media initiated a restructuring<\/a> that was expected to lead to over a hundred job losses and the end of its Vice News Tonight<\/em> broadcast; on May 1, the New York Times<\/em> reported that Vice<\/a> was preparing to file for bankruptcy protection. Since then, there have been reports that a private equity deal could rescue the company, though it may value it<\/a> as low as three-hundred million dollars\u2014a relatively large amount by everyday standards, but still a far cry from the near six billion dollars the company was said to be worth in 2017. Elsewhere, Disney slashed staff at FiveThirtyEight<\/em><\/a>, the data-driven news site that it owned as part of ABC News. Numerous more traditional media outlets<\/a> have also made cuts this year, from the Washington Post<\/em> to Gannett.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than any of these, however, one recent announcement stood out as a sign of something important dying, at least on the digital-media side of the equation: namely, the closing of BuzzFeed News<\/em><\/a> and the loss of its more than sixty staffers. (BuzzFeed<\/em> will stay in the news business via HuffPost<\/em>, which it owns.) “This moment is part of the end of a whole era of media,\u201d Ben Smith, the founding editor of BuzzFeed News<\/em>, told the Times <\/em>(where he later worked as a media columnist). \u201cIt\u2019s the end of the marriage between social media and news.\u201d As is the case with many marriages, the end of this one was hardly a surprise<\/a> to anyone who had been paying attention. Layoffs at BuzzFeed News<\/em> had become the norm in recent few years, including two hundred job cuts<\/a> in early 2019. BuzzFeed<\/em> went public in 2021, which some hoped would bring prosperity, but its stock soon slid. The company was worth a billion dollars shortly after its initial public offering.<\/a> At time of writing, its share price implied that it was worth less than eighty million dollars<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in the halcyon days of 2015, Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed<\/em>\u2019s CEO, told Recode<\/em>\u2019s Peter Kafka that he planned to<\/a> \u201cfish for eyeballs in other people\u2019s streams\u201d\u2014in particular, Facebook\u2019s. The site\u2019s content, consisting of quizzes and short videos in addition to hard-hitting news stories, seemed perfectly suited for that platform, and, for a time, Peretti\u2019s plan seemed to be working well. But by 2017, BuzzFeed<\/em>\u2019s revenue growth had reportedly started to slow. <\/a>Then, in 2018, Facebook made a series of changes to its algorithm that were designed<\/a> to show users more \u201cpersonal\u201d content, such as photos and posts from friends, ahead of articles from external publishers. For some news outlets, including Mashable <\/em>and Mic<\/em>, the changes meant hardship, and even death<\/a>. BuzzFeed<\/em> was not hit quite as hard, but it was<\/em> hit: according to one estimate<\/a> from a former BuzzFeed<\/em> staffer, stories that once racked up as many as two hundred thousand visits were now getting a tenth of that amount. As I wrote in 2019<\/a>, “Editors at BuzzFeed<\/em> (and many other places) yoked themselves so tightly to Facebook\u2019s wagon, even after the Zuckerberg empire provided ample evidence<\/a> it would move the goalposts.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Despite these problems, Peretti told me, in an interview in 2018<\/a>, that he was still committed to BuzzFeed News<\/em>, which he called a \u201cstrong brand\u201d that wouldn’t be affected to the same extent by Facebook\u2019s algorithmic changes. \u201cWe haven\u2019t de-emphasized news at all,\u201d Peretti told me\u2014though he added that “there\u2019s always a question of what is the rate of growth of news vs. entertainment.\u201d That question was answered over the next few years, as the news division continued to be a drain on BuzzFeed<\/em>\u2019s balance sheet. In a recent memo announcing the division\u2019s closure<\/a>, Peretti conceded that he had been “slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn\u2019t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism.” For his part, Smith wrote recently, in his somewhat eerily timed new book, Traffic<\/em>, that he regrets<\/a> encouraging Peretti to see news as “a worthy enterprise that shouldn\u2019t solely be evaluated as a business.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some saw the seeds of BuzzFeed<\/em>\u2019s future decline\u2014and that of BuzzFeed News<\/em>, in particular\u2014even when the company was reveling in growth and others were hailing the news division as the future of journalism. Nick Denton, who founded Gawker Media and later watched it bankrupted by Hulk Hogan\u2019s privacy suit, said all the way back in 2012<\/a> that “Peretti’s craving for the quick viral fix will not be satisfied by the nourishing fare” from the news division, and that eventually Buzzfeed<\/em> would \u201ccollapse under the weight of its own contradictions.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, entries in the “Oral History of BuzzFeed News<\/em>,”<\/a> which staffers at the site published just prior to its closure last week, make it obvious that many people who worked there also knew that the good times could not last. Albert Samaha, a culture reporter, recalls “free lunch and tons of happy-looking people hopping around,” and remembers thinking: “Damn, either we\u2019re saved or we\u2019re doomed.” Karolina Waclawiak, a former editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News<\/em>, said that when she first started<\/a> working on its culture desk she asked about her budget for articles and was told, “Don\u2019t ask or you might get one.” When Waclawiak saw what editors were paying for stories on other desks, “I was in absolute shock,” she recalls. “I knew it couldn\u2019t last.” Doree Shafrir, a former executive editor, describes a company that seemed to shift focus on a whim. “There was so much organizational-slash-strategy whiplash,” she said<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some observers seem willing to forgive Peretti and Smith for their lack of foresight. Hillary Frey, the editor-in-chief of Slate<\/em>, wrote recently that Peretti<\/a> funded a news organization with “a great bunch of journalists who were rewriting the rules and figuring out how to swim alongside the currents of the internet [and] when it wasn\u2019t going great, he subsidized that news division with money from his other properties.” Others, however, have been less forgiving. The commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote in his newsletter<\/a> that BuzzFeed<\/em> embodied the worst elements of traffic-focused media. Smith’s book, he added, is about “the money-grubbing, nothing-matters, viral assholes who violated every ethic in the business, and, in the end, failed.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, Sullivan and others see the end of BuzzFeed News<\/em> not only as the failure of an individual newsroom, but as a broader indictment of socially-driven media. Leah Finnegan, a former editor of Gawker<\/em>, writes in The Baffler<\/em> that<\/a> the decline of BuzzFeed News<\/em> and other outlets shows that “journalism is incompatible with traffic [and] pursuing both at once is a fool\u2019s errand.” Max Read, another former editor at Gawker Media (which Smith, in his book, portrays as the yin to BuzzFeed’s yang) said the race to go viral now seems<\/a> “pathetic\u2014at best, a brief, wacky interregnum between periods of sustained dominance by big national news publishers, at worst a pointless waste of journalistic creativity and resources spent pursuing a doomed business strategy.” In an article about Smith\u2019s book, Nathan Heller, at The New Yorker<\/em>, argues that<\/a> “to live in traffic is to live under the rules of the platforms that run traffic, and though this revelation seems to have come astonishingly late to Smith… it\u2019s the biggest moral of the tale that he tells.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Herrman, a former BuzzFeed News<\/em> staffer, writes in New York<\/em><\/a>, meanwhile, that from the vantage point of 2023, the history of digital media laid out in Smith\u2019s book \u201csounds less like a story of entrepreneurial experimentation than an account of a recurring industry delusion.” The death of BuzzFeed News<\/em>, Herrman adds, “drives home the absurdity of a marriage between the news media and a speculative tech industry that can only conceptualize it as either a threat or as food.” In his newsletter, Read argues that the conditions that favored BuzzFeed<\/em> for so long came to an end as a result of other trends converging<\/a>. One was that legacy publications, such as the Times<\/em>, <\/em>“got their act together and realized it was trivially easy” to compete with and hire from the new digital startups. Another was that Facebook realized that it<\/a> didn’t really want to be in the news business after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does the death of BuzzFeed News<\/em> really mean the end of socially-powered journalism as a whole? It unquestionably suggests that roping a newsroom\u2019s fortunes to a massive platform\u2014one that has made it clear that it fundamentally doesn\u2019t care about journalism\u2014was, and remains, a mistake. And, as Finnegan points out, it is also an indictment of the \u201canything for clicks\u201d mentality that BuzzFeed<\/em> sometimes epitomized. That doesn\u2019t mean that news and journalism shouldn\u2019t be shared on social media. But it does mean that shareability shouldn\u2019t be the entirety, or even the centerpiece, of one\u2019s business strategy for news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This conclusion invites a second question: if the era of social news is behind us, what comes next? The answer, perhaps, looks more fragmented\u2014and not a little like the past. Denton recently told Kafka<\/a> that commentators including Sullivan and Matt Yglesias have “thrived since leaving media organizations. They\u2019re basically living the old blogging dream.” Frey argues that there is a reason<\/a> why outlets like the Times<\/em> and Slate<\/em> are still around: “Loyalty like that was built through homepages and curation, not distribution on Facebook or Twitter.” The 2010s, she says, were “a detour.” Ben Thompson, a media analyst who once called BuzzFeed News<\/em><\/a> “the most important news entity in the world,” acknowledged in 2019 that he was wrong. The only way to build a business in a space dominated by a platform like Facebook, he wrote at the time, is to<\/a> “go around them.” Good advice, perhaps. But a little late for BuzzFeed<\/em>, Vice<\/em>, and many others.<\/p>\n

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Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer The past few weeks have not been kind to the giants of digital news. On April 20, Insider\u2014which is owned by the German publishing company Axel Springer\u2014said that it was laying off ten percent … <\/p>\n

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