In a move that ends a seminal era of online journalism, BuzzFeed is closing its eponymous news division. Having begun as a quirky digital upstart and grown into a Pulitzer Prize-winning operation, it eventually fell prey to the punishing economics of digital publishing that have depressed many of its peers.
It’s a sobering end for a publication that was once seen as a serious challenger to legacy media outlets that were slow to adapt to the Internet. It was also the final chapter of a venture capital-driven digital era that left an indelible mark on the way journalism is produced and consumed.
When BuzzFeed News was founded in 2011, in the run-up to next year’s presidential election, it explored both petty and serious stories through lists and headlines designed to go viral on social media. That reflected the practice of the parent company, a kind of internet lab that Jonah Peretti started in 2006.
However, the news operation quickly attracted attention for its ambitious, sharp reporting, and continued to open foreign bureaus and invest in investigative journalism. A number of alumni work for the more established news organizations it sought to disrupt, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg News, and those newsrooms have embraced many of the practices BuzzFeed pioneered in seeking online readership.
But for all its achievements, the news division failed to make money, unable to reconcile its reliance on digital advertising and the vagaries of social media traffic with the significant costs of employing journalists around the world. world.
Ben Smith, the founder and editor of BuzzFeed News, who left in 2020 to become a media columnist at The Times, said in an interview that he was “very sad” about the closure.
“I’m proud of the work BuzzFeed News has done, but I think this moment marks the end of an entire media age,” said Mr. Smith, who now heads the Semafor media outlet. “It’s the end of the marriage between social media and news.”
The closure of the news division is part of a wider round of job cuts at BuzzFeed, said Mr. Peretti, the company’s CEO, in an email to employees on Thursday. The closure of the news division will affect about 60 of BuzzFeed’s approximately 1,200 employees, some of whom will be offered jobs at other parts of the company. The company is also cutting 120 people across its business, content, technical and administrative teams.
The decision is the latest in a string of financial setbacks facing digital media companies. Once the focus of massive optimism and investment from industry titans including the Walt Disney Company and Comcast, new media companies such as BuzzFeed, Vox Media and Vice have failed to live up to their previously high valuations.
Vox laid off 7 percent of its staff in January due to the uncertain economic climate. Vice, which has struggled financially for years, is desperate for a buyer. On Thursday, Insider announced it would lay off 10 percent of its staff in the United States, a move the company attributed to broader economic headwinds.
BuzzFeed was part of a growing group of media companies that took advantage of the growing dominance of technology platforms to bring audiences to their stories, betting that profits would follow. BuzzFeed News peppered the headlines and bold text with sentences that would stop thumbs midscroll and was tailored to online conversations that many news organizations ignored. Some of its traditional media competitors eventually followed BuzzFeed’s obsession with its readers’ habits, with editors glued to online dashboards created by companies like Chartbeat and Parse.ly to gauge audience behavior.
But it was the tech giants, including Meta, Alphabet, and ByteDance, that reaped most of the value from the huge audience their platforms attracted, and the profits that huge audience suggested never materialized for BuzzFeed News. Digital advertising – a mainstay for digital publishing – is increasingly following young consumers to tech platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Rafat Ali, the founder and CEO of digital media company Skift, said BuzzFeed News’ demise was a stark reminder that news organizations risk becoming obsolete if they don’t focus on developing multiple ways to make money.
“The era of disposable media has arrived,” said Mr. Ali. “If you build your business on a trend — in this case, social sharing — and that trend comes to an end, so does your business.”
In his memo, Mr Peretti said he had “made the decision to overinvest” in BuzzFeed’s news division because he loved the work it produced, but acknowledged he had been slow to accept that social media platforms would not provide the financial backing that was needed to make Buzzfeed News profitable.
“I have learned from these mistakes, and the team moving forward has also learned from them,” Mr. Peretti. “We know that the changes and improvements we are making today are necessary steps to build a better future.”
BuzzFeed will continue to publish news on HuffPost, another digital media pioneer, which BuzzFeed acquired in 2020. Mr. Peretti said in his memo that HuffPost was profitable and less dependent on social platforms. He added that the company made progress “only with parts of the business that have demonstrated their ability to add to the company’s bottom line.”
The financial strain on the news division had been evident for years. In Mr. Smith’s forthcoming book on the digital media age, “Traffic,” he writes that there has long been confusion “about what BuzzFeed News was for.” That became a problem during a controversial union action at the company in 2019.
“I regret encouraging Jonah to see our news department as a worthy enterprise that should not be judged solely as a business,” writes Mr. Smith. “Jonah resented what seemed like ingratitude from people whose work he valued so much that he was approaching $100 million in losses.”
In better times, BuzzFeed News was a beacon for emerging political and investigative journalists. The site won a 2021 Pulitzer Prize for international coverage of stories that used satellite imagery to report on the Chinese government’s detention of Muslims.
While it received critical acclaim for its investigative work and became a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for expounding on a corporate litigation process, it also drew criticism for ignoring some of the standards followed by some of its more traditional competitors .
In 2017, BuzzFeed published a file full of unverified information about Donald J. Trump, who had just been elected president. The company’s decision to publish the dossier was met with scorn from some media critics, who said it was irresponsible to release the information without extensive scrutiny. BuzzFeed and Mr. Smith, the editor at the time, defended the decision, saying the public had a right to information circulating at the highest levels of power in Washington.
That same year, BuzzFeed News was sued by a Russian executive named in the file, who said the news organization defamed him when it published his story. BuzzFeed won the lawsuit, and Mr Smith said in an essay for The Atlantic on Thursday that he would make the same decision to publish again.
Editorial staff had been told not to go to the office on Thursday. Mr. Peretti held an all-hands video meeting following the announcement, with some members of management joining from a conference room in New York, sadly dubbed “Operation Doomsday,” according to a BuzzFeed employee who was on the phone talking about the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
Mr Peretti told the workers he had failed them, the staff member said. “Obviously it’s a huge failure on my part, and I’m deeply sorry,” Mr. Peretti said at the meeting, according to the person.
Mr. Peretti was asked if he would step down, and he said he would stay with the company.
“I support this decision,” he said, according to the person in the meeting. “Nothing that happens today is about the work of this team.”
Karolina Waclawiak, BuzzFeed News’ editor-in-chief, told employees in an email Thursday that the newsroom had made progress this year to become profitable “only to be told — four months later — that we had run out of time.”
A spokesperson for BuzzFeed said the company planned to keep all stories published by the news division on their website forever.
BuzzFeed News signed off on Thursday in the slightly irreverent manner it has become known for over the past decade.
“BuzzFeed News logs off with a reminder that Blippi pooped on his friend,” read an Apple News push notification from BuzzFeed, referring to the outlet’s story about an actor playing a character from a prominent children’s show.
