Viral content website BuzzFeed took the world by storm with lists of kittens, photos everyone should see before they die, and things only someone who grew up in the 1990s would say. And so he jumped in for a bit of credibility by starting his news department. You even won a Pulitzer Prize a few years ago, the ultimate in American journalism. This Thursday, the portal returned to its origins with the closure of BuzzFeed News after years of losses, bad decisions and various setbacks for its ambitious commitment to digital journalism.
“We have decided that the company cannot continue to fund this business,” CEO Jonah Peretti wrote in an internal letter explaining the 2020 layoff of 15 percent of the entire workforce at the company, which in 2020 bought HuffPost, a news aggregator that he went on to buy wants to double the attention of the company. A total of 180 people will take to the streets or be relocated: a third work in the news sector. The news caused shares on the New York Stock Exchange to fall by 20%.
The “love of the project” prompted Peretti, as he explains in the letter, to “invest more than necessary”. “That love also made me too slow to accept that the major platforms would not provide the necessary dissemination or financial backing to support free and premium journalism designed specifically for social media.”
BuzzFeed News began during the 2012 White House campaign led by Ben Smith, a young reporter signing on the Politico website. This pattern, based on luring talent from organizations considered reputable to a web that was then blamed for all the ills of the digital world, was an integral part of the formula that transformed a portal built only on the Basis of adding other people’s content into hard information matters entered a medium with its own stories, juicy research and newsrooms in New York, Madrid, Paris, London, Rio de Janeiro or Mexico City.
The secret also lay in the youth of its journalists (and in the ambition that usually accompanies the reporter’s first babble). Exclusives that have made a difference for BuzzFeed News include stories like the one that exposed the alleged physical and sexual abuse of Tony Robbins, the self-help guru, or, more recently, the one leading to the freedom of seven prisoners contributors who did this ended up in prison with the perfidy of a Chicago cop.
They weren’t afraid of long texts, as long as they were presented in an agile way, with a smart social media distribution strategy, and with bold and seductive titles for their young reader base. This earned them respect in places like the White House or the Capitol, whose congressmen often had references to the Web because it was the medium their children read.
Chinese research
The ordination came in 2021 with the Pulitzer for denouncing China’s vast infrastructure for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Xinjiang region. Previously, the web had peaked in popularity in January 2017, when Smith decided to publish a 35-page dossier (the Steele dossier) on Donald Trump’s ties with Russia. It circulated through newsrooms in Washington, but media outlets like the New York Times or NBC chose not to air it for lack of guarantees.
It’s ironic that the end of BuzzFeed News came in the same week that it commemorated the tenth anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings (a tragedy that helped cement the internet’s mentality shift) and that Smith – the left the company in 2020 – worked as a media reporter at the New York Times and embarks on a new adventure, a website called Semafor― has published the memoir of his adventures in digital journalism, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. This Thursday, The Atlantic magazine has a chapter of this book entitled “After all this, I would still publish the dossier.”
Despite the string of successes, the problems of making the commitment to legitimate information profitable made it unsustainable. The newsroom, like other media born in the millennial heat, fell victim to the Facebook algorithm and the difficulty of monetizing the life-saving mutants of journalistic trends in recent years, from videos to podcasts.
Nothing prevented the layoffs and the closure of entire departments such as investigation, politics, science or inequality. The last personnel adjustment last fall made it clear that the question is not if the website will be closed, but when.
“Though Peretti believed it would take forever, BuzzFeed News has proven to be exactly what its enemies said it would be: a bolt from the moon in the digital journalism galaxy,” a former EL PAÍS employee said on condition of anonymity. . “I think this adventure will be remembered because it brings the way reporters express themselves on the internet closer to street slang, for readers of the same age. It also taught traditional media to improve their concept of information in the age of social networks.
In the end, the big American newspapers are fishing for a staff that they initially looked down on and 10 years later is already journalism history.