Buzzfeed News Is Dead. Here’s Why…
The end of Buzzfeed news is a lot more concerning than it appears.
When people think of Buzzfeed they are often reminded of their listicles such as 25 Ways To Tell You're A Kid Of The '90s or the try guy that cheated on his wife. What most people don't recall is their news division that was trying to have the editorial authority of the New York Times. Their first mistake was calling it Buzzfeed News. Sorry, but it's hard to take a news organization seriously when on the same site I can find riveting content such as this:
While Buzzfeed lacked a serious tone, they were experts on virality and easily digestible content. When they launched their news division in 2011, it was relying on one major assumption: legitimate journalism can be mixed with their traditional viral content formula. They believed that with this mixture they could challenge legacy media. So off they went, and hired an army of youthful, internet savvy reporters eager to break the next big story. Their audience was for the new generation that was getting their news from social media feeds instead of reading a newspaper or from a talking head on a cable news program.
Having needed to appeal to this younger audience, they would blend somewhat goofy and lighthearted questions to important figures while also sneaking in some legitimate groundbreaking journalism. They broke the internet for getting Barack Obama to use a selfie stick but they also won a Pulitzer prize reporting on China's mass detention of Muslims. By utilizing satellite imagery, architectural expertise, and interviews with two dozen former prisoners, they identified a vast new infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Uighurs. Yet their most popular video is about trying to steal food from a delivery robot…Buzzfeed News was all over the place, it seemed to have a lot of junk then randomly toss in something groundbreaking. Possibly their most notorious piece being the now discredited Steele dossier. This was a series of allegations of misconduct, conspiracy, and cooperation between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia prior to and during the 2016 election campaign. This provoked his response:
Turns out he was right, Buzzfeed was failing and On April 20, 2023, BuzzFeed announced it would shut down BuzzFeed News as part of a 15% workforce cut.