Buzzfeed News, once a shining star of digital journalism, has announced it will shut its award-winning news division for good, laying off about 60 journalists in a move its founding editor, Ben Smith, described as “the end of the marriage between social media and news”.
Buzzfeed – for a few years regarded as a top exponent of viral news – has been struggling to maintain its buzz of late. The site’s founder, Jonah Peretti, is reported to have told staff: “I made the decision to over-invest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much. This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media.”
Buzzfeed News produced lots of hard-edged, scoop-heavy journalism – and it will be missed. Let’s be clear: it is the valuable news division – the one that revealed the network of detention camps in Xinjiang Province in China – that is to shut.
Viral content
Buzzfeed pioneered the use of viral content and helped legitimise the practice as a form of journalism. The company’s early success – roughly a period between 2012 when it launched Buzzfeed News and early 2019 when it started laying off staff – inspired many other media companies to create viral content of their own.
Even the BBC, in a report by the former chief executive of Sony, Sir Howard Stringer urged itself to become more distinctive “like Buzzfeed”.
Even if the wider Buzzfeed – the user-generated entertainment division, that formed our impression of Buzzfeed, with headlines such as 10 Cardboard Boxes That Look Like David Cameron and quizzes such as Which Ousted Arab Spring Ruler Are You? we should not forget the quality of its journalism.
It won website of the year at the 2018 Society of Editors Press Awards and then scooped the Pulitzer prize in 2021 with the Xinjiang detention camps exclusive.
Journalistic values
A study in Singapore found that BuzzFeed News’s news values were broadly similar to those of The New York Times, with both outlets prioritising stories about government and politics.
The closure of the news division provides a sobering reminder of the challenges facing digital journalism. The industry still struggles, two decades on, to find a sustainable business model. And no new-media organisation has been able to break the hold of the traditional news media. In Press Gazette’s March 2023 ranking of the top media sites in the world, the only “new” media site to break into the top 25 was Buzzfeed News, and that was in 25th position.
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