BuzzFeed News

» see buzzfeednews.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i clicked maybe a hundred buzzfeed news stories over the years and almost all of them arrived from twitter. that is roughly the relationship most non-american readers had with it. the listicle side of buzzfeed was a global product the algorithm pushed at you whether you wanted it or not. the news side lived on a separate subdomain with a different editorial budget. it pulled most of its readers from twitter quote-tweets pointing at a specific investigation.

the news division launched in january 2012 when jonah peretti hired ben smith out of politico to be its editor-in-chief. peretti's bet was that the listicle audience could be converted into a news audience if the underlying journalism was good enough, and that the ad and brand-content dollars on the entertainment side could subsidize the reporting on the news side. for about seven years that bet looked sustainable. the newsroom grew to roughly 250 journalists at peak with bureaus in london and mumbai. it published the kind of investigations that legacy papers had stopped funding.

the wins were real. in 2017 the steele dossier was published in full by buzzfeed news against most newsroom press conventions of the moment. the next year it published the fincen files investigation with the international consortium of investigative journalists, and in 2021 it won the pulitzer for international reporting for the xinjiang internment-camp coverage that paired satellite imagery with first-person testimony. that pulitzer was the first one ever awarded to a digital-native outlet. the operating losses across the same period ran into the tens of millions of dollars annually.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

ben smith left in january 2020 to take the media columnist job at the new york times. mark schoofs replaced him and ran the division through the pulitzer win. the 2020-2021 stretch was its peak as a journalism operation. it was also the stretch when buzzfeed inc. was preparing to go public via spac, and where everyone inside the company knew the spac math required the news division to be a smaller line item than it was.

the spac closed in december 2021 at a valuation roughly half of what had been pitched a year earlier. ad-tech revenue across the entire digital media sector cratered through 2022 as platforms cut off third-party tracking and brands moved budgets to tiktok. by early 2023 buzzfeed inc. was reporting quarterly losses that the news division could no longer be carried inside.

~ the day it died ~

april 20 2023 was when peretti's memo went out to the whole company. fifteen percent of buzzfeed inc.'s headcount was being cut, and buzzfeed news was being closed as a unit. complex networks, the men's-culture site buzzfeed had acquired in 2021, was being put up for sale. the rationale in the memo was that "investors had been clear" the news operation could not justify its losses.

the last new buzzfeed news story posted may 5 2023. some of the reporting staff moved to huffpost, which buzzfeed inc. still owned and which kept publishing. some moved to legacy papers or to substack newsletters. the digital archive of buzzfeed news lives on at buzzfeednews.com as a static read-only mirror, which is a kinder fate than gawker or valleywag got.

~ the long tail ~

buzzfeed news was the cleanest example of the bargain that defined 2010s digital media. listicle and quiz traffic produced platform-scale audiences, and the platform-scale audiences justified hiring real journalists to do real journalism. that bargain was always one ad-market downturn away from collapse, and 2022 was that downturn. vice filed for bankruptcy a month after the buzzfeed news memo and mtv news laid off most of its staff in may 2023. the gawker successor sites contracted. the millennial-era digital newsroom is a small archipelago in 2026, and the buzzfeed news pulitzer is one of the artifacts left behind.

the larger question is whether the original pitch was ever real. if you can win a pulitzer for international reporting and still be closed three years later, the issue is not journalism quality. it is that nobody figured out how to charge for online news at the scale that web-native operations required. the local newspaper model died in 2008. the venture-funded digital model died around 2023. nothing has clearly replaced either of them.

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