[News] The viral website BuzzFeed ends its ambitious commitment to digital journalism with the closure of its news division

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The portal, which opted for research and long-term reporting as a way to gain credibility in the media ecosystem, won a 'pulitzer' in 2021

Viral content website BuzzFeed took the world by storm with lists of kittens, photos everyone should see before they die, and things only someone raised in the 1990s would say. And so, he dove for a bit of credibility with the creation of his news division. They even won a Pulitzer Prize a couple of 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 finance that division," wrote the CEO, Jonah Peretti, in an internal letter to justify the dismissal of 15% of the entire company workforce, which in 2020 bought HuffPost, a news aggregator. in which from now on he intends to redouble the attention of the company. In total, 180 people will go to the streets or be relocated: a third worked in the news section. The news sent shares tumbling 20% on the New York Stock Exchange.

 

The “love for the project” led Peretti, as he explains in the letter, to “overinvest more than necessary”. “That love also made me take too long to accept that the big platforms would not provide the distribution or financial support necessary to support free and premium journalism designed specifically for social media.”

BuzzFeed News began during the 2012 White House election campaign under the direction of Ben Smith, then a young reporter signed to the Politico website. This pattern, based on attracting talent from organizations considered serious to a web that was then blamed for all the ills of the digital world, was an essential ingredient in the formula that turned a portal that only entered hard information matters based on adding other people's content in a medium with their own stories, juicy investigations and newsrooms in New York, Madrid, Paris, London, Rio de Janeiro or Mexico City.

The secret was also in the youth of its journalists (and in the ambition that usually accompanies the first babble of the reporter). Among the Russian exclusives that made a difference for BuzzFeed News are stories such as the one that exposed the links between President Vladimir Putin and the action actor Steven Seagal, the one that exposed the alleged physical and sexual abuse of Tony Robbins, self-help guru or , more recently, the one that contributed to the freedom of seven prisoners who ended up in jail for the perfidy of a Chicago police officer.

They are not afraid of long texts, as long as they are well edited and presented in an agile way, with an astute strategy of distribution in social networks and with titles capable of connecting with their base of young readers. This was how they were made 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 consecration came in 2021 with the Pulitzer for denouncing China's vast infrastructure to detain hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Xinjiang region. Before, the web had registered its peak of po[CENSORED]rity in January 2017, when Smith had published a 35-page dossier (the Steele Dossier) on Donald Trump's relations with Russia. It circulated through the newsrooms in Washington, but media such as The New York Times or NBC preferred not to air it due to lack of guarantees.

It is ironic that the end of BuzzFeed News came in the same week that the tenth anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings was commemorated (a tragedy that helped cement the web's change in mentality) and in which Smith ―who left the company in 2020, worked as a media reporter at The New York Times and is embarking on a new adventure, a website called Semafor― has published the memoirs about his adventures in digital journalism, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Rave in the billion dollar race to go viral. This Thursday, The Atlantic magazine has advanced a chapter of that book entitled "After all that, I would still publish the dossier."

 

Despite the succession of successes, the problems in making the commitment to serious information profitable made it unsustainable in the long run. The Newsroom was a victim, like other media born in the heat of the millennial generation, of the Facebook algorithm and the difficulty in monetizing the life-saving mutants of journalistic trends in recent years, from video to, more recently, podcasts.

Nothing prevented the layoffs and the closure of entire sections such as Investigation, Politics, Science or Inequality from beginning. The last staff adjustment last fall made it clear that the question was not if the website was going to close, but when.

"Although Peretti believed that it would last forever, BuzzFeed News has turned out to be exactly what its enemies said it would be: a flash in the galaxy of digital journalism," a former employee of the company explained to EL PAÍS on condition of anonymity. . “I think this adventure will be recorded because it addressed the way in which reporters express themselves on the Internet when talking about the street, to 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 ended up fishing for a staff that they initially looked down on and that, 10 years later, is already the history of journalism.

 

Link: https://elpais.com/sociedad/2023-04-20/la-web-viral-buzzfeed-pone-fin-a-su-ambiciosa-apuesta-por-el-periodismo-digital-con-el-cierre-de-su-division-de-noticias.html