BuzzFeed News Asks Readers to Chip in with Donations | Hacker News Reader

BuzzFeed News Asks Readers to Chip in with Donations

wsj.com

50 pointsmoksha25644 comments

I'd gladly support BuzzFeed News. Just today they broke this huge story [1].

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christinekenneally/orph...

Buzzfeed really do produce some first-rate journalism. Their investigative work is absolutely equal to anything being produced by traditional newspapers.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations

I agree - their news division has really impressed me over the past few years. They really should spin themselves off to avoid the negative association between their journalism and the clickbait pop quizzes and gratuitous native ads from the rest of the company.

I thought their strategy was for the clickbait revenue to support the costs of their news division.

That is probably one of the most intensely powerful things I've read.

What an incredible story..

Wow. I genuinely didn't know BuzzFeed did journalism to this order. It feels very strange to read this and contrast it from the seemingly endless number of articles that are basically just a bunch of GIF images with a single line caption each taken from Reddit threads.

Thanks for the link. I put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17852129 in the second-chance queue (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and links back from there). If it gets a discussion, hopefully it will be a substantive one—sadly much harder on so traumatic a topic.

Even the dedicated news section has headline now that reads: "x has a lot of people shook on twitter."

Won't pretend to understand what kind of language appeals to 18-20 year olds, but is that demographic valuable enough to have such garbage articles/headlines interspersed with actual journalism? Such an enigma to me.

Seems unlikely that the demographic they're catering to at the expense of everyone else would chip in with donations.

The front page of NYTimes.com currently lists among the hard news the headline "Dogs in Poofy Dresses. You're Welcome." but I don't think that prevents a wide range of age brackets from reading and supporting it.

There are a lot of people who feel the Times has gone steeply downhill in the last few years. Personally, I've gone from an avid subscriber to never visiting.

The Journal, the Economist, and the BBC are my go to these days.

When I was 18-20, I wanted to be the sort of person who read The Economist. I got a subscription when I was 22 or so, I think. I kept up with it for a bit and then realized it wasn't actually improving my life in any way - not even keeping me meaningfully informed about the world.

Now that I'm older I'm more excited about people using "shook" as slang than about reading The Economist, and I intend on donating $100 as soon as the button is live.

> The Guardian, a U.K.-based newspaper, has raised $130 million from reader contributions since April 2016.

That's actually a significant portion of its revenue (~$275 million last fiscal). Quite interesting.

http://archive.is/77hdf

Irony, but thanks.

I always had mixed feeling about buzzfeed, the same mixed feelings I have with Google. It's like there are 2 separate entites :

1) the Buzzfeed that is amazing and produce some incredible stories

2) The clickbait attention-whore buzzfeed that makes me lose faith in humanity and in the internet in general.

For those wondering about Google :

1) The Google we all loved at first, creating incredible products that impact people lives for the best

2) The creepy Google that tracks everything that I do all the time and makes me angry that I cannot find any alerternative that could be as good.

I would have a really hard time donating to buzzfeed as long as it is not clear for me what buzzfeed really is (Amazing stories creation or click bait article).

Edit : typo and layout

I actually think the offer to read this story on your Kindle is quite clever...if they offered that to me in a pop-up before serving me a barrage of ads, I might even prefer it.

And it's an honest revenue model! And it's 86 pages, for crying out loud...they should charge way more than $0.99.

Push that, instead of donations. IMO.

This is stupid. If you're a corporation, you don't get donations. You charge customers for a service. If you want donations, start a non-profit.

As a New Yorker, I'd gladly pay a yearly fee to go to BuzzFeed-sponsored events. But if I'm going to donate to support journalism, there are lots of solid competitors for my money.

> If you're a corporation, you don't ask for donations. You charge customers for a service.

Why? Because that's how it's always been done?

Should they charge customers for a service even if it's less profitable than asking for donations?

Because a for profit business is ... for profit. If they manage to stay in the black, I’m “donating” my money into investors’ pockets. If they stay in the red, my donation is meaningless because they’re death spiraling anyway.

No, thank you.

So what you are saying is: you would gladly pay a mandatory fee, thereby gating folks who cannot afford this fee from the content, rather than pay a donation of any amount you wish and still allowing those who can't afford to pay to read the content? In the end, there is zero difference to you in either case, assuming you pay them the same in both, so you're literally gate-keeping news based on ability to pay because you think it's weird that they are for-profit and asking for donations.

> you would gladly pay a mandatory fee, thereby gating folks who cannot afford this fee from the content, rather than pay a donation of any amount you wish and still allowing those who can't afford to pay to read the content?

It’s a tragedy of the commons. Paywalls force everyone who values the content (and can afford it) to contribute. (This also guarantee resources for the organisation, which reinforces the content quality.) Donations, however, risk subsidising free riders who could have paid but didn’t. There are also fewer checks donors have on a private company than a non-profit.

There are plenty of quality journalism non-profits. There is no sane reason to donate to a private company over one of those groups.

Paywalls seem to not actually be guaranteeing resources for journalism, in practice. If you mean "In the cases where paywalls work, ..." then sure. But that's exactly my point - what is a rational, profit-seeking, red-blooded, capitalist company to do when asking for donations is more likely to make money than selling goods and services?

I don't understand what the risk of subsidizing free riders is. Is subsidizing free riders a bad thing?

I don't understand why donors having fewer checks matters. Do donors have less power than customers of a paywall?

Do you have the same concern that when you buy a product from a for-profit company, your money is going into investors' pockets if they're successful and meaningless if not?

All I want to do is voluntarily use my money in a way that yields good outcomes for me. It doesn't really matter to me whether BuzzFeed wants to use all $100 I give them, or wants to use $95 of it and send me a tote bag with the other $5 that I'll stick in a closet and never use. It does sort of matter, I guess, that they're not incorporating as a non-profit if there are tax benefits to doing so. It does sort of matter that the money is going to a sustainable company, but maybe paying back investors is the best way to ensure that it's sustainable. But apart from that - why is it better for me if they come up with some artificial way to make things look like a sale?

Journalism is in an on going funding crisis. I hear what you are saying, but there are plenty of publications that have gone belly-up after putting up a pay wall - there are just too many alternatives with near identical content. This is probably "their own fault" for training the public to expect free online content, but at this point every possible business model is on the table, including asking for donations in association with articles on highly charged issues.

> there are plenty of publications that have gone belly-up after putting up a pay wall - there are just too many alternatives with near identical content

I don’t fault them for trying. But if there are “many alternatives with near identical content,” what is lost in their going?

There is ad-funded free content and quality content behind paywalls. Donor-funded nonprofit journalism exists in some markets. But donor-funded private enterprise? Foolish.

They could become a non profit with a journalism branch like National Geographic used to be before they split off their magazine section and sold it to Fox.

I don’t know. This represents a kind of Coaseian solution for the provision of a public good. There’s nothing wrong with alternative funding models. Another example which we don’t see much of in the us is direct government funding of media, which has had good results in a few places.

Just as soon as they chip in with some real journalists

If only the journalists that reported these stories in 2017 at BuzzFeed were real:

* Helping to free an innocent man who'd spent 23 years behind bars

* Exposing the true scale of Russia's targeted assassinations in the West — and how UK and US authorities have turned a blind eye

* Sexual assault at Massage Envy

* A dirty offshore bank — and its blue-chip Western enablers and protectors

* BP's dangerous accidents in Alaska

* The US government's shadowy national security contractors

* Whistleblowers: FBI software contains Russian-made code

and more: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/markschoofs/the-year-in...

Okay. I get it. You're using the low-quality "alternative news" articles with clickbait headlines to draw in short attention span readers because those are your cash cows. Having that steady advertising income allows you to finance real journalism like the things you listed that might not be able to stand on their own in the current trend-or-die marketplace.

So let's make a deal. If I pay a subscription, will you only give me the good headlines and not spam me with the crappy stuff I don't want to see?

Just go to buzzfeednews.com instead of buzzfeed.com

Not to mention publishing the Steele dossier

That's a great example of how shoddy Buzzfeed's journalism is and why they shouldn't be supported.

> BuzzFeed was harshly criticized for publishing what Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan called "scurrilous allegations dressed up as an intelligence report meant to damage Donald Trump"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Russia_dossier#P...

Hrm. In hindsight, it seems obviously preferable that the public got to view this dossier. It would have been hard to have an informed opinion about e.g. the Strozk situation without knowing about the dossier and it’s contents.

Presenting unsubstantiated rumors as news is not "obviously preferable".

And Sullivan was wrong. Take a read of the “Veracity” section of that article.

I read it and it's still clearly unsubstantiated allegations and not factual news.

Doesn't seem shoddy to me. I agree completely with the quote from buzzfeeds executive staff. The materials were newsworthy because they were "in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media".

I trust BuzzFeeds investigative journalism about as far as I could throw it without an advertorial falling out

You can't build a reputation on garbage clickbait, and then expect people to take you seriously on-demand. Integrity isn't a light switch that you can flick on and off. To take any investigative piece seriously, I have to have some trust for the people that produced it, and I don't trust Buzzfeed to be anything other than low-quality, no-integrity mindless garbage.

I see you're being down voted into nothingness (ironic when the topic is about integrity, journalism, free speech) but I agree.

Buzzfeed has been garbage for years at least here in Canada, some pretty vile people work there (Scaachi Koul). I too can't take them seriously considering their history. Maybe the US version is better and maybe I will find them trustworthy but I can't see it happening anytime soon.

Even the NYT after that disaster with the hiring of Sarah Jeong. I didn't realize it was OK to be racist as a retort I foolishly choose the option of just never being racist.

Trust takes years to develop but will disappear in an instant.

> You can't build a reputation on garbage clickbait, and then expect people to take you seriously on-demand.

Look back at how currently reputable publications got their start. Look at what the WSJ editorial page publishes today.

I find it incredibly fascinating that a site like Buzzfeed can do amazing journalism, but the majority of mainstream media falls grossly short but expects the same respect.

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