BuzzFeed employs ~1600 people? Maybe it's my ignorance on content companies, but that seems excessive for what they produce. Is there someone that can provide a bit of a breakdown of jobs so I'm more informed?
1,600 employees in that segment probably cost ~$120m per year in salary and benefits, give or take $20m. (their employee count was higher than 1,600 for a time though)
They likely have burned through a lot of that $400m in the last 40 months. TechCrunch reports they had just over 300 employees in mid to late 2013. So they increased headcount more than 5x in 3-4 years (another article reports they were up over 1,700 employees sometime in 2017).
> I mean just go to their website. Do you seriously call them a proper, trustworthy news source?
What's wrong with https://www.buzzfeednews.com/? It looks perfectly fine to me.
¹Also in their favor is the fact that BuzzFeed News doesn't have any sort of paywall. The only benefit I get from a subscription is knowing that I'm helping to support good journalism.
Incidentally, it seems that at least parts of the dossier have now been corroborated, and nothing has been disproven. There's still large parts of it that are in question of course, but I fail to see how it's been "discredited", it's merely been criticized.
Feel free to argue that BuzzFeed was incorrect in releasing a dossier full of raw intelligence before it had been corroborated. That's certainly something one can argue, and many people would agree (but not everybody). But that's not the argument you're making.
At the time, the dossier was disseminating through government and media circles, and being referred to in a lot of news and commentary, but the public had no access to it. The point of making the document available was to pull the curtain on that kind of NY/DC politics/media insiderism.