The problem is that the trash tarnishes the brand its reputation. Buzzfeed may do great things, but I won't read any of it because the overwhelming majority of what it publishes is crap, and I never know if a headline is important, or clickbait.
I'm not inherently against those titles, even the NYT gets a bit cute with their longform stuff to draw in readers. But it is a bit more frustrating when there are lots of vacuous articles to sort through; it's still pretty hard to discern their investigative stuff from the fluffy longform pieces.
Of course, the BuzzFeed News imprint has a whole section devoted to R. Kelly right now, and seems to be aiming no higher than a CNN or USA Today mix of hard news and fluff. Add to that the occasional bout of serious hackwork written in their "real news" style, and I'm not overflowing with hope.
Perhaps more to the point, it looks like this composite approach didn't actually balance the books, or we wouldn't be seeing layoffs right now.
I used to be pretty optimistic about this model, starting around the time Buzzfeed hired Mike Giglio from Newsweek and started doing in-depth stories on Syria. After all, traditional newspapers run cartoons and ads; even the NYT runs an extensive Features section. BuzzFeed looked like a modernized version of that same practice, with its fluff model updated to interest an online, click-based audience instead of a subscriber on Sunday morning.
But these layoffs call into question whether clickbait is in fact a way of funding good journalism, or whether Buzzfeed was just converting investment money into respectability. Buzzfeed overall is cutting staff 15% over multiple rounds of layoffs, but Buzzfeed News already dropped 17% of staff in round one. The entire teams for national news, national security, and health went, as did the Spain office. Maybe tellingly, the entertainment desk kept two staffers.
I think it's still an open question what the role of serious longform work is for Buzzfeed. One narrative says that the individual readers value both investigative and fluffy content from one source. If that's true, good reporting isn't an act of charity. It's just low-margin content produced to keep readers (or maybe staff?) in the same way that grocery stores sell staples like eggs basically at-cost while they profit elsewhere. Another narrative says that listicle readers (and writers) don't care about the presence of serious coverage (at least from Buzzfeed), so if any part of Buzzfeed News isn't running a profit it's not advancing the company.
(Even more broadly, I think it's an open question whether there's any known way to profit on mass distribution of investigative journalism. It seems to rely on patronage models, outright charity, or in a few areas contract work like Bloomberg Terminal.)
1) Right now WSJ has three columns of text because they want consistency with their hardcopy, but it doesn't feel right for a laptop.
The others are ok sources but still too much opinion mixed in for my money. Can't somebody just give us the facts?
What happened with that story about the magic Chinese spying chip, found only on SuperMicro motherboards sold to Apple? Did they prove it true? Did they retract it?
There is a point about this, if I can't trust them with things I have an idea about, how can I trust them with things totally foreign to me?
This isn't to say that there isn't value in traditional journalism, and I think the viability of member-supported radio is a testament to that. But the old guard of for-profit journalism is obsolete, and it's quickening its own death by going hog-wild with unverified sources, hit pieces, and lack of fact checking.
Are you under the impression that government corruption and injustice are things of the past?
Now anyone with a phone can record video of events as they happen, and anyone with a YouTube channel can report on the news and make political commentary for a mere fraction of the overhead that media firms operate on.
Except that we live in a world of deepfakes, astroturfing, and a dozen other reasons not to trust what is posted on the internet by any random person.
And building on my comment above, Random Joe isn't going to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars investigating illegal arms sales, contract fraud, or hundreds of other things that big journalism companies do routinely.
member-supported radio is a testament to that
Member-supported radio doesn't cover 1/1000th of what local newspapers do.
I think you may not understand the value of professional journalism, past and present, perhaps because you haven't been exposed to it, or its consequences.
Oh, come now.
> Except that we live in a world of deepfakes, astroturfing, and a dozen other reasons not to trust what is posted on the internet by any random person.
And professional journalists are going to be immune to these things? A lot of the time, journalists actually repost what they see on Twitter and YouTube. I suppose that in an ideal world journalists would wise up in the face of deep fakes and trust their various sources a lot less, but caution != profit.
> And building on my comment above, Random Joe isn't going to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars investigating illegal arms sales, contract fraud, or hundreds of other things that big journalism companies do routinely.
I don't agree that you need Big Journalism for that job to be done. Individuals in the press who are outside Big Journalism, as you put it, can do the same job independently and for a fraction of the cost.
> Member-supported radio doesn't cover 1/1000th of what local newspapers do.
Sure, local newspapers have an edge over public radio, but you can also use that same argument against Big Journalism, which despite its resources can't do the same job that local newspapers do.
> I think you may not understand the value of professional journalism, past and present, perhaps because you haven't been exposed to it, or its consequences.
That's not a fair assessment at all.
Idealism often dies when people start owning larger personal responsibilities.
I'm under impression that government corruption and injustice has little to do with kim kardashian reaction gifs. Yes, I know about Buzzfeed News, see below.
I think you may not understand the value of professional journalism, past and present, perhaps because you haven't been exposed to it, or its consequences.
Yeah, no. I can give you one recent example of professional journalism. Series of articles by John Carreyrou about Theranos, which were later followed by "Bad Blood" book.
Buzzfeed had 1700 (!) employees, as of Dec 2017, according to wikipedia.
Had the whole buzzfeed, news included, produced anything remotely comparable?
Do not degrade professional journalism by comparing it with Buzzfeed.
Journalists, in their true form, turn data into information.
That is more important than ever in our context free world of video snippets and misleading quotes.
which is probably why even big brand journalism hasn't really changed. the list of outlets that i block on twitter and apple news (the latest of which is forbes, for yet another installment in their "latest iPhone update has a NASTY SURPRISE" articles) grows weekly, but i can't get out of the clickbait content tsunami.
That's an interesting observation. It seems like how most people who watch sports have little to no interest in playing themselves, even recreationally, but they "join" a team because of the sense of participation they get. Not sure if that's the best analogy, but it's reminiscent for me.
People forget that smaller media firms like Buzzfeed, Vox, Huffpo, etc all thrived under a neutral FB, Google, etc. Remember when these companies were supposed to be the "new media"? What changed?
Buzzfeed did this to themselves. They demanded that fb, google, etc censor and pick favorites and they chose the big boys over buzzfeed.
What buzzfeed didn't realize is that their competition isn't infowars, breitbart or foxnews. Nobody who read those sources would ever waste their time on buzzfeed. Their competition was the NYTimes, CNN, MSNBC, Washingtonpost, etc. Now that buzzfeed has successfully helped these large media companies get preferential treatment with FB, Google, etc, there is really no room for buzzfeed. The big boys took buzzfeed, vox, huffpo, etc's market share. I bet these large "authoritative" companies are seeing a rise in traffic and increasing ad revenue. I wonder where that increase is coming from? Infowar fans? Highly unlikely.
There were arguments that Buzzfeed was attacking it's potential readers for political reasons to their own detriment. I think the meme "get woke, go broke" hints at this. The question is why did they and so many other new media outlets let ideology get in the way of their own success?
While it was easy to dismiss failures of pre-internet publications as merely failing to adapt to the new medium, BuzzFeedNews was Internet-native, and still failed.
I think that was much more the case when the brand was the only brand. When the company lived or died by its chocolate, or single brand of appliances etc, even if the founder was gone, I think a lot of care was taken. Now a brand is commonly one of 10 or 30 in a portfolio, I don't think there's much care left.
When the parent has a dozen appliance brands you can play loose with the trust of any or all. Half the product may be little more than badge engineering. When there's dozens of food brands in the book, or the market leading brand gets bought, it's virtually certain they will be worse than they used to be. Often quite a lot. The perception of the brand might carry that for years.
BF is an odd one as it's trying to become a respectable news outlet, without letting go of the junk that made them. Now the perception has to go the other way, up. A much more difficult move.
At least (for now) if you buy a Samsung or LG you know who to be pissed off at.
Sometimes you only need to buy the reformulated market leader once to realise there's no reason to ever buy it again.
Trust may turn out to have been a 20th century concept.
(like Buzzfeed's equally dodgy counterpart, News Corp and its different newspaper/news site names).
At the time, my view was that, Buzzfeed, and others, were just attempting to ride the tsunami of free Facebook traffic for a wildly bloated valuation in hopes to hoodwink a legacy media company into buying them before the party ended. They spent what would have been their profits, and then some, on shining their turds. It was a gamble and they mostly lost.
Here’a a new post by the Director of Quizzes who was laid off: http://www.fluxblog.org/2019/01/how-laid-off-are-you/