BuzzFeed News Has Won Its First Pulitzer Prize | Hacker News Reader

BuzzFeed News Has Won Its First Pulitzer Prize

buzzfeednews.com

125 pointsbryant57 comments

Buzzfeed News have been writing serious, in-depth news articles for years now. Here's a great one from 2016 about how Facebook is the internet in Myanmar: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sheerafrenkel/fake-news...

Unfortunately their brand is tainted by the reddit-meme listicle crap of their sister site. I'm surprised they haven't changed their name yet.

TIL Buzzfeed & Buzzfeed News are separate websites, When ever I saw a URL pointing to Buzzfeed News I assumed its the former - A daily mail with lesser NSFW images, So never bothered to click.

Good to know that the latter is doing some good journalism, But perhaps a rebranding is due?

Maybe it's a generational thing? I'm in my 20s and I'm much more likely to click on buzzfeed news than the new York times or something.

Also like many of my friends, I get about 90-100% of my news from Reddit. I just don't care about visiting individual publications. Doesn't appeal to me.

> I get about 90-100% of my news from Reddit

What subs?

not op but me, politics and worldnews, also other anti-capitalistic subs

Did you mean “also other” as in different actual anti capitalist subs? The two mentioned are huge subs that are at best neoliberal and do not stray far from actual status quo quandaries.

As a casual Reddit user, I know Chapo got banned. I know technically the reasons weren’t for its politics, but lol... Anyway. Are other anti capitalist subs that much against the status quo?

Edit: I liked your pithy comment about being lower class and nothing wrong with that in the Pine phone thread.

I think that's because you knew what Buzzfeed News was and if we see other HN comments it looks like many 'here' thought Buzzfeed News publishes only contents like '15 Hedgehogs With Things That Look Like Hedgehogs'; But that's Buzzfeed and not the News site.

It's intriguing that a click bait platform decided to create an investigative journalism site but with the same brand. It's definitely not aimed to get those who don't visit Buzzfeed but to leverage their existing audience, Then again why would someone interested in 'What Is Your Inner Potato?' be interested in reading about human rights abuses?

Why wouldn't they be? Just because people read dumb things doesn't mean they are dumb themselves.

I didn't say that, My statement was regarding technical nature of user's interest.

I'm genuinely curious about Buzzfeed's rationale to build a factual news site when their brand represented anything but that i.e. 'Going against what their recommendation engine would typically suggest for their users'.

Because youth culture loves to exist in dichotomy. The stupid clickbait site and the proper news sight being part of the same thing is the appeal. Similar reasoning to how comedy/news has become a booming format. Doing something stupid and doing something serious at the same time is the zeitgeist.

That's very interesting, If true then the recommendation engine would have indeed identified the supposed dichotomy thereby justifying the decision to stick with their brand.

It does generally mean they are interested in dumb things though. The demographics of people who read those are quite a bit different than those who read long form content.

Hey if that's what they needed to do to fund investigative journalism, I'm all for it.

Investigative journalism is even harder to monetize than regular journalism. For example, you can't really publish a sponsored article.

I agree and In fact that's exactly what I thought when I saw their 'donate' button. It enforces my opinion that the 'Buzzfeed News' is genuinely trying to do some real journalism.

> Also like many of my friends, I get about 90-100% of my news from Reddit.

Doesn’t letting a democratic process decide what news you see worry you? That leads to severe echo chamber problems.

The problem with getting your news from Reddit isn't just the democratic process, if I remember rightly the moderators of the default news subreddits outright spread partisan misinformation using them.

One could argue that viewers count-driven news are just as democratic, except that people vote by viewing/opening/sharing links instead of clicking an upvote button.

Same goes for the echo chamber comment: Most newspapers are not bipartisan either. Reading Reddit is like reading a single source, in a way.

I first found out that they were two different operataions when Buzzfeed News started getting invited on to the BBC's news discussion programmes

It has to be a mix of things. Anecdotally, regular Reddit usage penetration isn’t that high. Especially not [nearly] all news. It’s def there though and def higher than many other platforms.

They have been doing it since the inception in 2011

i think the main reason for the existence of buzzfeed news is to bring some legitimacy to the buzzfeed brand, so their staff can feel good about working for a pulitzer prize winning organization instead of a clickbait farm even though the clickbait farming brings in all the money.

rebranding buzzfeed news would defeat the purpose.

Also, “Buzzfeed” is a genuinely silly name to have for a news site.

Wow ok, I did not know that. I thought I'd become tainted somehow because I liked a few articles I read.

Frankly, at least with the USAs current regulatory setup, I can't think of a better business model to sustain true investigative journalism.

Without the giant clickbait money engine that is BuzzFeed, I'd be really surprised if BuzzFeed News would be profitable enough to operate independently.

Surprised there’s no mention of Shawn Zhang[1] and his discovery of dozens of camps via satellite images[2] in 2018. Chinese govt started to censor the satellite images after Zhang published his discovery on medium and Twitter, which gave Buzzfeed News a new source to compare and led to more than 200 sites described in its winning piece.

[1] https://shawnzhang.ca/

[2] https://medium.com/@shawnwzhang

10 reasons why BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer Prize. (You wont believe number 7!)

Do they work in the same office as BuzzFeed? Would be funny to think they’re busy writing hard-hitting journalism while in the other room the BuzzFeed guys are crafting “Eat Through This A-Z Buffet And We'll Reveal The Dog Breed You Are On The Inside”.

In the UK The Times and The Sun share a building despite having similarly different Tones.

I don't really see an issue with this - and hope it is the case. I imagine hard-hitting journalism takes some thought, while clickbait lists take a different type of work and can be more relaxed and creative. The two probably compliment each other fairly well.

> They ultimately identified more than 260 structures that appeared to be fortified detention camps. Some of the sites were capable of holding more than 10,000 people and many contained factories where prisoners were forced into labor.

All BuzzFeed jokes aside, this is an exceptional piece of journalism. They managed to identify the exact spots where China was holding the Uyghurs, Kazakhs. "They began with an enormous dataset of 50,000 locations. Buschek built a custom tool to sort through those images."

In a time when even mentioning anything remotely to China can get you in really hot waters, kudos to them for pursuing such news.

Not disagreeing with your main point, but isn’t hating on China the new hotness? Anything anti-CCP is almost guaranteed upvotes.

Not for anyone working for a company with ties to China.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/26/john-cena-very...

> Not disagreeing with your main point, but isn’t hating on China the new hotness?

Be precise: many of us loves China and Chinese people.

> Anything anti-CCP is almost guaranteed upvotes.

Because we love Chinese people.

Weird but true.

In the same way that we want to stop boats before they cross the Mediterranean so that less people will die crossing.

(However I admit that I think I'm probably in the minority who actually wants to increase spending to support people where they live so they don't have to move.)

Maybe on HN? In the real world China has ties with a lot of western companies and probably countries.

Look for people not recognising Taiwan or the world not sanctioning China for COVID or for the aforementioned concentration camps where they detain 8M people.

This is a reaction to China’s behavior (current example: Going wild over John Cena calling Taiwan a country).

Very strange to see these low effort negative comments on HN. BuzzFeed News is not BuzzFeed and it’s not the first time they are recognized by journalistic awards. They actually did something very interesting: built a team of investigative journalists inside a click-bait factory. Usually trend is the opposite - to go down from journalism to churning as many clicks-generating titles as possible.

The actual series of articles that got them the Pulitzer Prize: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-inter...

It's ironic because when the series of Pulitzer winning articles were posted on HN they collected over 1000 votes and were on the frontpage twice. Now every is surprised_pikachu.jpg that they won a Pulitzer...

They were previously a Pulitzer finalist for a series of articles on supposed Russian assassinations in western countries that went firmly into conspiracy theory territories. The one I personally spotted was an article about the death of a British scientist which made it sound like the police were covering up by treating it as a suicide - except their entire evidence for it being a Russian assassination was some of his relatives not knowing he was suicidal and Buzzfeed massively overstating his role in the Litvinenko investigation as justification for why Russia wanted him dead. They even eventually admitted he had been suicidally depressed, those close to him were aware of this, and there was no evidence of foul play - and then claimed it could've been caused by secret undetectable Russian mind control chemicals as justification for continuing to treat this as an assassination. I'm not even kidding.

It sounds like this series of articles might've been better than their last attempt, but long form is not the same as actually good investigative reporting and the Pulitzer isn't worth what it once was (if it ever was worth much - there have been some pretty dodgy winners in the past too).

I remember one of the first incidents they were involved in was the witch hunt for the Boston bombers. It's nice that they've come a long way since then.

Do I understand correctly that the Buzzfeed „Trash & Memes“ website is what earns money (through ads etc) to finance the Buzzfeed News „Pulitzer-Worthy hard-hitting investivations“ website, which by itself is a losing money endeavour?

If so, that business structure alone is worth a price!

> Alison Killing conducted this reporting with a grant and further assistance from the Open Technology Fund.

The Open Technology Fund was previously part of Radio Free Asia [1], and continues today as a project of the US Agency for Global Media (the Orwellian name given to the US' external propaganda networks) [2]. Given the current US-China tensions, it is hard to imagine how this work could not be extremely biased.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Agency_for_Global_Media

Can you imagine if someone had told you BuzzFeed was going to win a Pulitzer in 2007?

Kudos to them - from listicles to some really important journalism.

BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News are different organizations with separate standards.

It is a separate division of the same Buzzfeed, Inc.

I think they're basically saying that the listicles walked so the investigative journalism could run.

Yes, I'm aware of that, but BuzzFeed started as a company that made dumb viral listicles then turned the brand awareness and money generated by that into an organization that's doing serious, important journalism.

I wish news outlets would stop describing it as the imprisonment (oppression, etc) of Muslims.

What's happening there is because the Uyghurs are an ethnic minority.

Do you have any source or reasoning for the claim that the persecution of Uyghurs is ethnic?

Well there are millions of ethnic Chinese Muslims who aren't put in concentration camps (there is apparently discrimination).

The Uyghurs are an ethnic minority like the Tibetans with a large population in a distant part of the country and have been seen as a threat for a long time.

Are you sure about that? It's not as if they don't persecute ethnically Han Chinese practitioners of other religions. Why would Islam get a free pass?

That's the point ... others are discriminated against (Muslims, Christians, etc) but what's happening in Xinjiang is specifically targeting an ethnic minority who has separatist inclinations.

Millions of Chinese Muslims are not being put in "reeducation" camps.

Nor are presumably millions of ethnic Uyghurs scattered all over the country. Maybe they're just not a threat when they're thinly spread or maybe those who are detained have said naughty things online or some other signal of having higher separatist risk.

BuzzFeed? The 'Ten Disney Characters That Represent You' people?

Just take a look at this scroll of doom:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/news

Buzzfeed and Buzzfeed News share a parent and brand, but they are quite different. The former is the Web equivalent of junk food; the latter is a decent news org.

Newspapers print news, sports, comics, and celebrity gossip. I guess we were wrong for ever looking at the news since they also publish fluff?

Same for news on television, honestly.

It is quite possible for a company to do more than one type of article and be decent-to-excellent at both.

The factually incorrect 1619 project won a Pulitzer Prize previously, so I’m not sure that it means much anymore. It could be that Buzzfeed News did excellent work here, but I also feel like the Pulitzer is an insular awards show that reflects biases inherent to the news industry.

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