BuzzFeed investors have pushed CEO Jonah Peretti to shut down entire newsroom
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Github repo of their open-sourced work: https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/everything
Previous HN submissions from the domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeednews.com
2021 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/megha-rajagopalan-alison-ki...
It didn't work because the financial cards are stacked against print media, there is basically NYT and then tech billionaire charity cases like The Post and The Atlantic.
Expensify which featured on HN a few times have been drilling as well since IPO.
"As it turned out, for many former employees, it was all too good to be true. This past Monday, as BuzzFeed went public, many of them learned something alarming: they weren’t able to trade the stock that they had waited years to exercise."
When you have skin in the game it aligns interests.
“As the markets opened on December 6th, former BuzzFeed employees contacted their brokerages to initiate trades, but later found out that the type of stock they held, known as Class B, couldn’t be publicly traded yet. That evening, Continental, a stock-transfer company that BuzzFeed had engaged to facilitate the spac merger, sent an e-mail informing former employees that, in order to trade their Class B shares, they would have to convert them into Class A shares. In order to complete the process—which would take three to five business days—former employees were informed, they would need to print the e-mail, sign, scan, and return it.”.
“An e-mail circulating among former employees this past week raised the question of whether they could have a legal case. “This is rotten and definitely slimey, but I have not figured out if it’s illegal,” a person wrote. When asked whether anything illegal had occurred, Matt Mittenthal, a spokesman for BuzzFeed, said ‘of course not.’”.
And this only applies to past employees that exercised their options - paying some money and taxes for their equity.
It's not the organization, just the division.
News is responsible for the very good image that Buzzfeed has. Why do they give it up when they can finance it?
Investors don't have to shoulder costs for a service that no one cares about. You want a "what flavour of jelly bean are you" quiz you go to Buzzfeed. You want serious news you read one of the countless other site that covers world news. Yes it's cynical, but if I had money in Buzzfeed I would have pressured the CEO too.
That being said, their reputation as "Buzzfeed" is bad, if you repeat a piece of information to someone and say that you "read it on Buzzfeed", there will be an inherent bias that the source is bad, because most people associate them with terrible pop-culture articles on Facebook and don't even know that they won a pullitzer prize.
In that context, their reputation is permanently damaged for most people. If Buzzfeed really want to create "serious" news branch they'd have to call it something else at the very least.
I rank BuzzFeed on the same level as the Huffington Post. You want real news? Go to the Associated Press directly, or Reuters.
NYT can be ok, but their monetization tactics are kind of weird
Pardon my French, but this is bullshit. Activist investors pressuring buzzfeed are directly responsible for their actions. At best, they looked at the orgs under the umbrella and decided that the best move is to axe BFN. Experience tells me that either they're focused on short term profits, or silencing journalists they dislike.
And, yes, this is partly an indictment of the entire western economic system. Rapacious focus on short term profits will be our downfall. This is merely one example of many.
But I'm saying that no matter what, management is responsible for actions they take.
Foresight isn’t profitable. Sustainability isn’t profitable. They want next years bonus cheques not a healthy retirement fund.
That's a strange point to make in a discussion about how investors are pushing management into making the short term decision.
This is what people mean when they say capitalism won't solve all our problems.
You're talking on Hacker News where people routinely bypass paid content by posting workaround links. The same people who get angry when people stealing their SAAS subscriptions. This is the pot calling the kettle black.
It's simply unfortunate branding.
I say we draft the ad people to defend Ukraine before we let them back into society on parole.
This part confuses me. The newsroom is a loss, but buzzfeed as a whole is profitable, got it. But if buzzfeed as a whole is profitable even with the news division in the red, what does it mean to say you "don't have the resources to support another two years of losses"?
Legally it is hard to define either as they vague and subjective, obeying the board directions is much easier to define and codify in law.
If management does not do as shareholders ask , shareholders can get management replaced by nominating and voting for directors who want the same thing in the next general meeting or call for a emergency one.
Management reports to the board and the board reports to the shareholders.
It is hard to counter the direct wishes of all shareholders combined. However rarely all shareholders want the same thing. Management themselves own substantial shares and obviously will feel different for example.
By that definition Bezos is (well, was) an Amazon employee. And Musk is Tesla employee.
Zuckerberg owns a minority of shares but a majority of votes, so I don't know where he falls in your calculus. But I disagree with your statement as a whole, so I don't care too much about the line.
There's nothing illusory about it, the definitions about what you can do with Facebook voting and non-voting shares would be quite rigorously defined.
Tesla would probably exist without Musk as CEO. Amazon would certainly exist without Bezos as CEO.
Since the OP responded in a different post that Zuckerberg, by virtual of control of the majority of Meta stock isn't an employee, he's clearly referring to power, not to equity. And I think it's true that Bezos (if he chose to reassert himself) or Musk can do whatever they want with their respective companies. I mean, even if he doesn't control more than 20% of the stock, who do you think is going to stand up to Musk? The institutional investors? A coalition of people who bought into Tesla because they worship him? The minority that is none of the above?
> You don't have permission to access "http://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/22/buzzfeed-investors-have-pushe..." on this server.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/peter-t...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/peter-thiel-d...
If Thiel was getting into bed with this guy, then yea, you can probably impute some knowledge b/c Thiel would do some diligence. But we are talking about a dinner and an email.
I met a new person this weekend under similar circumstances. You shouldn't take that as a a sign I agree with that person's politics.
Personally, I would be open to such an experience. I am not so insecure in my beliefs that I would worry on that front. I might learn something about them and the nature of the world, and maybe they would too.
Maybe this will sound corny, and I guess it probably won't land with non-Christians, but I'll offer my heuristic anyway: What would Jesus do? I don't think shunning is the answer.
I know nothing about Thiel, but the actual quote is "hosted a dinner with" which like the one you responded to here said, could easily mean there were 50 guests at a party and one of them was this guy.
Your made up quote is something entirely different.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/paulmcleod/ketanji-brow...
We need more of this kind of journalism to keep the facts out there and point out lots of pols twist things to fool the public.
It's a clear slant of D good, R bad, here's how we explain away what R's are saying because we think X.
There's a million left-wing outlets to do this, Buzzfeed News will not be missed.
I considered it as obvious sarcasm as calling Fox News a left-wing front of the Democratic Party.
And I wouldnt consider them "far left" anyway, just left of some other mainstream news sources.
Definitely, unfortunately the facts are usually scarce and twisted in those hit pieces.
> And I wouldnt consider them "far left" anyway, just left of some other mainstream news sources.
https://wikiless.org/wiki/Overton_window
Still far-left in my eyes, but you're not wrong in the general sense, simply because most MSM is far-left nowadays.
What do you consider far left? Mainstream media pushes for larger police budgets, high defense spending, defends billionaires, defends foreign policies that cause death, destruction, and misery all over the world, they are almost never actually critical of politicians and/or what they say in a way that matters. They defend massive corporations that are working against Americans, push fossil fuels (and for adjacent industries, like cars), push against single payer healthcare, and many other policies that are even just slightly left of center.
No part of our mainstream media is even close to far left, basically no major source in the world is.
At best, you might get a left wing opinion article in the NYT or something, but thats still going to be sandwiched between police propaganda and the current week's article on cancel culture.
An absolutely awful branding decision.
Don't you have that backwards? I was always under the impression that BuzzFeed News existed to help prop up the BuzzFeed brand's reputation.
Presumably the way this SPAC was structured resulted in a change of control, and if you make that decision, you get what you get.
This doesn't really dispute your point though. Rules tend to have an exception or two.
which isn't their goal.
Investors' goal is to earn the highest return possible on their capital they invest, and take the lowest risk possible they can get away with.
Making the world a better place is something a charity does. Making money is what a company does. If the company incidentally makes the world a better place, that's great, but why does anyone expect this to happen?
A solo news operation sounds a lot like a OS written by one person. At some point, it takes more labor to build something than one person is capable of.
Oh don't worry, you'll still get that. In fact, that's all you'll get. Investors know how to sort the wheat from the chaff to provide us with the race to the bottom our society really needs.
100 employees is a lot of people. Even if you paid them nothing more than median wage (~$52k), with healthcare and other HR costs that easily adds up to the lions share of $10 mil. And this is just talking about people. Not servers, office space, equipment, contracts & rental fees, licensing, etc.