They also had one of the best news org GitHub repos, with the code and data and documentation for their investigations:
https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/everything
[0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-news-wins-ge...
We have to filter out noise in some ways, and BuzzFeed has made no considerable effort to position themselves as a platform worth listening to.
I thought Buzzfeed was online "tabloid journalism" like The National Inquirer.
The business model seemed to be "what if we have truly great investigative journalism, funded by clickbait listicales that we, inexplicablly, use the same brand for".
It's easy to mock the branding decisions they made (and not entirely unfair) but it's still a loss to the internet to see them go.
It would certainly improve your reputation among raccoons.
Buzzfeed News was amazing real journalism at its finest.
It’s demise goes to show that humans do not want fact-finding journalism.
Even highly paid humans like HN developers refuse to pay for journalism so…
…what we’re left with is entertainment such as Fox News and the others.
Isn't it a more accurate description to say that this goes to show that if you dilute your fact-finding journalism brand with clickbait nonsense, then people will ignore all of it?
The Steele Dossier was “good” journalism?
It was partisan hackery.
https://www.thewrap.com/buzzfeed-finally-updates-story-that-...
Non sequitur. People didn’t realise Buzzfeed News was fact-finding journalism because Buzzfeed proper was everything but. Plenty of people on HN pay for news, as evidenced by the constant complaining about paywalls.
Not wanting "BuzzFeed" to be someone's source of journalism is not the same thing as that person not wanting to consume high-quality journalism/news.
That said, I could understand the argument that if someone is generally well-read in this world, they would definitely know BuzzFeed News was, for the most part, a separate entity. I can only speak for myself - I'm fairly happy with my mix of Propublica, The Economist, USA Today, and NYT, but I've also not really analyzed that mix much since 2019, and I definitely don't read everything all the time (it's too much to consume).
It doesn’t really indicate that we don’t want serious journalism, just that we’re not really willing to give every service the benefit of the doubt.
I certainly never did.
What I'm saying is there is already plenty of better (or just-as-good, or near-good) sources of journalism. I did not even know BuzzFeed News was separate from BuzzFeed, so why would I waste my time even looking into them when:
* There are already decent news outlets
* My only perception of BuzzFeed is that their quality is extremely sub-par, which is by their own doing.
In the competition for my attention, I'd rather lose out on a possible diamond in the rough that is BuzzFeed News, then subject myself to the far likelier possibility that BuzzFeed News was really just more "BuzzFeed".
In this edge case, that filter is wrong, but ask yourself - if Fox News came out with a new source that was of Pulitzer-worthy quality and was honestly unbiased, would you still give it the time of day? I still wouldn't, because the chances it adds something of value higher than my current level of journalism consumption is much lower then the chances that this magical "Fox News" offshoot is actually something decent.
Maybe just maybe Buzzfeed did both because in the end it’s the only way that journalism has been able to survive.
In the end you entertain and inform because to inform only means to go out of business.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer
“In the 1890s the fierce competition between his World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal caused both to develop the techniques of yellow journalism, which won over readers with sensationalism, sex, crime and graphic horrors. The wide appeal reached a million copies a day and opened the way to mass-circulation newspapers that depended on advertising revenue (rather than cover price or political party subsidies) and appealed to readers with multiple forms of news, gossip, entertainment and advertising.
Pulitzer's name is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes established in 1917 as a result of his endowment to Columbia University. The prizes are given annually to recognize and reward excellence in American journalism, photography, literature, history, poetry, music, and drama. Pulitzer founded the Columbia School of Journalism by his philanthropic bequest; it opened in 1912.”
Good stories take months (sometimes years), so you need hundreds of good journalists to make good stories in a high enough frequency that people would even consider paying for a subscription.
You're either chasing public grants (and people always question your impartiality), or you die. You can count on one hand the ones that have been in this game for longer than a decade and even then you'll have fingers to spare.
Today we lost a great one.
Disclaimer: I work for OCCRP.org which I would (subjectively) put in the same basket. No Pulitzer yet, but we got a Nobel Peace Prize nomination this year!
Maybe not everything in life ought to be ruled by The Market.
I don't think it shows that at all. What it shows is that if you take something good and slap a brand on it that people associate with crap, people will think your good thing is crap and avoid it, too.
More here: https://www.axios.com/2021/11/14/steele-dossier-discredited-...
> specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations
And that
> The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.
I don't really hold it against them that they published a document they had been given with a big disclaimer on it.
As far as Semafor is concerned, I'm pretty sure SBF's investment was public record. Where did they fail to disclose it?
https://www.semafor.com/article/11/22/2022/sam-bankman-fried...
In the end, Im pretty sure Elon was correct and Semafor did in fact misreport this, SBF didnt invest anything in the acquisition.
This thread is no different.
But they really should have renamed it. Would that be so hard?
Well, they did win a Pulitzer. That sounds like it would position them as a platform worth listening to and also like something that took some considerable effort.
Buzzfeed in general gets flak but to people in the industry, it was quite clear that they:
1 - Understood the medium 2 - For a brief while, nailed the art of messaging within it
And it's a shame Buzzfeed news needed that substrate to survive on.
Jim DeRogatis is the person most singly responsible for bringing justice to R Kelly.
"Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their Own Customers" - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/insuranc...
"A Middle East Monarchy Hired American Ex-Soldiers To Kill Its Political Enemies. This Could Be The Future Of War." - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/mercenaries-...
"Secret NYPD Files: Officers Who Lie And Brutally Beat People Can Keep Their Jobs" - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/secret-n...
"A Chicago Cop Is Accused Of Framing 51 People For Murder. Now, The Fight For Justice." - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/melissasegura/detective...
"WWF Funds Guards Who Have Tortured And Killed People" - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-wid...
The freemium models of the New York Times and Washington Post are the ones that are cleaning up. You get a few free ad-supported articles a month to pique your interest, and if you are really into it, you need to pay a subscription. But Buzzfeed never had a brand people would pay for.
Buzzfeed, the non-news part, certainly knows how to produce cheap content, which makes it easier to ad support. They also do sponsored content.
But I'd hesitate to say that Buzzfeed understood the medium. They knew how to game traffic. They didn't know how to make money.
A lot of news outlets chased clicks. They thought they understood the medium. Making money and supporting yourself is the ultimate understanding the medium. Turns out The Gray Lady understands it the best.
And it's an even worse business model if you rely on social media for your business model and one day Twitter (or any other platform eventually) decides that if you're going to make money sharecropping in their fields, you need to start turning over revenue to the landlord in the shape of checkmark payola for reach and gatekeeping fees for access to the API.
It's the classic platform enshittification end-game: Social media embraced companies like Buzzfeed for providing the content that they used to build critical mass, then turned around and viewed them as ATMs to be plundered. Same story as app developers in walled gardens.
The team that won it is also very interesting:
- Megha Rajagopalan, probably the only one that is a journalist by profession. She left for the NYT [1]
- Alison Killing, an architecture and urban planning investigator [2]
- Christo Buschek, a data and computation investigator [3]
It was such an interesting mix of disciplines and expertises, and is reflected in the award for reporting in international affairs::
For a series of clear and compelling stories that used satellite imagery and architectural expertise, as well as interviews with two dozen former prisoners, to identify a vast new infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims. [4]
Worth checking out, although it is from that era when web sites made your mouse wheel overheat from scrolling:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/fincen-files
---
[1] https://www.nytco.com/press/the-new-york-times-expands-inter...
[2] Technically "geospatial investigator", but I am going off her own description based on her web site https://killingarchitects.com
[3] https://twitter.com/christo_buschek
[4] https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/megha-rajagopalan-alison-ki...
https://futurism.com/buzzfeed-publishing-articles-by-ai
> Earlier this year, when BuzzFeed announced plans to start publishing AI-assisted content, its CEO Jonah Peretti promised the tech would be held to a high standard...
> This month, we noticed that with none of the fanfare of Peretti's multiple interviews about the quizzes, BuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated articles that are produced by non-editorial staff — and they sound a lot like the content mill model that Peretti had promised to avoid...
> The 40 or so articles, all of which appear to be SEO-driven travel guides, are comically bland and similar to one another. Check out these almost-copied lines:
> "Now, I know what you're thinking - 'Cape May? What is that, some kind of mayonnaise brand?'" in an article about Cape May, in New Jersey.
> "Now I know what you're thinking - 'but Caribbean destinations are all just crowded resorts, right?'" in an article about St Maarten, in the Caribbean.
> "Now, I know what you're thinking. Puerto Rico? Isn't that where all the cruise ships go?" in an article about San Juan, in Puerto Rico.
>The company-wide layoffs and elimination of the news operation come just months after BuzzFeed had laid off 12 percent of its staff in a cost-cutting measure. That penny-pinching move, which Peretti said was necessary due to an “ongoing audience shift to vertical video,”
On an individual to individual basis we might recognize bad content meant to feed off of our base emotional instincts versus content meant for accuracy and to inform.
However collectively it appears there's more of us that rather get sucked into the rage content than try for objective or accurate reporting.
This mirrors the transition of television News from not needed to be profitable to needing to be profitable. Look at the success of cable news.
I think this is less of a comment about us as a species and more a comment about the economic systems that we have in place. Our economic systems used to support journalism.
We ought to exercise what agency we have in shaping social systems, but not only this, we need to remind ourselves regularly that we do have agency in order to exercise it
Why would someone choose to wade through a listicle when they can get their rage unfiltered and on tap?
What is the alternative? And I do mean an alternative that would incentivize and yield the same creative explosion we've seen with the web over the last 30 years.
This wouldn't have happened without ads, no other alternative has ever been found that got the author of a website paid while not directly charging the reader.
The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web without, hell without ads there probably wouldn't even be a search engine to find anything on the web and without a search engine nobody would be able to find anything of any use.
All? That's such a ridiculous generalization that it's practically a lie. If that's all you remember, then I suggest that your experience has been too short and/or limited. Before Google even existed there were tons of sites that were there for reasons other than ads. (I've been involved with the internet since before it became public BTW, plus Usenet and other things before that, so I have some perspective.) Even after Google became the ad behemoth it is today, plenty of sites flourished while having nothing to do with it. I had my own blog from 2000 until last year, moderately well known in some circles, but neither I nor most of the other bloggers I interacted with had anything to do with ads. There were forums without ads, e-commerce sites without ads (not counting their own), etc. The current situation, where everything seems to be a walled garden or infested with ads, is pretty recent ... and even now, there are plenty of sites that decline to play that game. Like the one we're having this conversation on.
And I re-iterate, whatever and however many sites there were knocking around on the early internet pale in comparison to the breadth of sites and information that came onto the web fueled by ads when people realised they could fund their hobbies and write about topics they loved at the same time.
It's really very simple, if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense and it will vastly outpace the output of the contingent who simply wish to write for the sake of it.
Ads supercharged the webs development and I see nothing that could've replaced them, I say that as someone who's never been involved in the ad industry.
Confuse correlation with causation much? The internet has certainly grown, but not just because of ads. In some ways it has shrunk because of ads. Innumerable forums and blogs and even social-media sites like MySpace were shunted aside as VC- and ad-funded walled gardens like Facebook became dominant. That's a loss (and I say that as someone who worked at Facebook for a while). As I said, the volume has increased but the creativity hasn't. I'll take ten truly creative people over a hundred YouTube or TikTok "influencer" types any day.
> if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense
It makes me sad when I see people who can't even imagine a motive other than profit. Seems particularly common here, and I've learned not to engage with such. Have a nice day.
And most of what people write in order to get ad revenue is pure garbage. And even the stuff that isn't garbage is constrained by what advertisers approve of.
You're not going back far enough. The heyday for the web predated Google.
> The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web without
This does not at all comport with what I've experienced.
For anyone that has trouble imagining what I could possibly be talking about, there are some examples discussed here [1], from which I highlight a handful of bullet points, which may not all be mutually exclusive:
- financial stability
- the need to "chase the algorithm"
- sensationalism as a perverse incentive of the market
- a lack of incentivization of quality content
- the perverse disincentivization of long-form content
- the perverse incentivization of cheap editorial content over expensive investigative journalism
- the availability of quality information to people who can't afford to pay for an expensive news subscription or who may simply not have access to news where they are
- editorial independence from commercial or industrial interests
- long-term viability of more local news
- collapsing advertising revenue due to macro, social and tech trends
- parasitic audience capture by social media platforms
[1] https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_developme...
You have to think a little harder than "where the funding comes from" (yes that's important, everyone knows it's important to follow the money... but it's not the full picture). Sophisticated administrative structures can insulate you against certain risks by altering how power is normally or naturally distributed. When you design these systems, you create the accountability mechanisms that you want: almost anything is possible.
Similarly, when issues come up with existing structures, the answer doesn't have to be an ideological pole (in whichever direction). The most reasonable answer is usually just to tweak the administrative structures / accountability mechanisms. In other words, you don't have to try and reason about this in purely theoretical, vague terms: it's a very practical and concrete problem that can have as much context and nuance as you want.
That doesn't mean it's easy, but I hate that almost everyone seems to not even spend a minute being creative. Similarly, I hate how people confuse the issue of "is the media free to editorialize" with "do I agree with this piece of editorial content", which is >90% of the criticism I seem to see in general.
We need to destroy ads as a viable business model before we can even try exploring other models. Installing an ad blocker is ethical.
I suspect this dynamic also applies to software, including, perhaps counterintuitively, FOSS software. "Free" (but ad-supported) competes for attention with both paid and free (actually free). Interest in developing FOSS is lower, I would wager, when interest in using FOSS is lower, so we likely get less and worse FOSS in a world with lots of ad-supported (mostly spyware) software, than one without it.
people who contribute want to know the thoughts and insights of others, so comment!
It's unfortunate the internet went this way, but as you said, it happened because people "wanted" it to.
Oh. Well.
Most of those old IRC networks ended in .edu, as a good example. We never really paid for what we got on the internet, it just switched from an "under the table" scam off of universities to ad-supported.
What creative explosion? Trash news sites, social media? The world would be a better place without any of these.
The main change is that web media seems far more comfortable than traditional with being _just_ fluff, so the journalism is increasingly endangered.
https://www.theonion.com/kidnapped-journalist-forced-to-expl...
Sounds like a big branding fail. Not the critics' fault for not recognizing the literary awards here. Next time don't splatter the Internet with You Won't Believe What This Celebrity Looks like Now!
Here's a headline from today: "Victoria Justice Addressed The “Stupid” Rumor That She Was “Jealous” Of Ariana Grande During Their Time On “Victorious” Years After That “I Think We ALL” Meme Went Viral
And the exerpt:
“This is so dumb. Ten years later. How is this even a story? This is so stupid.”"
I can't tell if I'm reading satire anymore.
Plus they would still have the problem where people see "Buzzfeed" and immediately turn away because they have a preconceived notion of what kind of content they produce.
BuzzFeed (the listicle site) never had any credibility, so the only direction they had to go was up.
So whenever buzzfeed is mentioned someone welll-akchuallys “buzzfeed news is a serious news outlet tho”.
At the same time, it's sad to see yet another an independent news outlet go. As the recent meltdown over the (well deserved) Government Sponsored labels on Twitter showed, it's becoming increasingly difficult to run independent news when a lot of your competitors are state-backed, meaning they don't actually have to turn a profit.
I just learned this from your comment. Sounds like something I would have appreciated. Unfortunately, the "BuzzFeed" in the name likely acted as negative-marketing, here.
For starters, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), a left-wing watchdog with Progressive right in their website title, denounced BuzzFeed News' coverage of Obama during his term as "almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic," and even "creepy" for literally having only one negative article about him in their assessment out of one hundred random samples from Google (though they specifically call out the majority assessed were News Division, not BuzzFeed the tabloid). Their top tech reporter, Ryan Broderick, was fired after plagiarizing for almost a decade, and basically the entire time he was working there. And publishing the Steele Dossier as though it was actual news at first, even though even Wikipedia says many of the statements in it were false, was also a low point; even the Washington Post in 2017 said it was bad journalism. So bad actually, that the editor of BuzzFeed felt the need to publish an opinion piece in The Atlantic today (yes, today, 6 years later) defending his actions. Another Pulitzer-prize winning journalist (Barry Meier) called the whole event a "media clusterfuck of epic proportions."
FAIR: https://fair.org/home/buzzfeeds-obama-coverage-is-99-percent...
Broderick: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/markschoofs/a-note-to-o...
Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/01/... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/11/th...
Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/ben-smith-...
Meier: https://bookshop.org/p/books/spooked-the-trump-dossier-black...
From The New Yorker [0]:
"The story was sourced to “two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.” However, once it was published, other federal officials spoke up. Mueller’s office released a rare public statement, saying that “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.” BuzzFeed, and its editor, Ben Smith, have stood by the story."
[...]
"I recently spoke by phone with Leopold about his reporting of this story and his other work on the Trump-Russia affair. Leopold, who was previously at Vice News, is considered an expert at using Freedom of Information Act requests and was part of a team of BuzzFeed reporters who were Pulitzer Prize finalists in 2018. He has also been the subject of controversy. In 2002, Salon removed an article from its Web site after Leopold was accused of inaccuracy and plagiarism. Four years later, he incorrectly reported that Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, had been indicted in the investigation into the outing of the C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame. (Leopold was open about past substance abuse and mental health issues in a 2006 memoir, “News Junkie.”)"
I still respect the outlet's FIFA story, but BuzzFeed News remained a step below mainstream outlets with investigations like The Washington Post.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-buzzfeed-reporter-e...
That most certainly wasn’t when that push started.
e.g. Here’s a piece from Reuters in 2015, prior to Trump, “FEATURE-Beyond cute cats: How BuzzFeed is reinventing itself”: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-media-buzzfeed-idUSL2N0L...
My take is that Mueller was trying so hard not to find Trump guilty that he bent over backwards to interpret Cohen's testimony in an unrealistically benign light, splitting hairs over whether Trump's coaching amounted to "directing" or not.
Bottom line is that Buzzfeed news was a far left rag. The world will be better of with less polarizing news outlets.
I have no problem with extremist sites doing partisan hit pieces if they are good, worthy hit pieces.