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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

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codeflo·

Well, that’s a colossal failure of branding if I ever saw one. Seriously, what were they thinking?

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This is what everybody asked and it was never clear why they didn't differentiate the brand more.

I think the idea was to use BuzzFeed News to elevate the BuzzFeed brand.

Seems like they could have just pivoted buzzfeed.com to actual journalism and stop doing the culture war tabloid stuff altogether? Instead buzzfeednews.com links to buzzfeed.com all over the place with no obvious distinction between news and gossip https://www.buzzfeednews.com/topic/twitter

The tabloid gossip and listicles paid the bills for the journalism.

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.

That's not how credibility works. It is very easy to lose credibility but creating it is a long and arduous process. One credible brand tied to a noncredible brand leaves you with two noncredible brands.

> That's not how credibility works. It is very easy to lose credibility but creating it is a long and arduous process. One credible brand tied to a noncredible brand leaves you with two noncredible brands.

BuzzFeed (the listicle site) never had any credibility, so the only direction they had to go was up.

Who was behind that thought process… why did it need to be elevated? Was it even possible to do so? I think that answer to both of those is an obvious no. Somebody really liked the name they came up with, I guess.

I think they counted on people in the comments section of every thread about BuzzFeed News bringing up the fact that they won a Pulitzer Prize once and that means it totally different from regular BuzzFeed.

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