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Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you and take it one leg further: I didn't even know there was a difference between "BuzzFeed News" and the rest of Buzzfeed. As in, my first reaction to the article was "What else do they do?"

I thought Buzzfeed was online "tabloid journalism" like The National Inquirer.

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No, hilariously Buzzfeed News was top tier investigative journalism, and at their best was as good as anything done by NYT or WaPo.

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.

Buzzfeed News _was_ tabloid journalism. They published demonstrably fake news, most notably the infamous Steele Dossier. Buzzfeed News claimed the document was "unverified," when in reality it was verifiably false. Every other major media outlet had access to this document and refused to publish it because its claims were unsubstantiated. But not Buzzfeed News -- skepticism of this outlet's seriousness was completely warranted.

AND they knew the dossier contained bad info by their own admission but published it anyway.

I too did not know Buzzfeed news is not Buzzfeed, but I would even go as far as to doubt that it really is different than Buzzfeed.

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