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Comment by jokull | Hacker News Reader

His main argument is that by funding BuzzFeed he is "contributing to intellectual decrepitude" of young readers. This is an outrageous statement. BuzzFeed started out with socially optimised content and were one of the first to recognize the power of sharing over front page habits. Today they employ many great journalists and are creating high quality content that is much easier to consume and spreads more quickly (admittedly along with some pretty banal stuff). A16Z enter the partnership based on future prospects, nothing else. BuzzFeed may or may not become a good source of enlightened reporting in the future, but at least that is their goal and they have a pretty good chance at it for a generation that mostly consumes through social media.

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Exactly. Sites like BuzzFeed and Vice have some pretty trashy stuff, so people dismiss their small forays into "real" journalism as irrelevant posturing—but I don't think that's the case. In the past, quality journalists went to quality publications because the only place to find quality journalism was in a quality publication. Now, with people getting their articles from aggregators, social media and cross-linking, it's no longer important what publication a writer writes for. A journalist for BuzzFeed can write (nearly) the same article they would for the New York Times, and (nearly) the same people (within the younger audience, at least) will be able to discover it. The publication is less relevant as an institution and a brand — BuzzFeed, HuffPo and the ilk are just investors and CMS's for the work of individual writers.

Tl;dr: online news has been unbundled.

I think you're absolutely correct about the writers having potentially equitable quality, but I would challenge the following statement:

> The publication is less relevant as an institution and a brand

Journalism, and journalists, need to be trusted to deliver researched and verifiable content. This seems to be enforced because of reputation – i.e, the reputation of a publication.

When an organization does what BuzzFeed does to earn eyeballs, dollars and readership, it makes you question what they would do in more serious, "important" topics, such as describing world events to future voters.

I have trouble trusting BuzzFeed as an organization, as with Vice, due to this "trashiness". I think we all should.

I actually commend BuzzFeed for having unabashedly liberal social viewpoints. So maybe through listicles and what not, it can help push for more openness in our society to heterogeneity.

That sounds more like Upworthy, which was founded by two former leaders of MoveOn.org (Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley) with the explicit goal of presenting liberal/progressive ideas in viral, shareable packages. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/business/media/upworthys-v... for more background on this.)

Are you saying their plan all along was to bait readers by pandering to their needs, THEN slowly spoon-feed them smarter content?

Or widen the readership. You can either convert causal readers to serious readers, widen the audience to include more serious minded readers, or mix both. I think there’s a winning combination in there.

In any case they wouldn’t be the first media outlet to engage readers on the easily digested stuff but sprinkle in more challenging pieces. That’s pretty standard affair for most magazines and newspapers. Their innovation is in making sure their content gets shared, and that doesn’t just apply to listicles.

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