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plongeur

Okay, so I just had a look at BuzzFeed - let's see what we got there:

- The Battle for Brazil

- 17 Iced Teas That Will Quench Your Thirst This Spring

- 10 Things That Look Exactly Like Kylie Jenner’s New Hair

- 12 Things You Only Let Your Bff Do

- FYI The Twins From “The Suite Life Of Zack And Cody” Are Like Really Hot

- Can You Guess The Season Of “Law & Order: SVU” From A Screencap Of Olivia Benson?

- ...

Now, worrying about the integrity of BuzzFeed strikes me as slightly hypocritical - I mean, it's yellow pages 2.0 at the end of the day - isn't it?

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BuzzFeed may be 90% silly lists, but the fact that they want to be taken seriously as a source for real news and journalism means that it is important to hold them accountable to some basic standards of ethical behavior, like not quietly purging content at the behest of their advertisers and then lying about it.

I prefer Clickhole. It has far more journalistic integrity.

The inane listicles are just money drivers for BuzzFeed News, which is where much of the real journalism takes place. The site was founded in the late 00s as a simple lifestyle website in the vein of the AOL homepage but over time it's branched out into other areas, one of them being news. If they want to be taken seriously as a source of journalism (which they have in the past), then this sort of thing needs to be called out and punished accordingly.

I don't think hypocritical is the word. Unless you happen to know that they typically read buzzfeed for it's integrity. Then that would be hypocritical.

maybe myopic? misaimed?

maybe just stupid.

there's a lot of listicles but it drives some high-quality journalism.

Check out this amazing article covering the writing of the AUMF after 9/11 http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-w...

The listicles are the man source of clicks, both for BuzzFeed itself and the people writing articles like "You won't BELIEVE these TWENTY TERRIBLE ARTICLES BuzzFeed is running RIGHT NOW!"

Add a little bit of "Internet: Threat Or Menace?" bias from the people whose audience is skewing older faster than the general population and BuzzFeed is now terrible beyond words.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/09/05/tv...

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