Looks like this is the last time I’ll have to point out on HN that BuzzFeed News was the “serious news” side of BuzzFeed, not the main listicle side of the business. They won a Pulitzer in 2021 for International Reporting, and 2 Polk Awards [0]
They also had one of the best news org GitHub repos, with the code and data and documentation for their investigations:
I really don't know why they kept the BuzzFeed branding. I intentionally _ignored_ anything that came from BuzzFeed News as likely tabloid-esque news because of the branding, and I honestly do not think that's the wrong perspective to take.
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 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.
It was a colossal blunder to keep the Buzzfeed branding. Every time I saw one of Buzzfeed News' excellent investigative journalism projects published or talked about online, the conversation about them vs. Buzzfeed was the dominant one.
I agree with you. I'm aware that they have very serious, legitimate, award winning news coverage, and I applaud them for that - but if Hustler Magazine released a Hustler Weekly News magazine, I would not fault people for shrugging it off. Listicle BuzzFeed did such a good job at lodging itself in our awareness it colored the brand in one shade.
Not trying to make this political, but BuzzFeed news was the first outlet to publish the Steele dossier, we know that didnt end well. Then the editor and Chief and the time left, for the NYT, wound up founding Semafor, took some money from SBF and failed to disclose it.
> BuzzFeed has made no considerable effort to position themselves as a platform worth listening to.
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 News never understood the medium. They couldn't support themselves. It turns out chasing social media and search clicks for free ad-supported journalism is not a great business model.
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.
I'm not sure that that should insulate them from criticism? In fact I think much of the criticism towards Buzzfeed is precisely around how good they were at the medium, and what they used that medium for/what that medium could be used for at all (to take the McLuhan angle). To put it more obnoxiously and splashily, Goebbels was also a master of his medium.
And it's a shame Buzzfeed news needed that substrate to survive on.
They are the ones who published and relentlessly pushed the now-debunked Steele Dossier, aka 'Pee Tape". They went out of their way to spread misinformation and create political divisions for clicks at every opportunity. RIP Buzfeed but you won't be missed.
> they won a Pulitzer in 2021 for International Reporting
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:
> 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,”
Inside scoop is that Janine Gibson (who handled all the war crimes Assange uncovered as was editor of The GuardianUS) was supposed to be the editor of The Graun (Guardian) after Alan Rusbridger stepped down, but wasn't well liked. They gave the job to Kath Viner instead, Janine took her bat and (James) Ball with her and ran Buzzfeed News. All second hand of course.
Here’s an example of fake news with a touch of racism https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/popeyes-...
The family followed up and said this was nothing to do with a fried chicken sandwich. They did not correct the story (apart from to correct the location of the store which was also wrong).
They have an obsession with anal which is ... a lot. I get that they're pivoting, but the "anal and abortion" magazine probably shouldn't be targeting the underage.
Do any teens actually read it now? It seems like it's just another one of the online news media that have all changed to being exactly the same content written by highly neurotic people living in NYC.
Content mill runs rage content all day too. Unfortunately those get eyes and thus revenue. More a comment on us as a species than anything else.
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.
To some extent, proper journalism, especially investigative journalism, was always a sort of loss-making luxury even for traditional media. You don’t want your ad beside the story breaking Watergate, because people might associate you with Watergate. You want it with the fluff; sports or gossip or soft local news or whatever depending on demographic.
The main change is that web media seems far more comfortable than traditional with being _just_ fluff, so the journalism is increasingly endangered.
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.
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.”"
Could be the last time I have to point out that a tabloid news outlet will always (and rightly so) lack credibility, even if they attempt to create a “serious news” department, and hire a few actually good journalists. BuzzFeed News has about as much credibility as the McDonalds salad.
Linking to BuzzFeed always has been an uphill battle because of it's association to the, well, more light-hearted part of the business.
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.
> BuzzFeed News was the “serious news” side of BuzzFeed, not the main listicle side of the business
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.
Could you imagine if you're an actual journalist, with integrity and all that comes with the title, and you're now being offered a job at BuzzFeed or HuffPost? Talk about a true value test...
I'm not going to miss them. The News Division put their foot into bad journalism repeatedly.
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."
BuzzFeed News also lost credibility to me during the Trump administration, when the Mueller team publicly disputed the outlet's report on a Cohen-Trump story.
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.
Industry awards are pure wankery, particularly in media/publishing. Why are people so sure such awards confer credibility? Few industries are as self-celebrating as journalism, they shamelessly self-suck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness When industries like this give themselves awards, it's meaningless noise.
Journalism awards are total bullshit. Look at the Pulitzers given out for the investigations into Trump and Russia and made up Critical Race Theory. This polk award for exposing right wing misinformation does not mention the suppression of the Hunter Biden story which the faithful mainstream media, including Buzzfeed news, decided to censor.
Just because a news outlet received a couple of awards does not mean that it was an overall quality outlet. That is a terrible metric and your recursive citation really shows how poor your judgement is in general.
Bottom line is that Buzzfeed news was a far left rag. The world will be better of with less polarizing news outlets.
- Help, The World Is On Fire And I Feel Like My Life Is Over At 24
- Multiple Women Are Reportedly Cooperating With The Criminal Investigation Into Jonathan Majors, And His Attorney Again Said He’s Innocent
- Two Former New Mexico State Basketball Players Accused Their Teammates Of Sexual Assault And Blamed The University For Doing Nothing To Stop It In A New Lawsuit
- A 34-Year-Old Man Who’d Recently Been Released From Prison Is Accused Of Killing His Parents, Two Of Their Friends, And Injuring Three Others In A Shooting Rampage
These are "featured" articles right now. I know interest is subjective but it just seems like none of that really matters for your day to day life. I stopped watching national news around 7 years ago and I have felt _immensely_ better since doing so and I don't at all feel like I've missed out on a thing. My life has seemed to slow down (in a good way).
The only news I pay any attention to is HN and my local news but even that is really only a few minutes a day.
Who is the target demographic for this news? All those stories could have been randomly generated and it wouldn't make a difference for the majority of visitors to that site.
I have a slight bias against journalism because I've personally been effected by a twisting of truth and being in finance (I run a trading firm) just the way investing/stocks are presented blows my mind (in a bad way)... that said, I'm never one to rejoice at people losing their jobs. I just really am curious as to why and what Buzzfeed news hoped to accomplish.
> I have a slight bias against journalism because I've personally been effected by a twisting of truth and being in finance (I run a trading firm) just the way investing/stocks are presented blows my mind (in a bad way)
This is kind of like saying "I have a slight bias against maps because one sent me in the wrong direction." People need a way to know what's going on in the world.
that is a big shame, it was a good and serious news organisation for years.
I was going to link to some of their good stories, but hilariously they have their own listicle of some: "17 Explosive BuzzFeed News Investigations That Made Waves In 2019" [0]
> Furthermore, Peretti told the remaining staff that he would be focusing more of the company’s energy going forward on AI. “We will empower our editorial teams at all of our brands to do the very best creative work and build an interface where that work can be repacked and brought to advertisers more effectively,” he said. “And we will bring more innovation to clients in the form of creators, AI, and cultural moments than can only happen across BuzzFeed, Complex, HuffPost, Tasty and First We Feast.”
What the heck does that mean? It sounds like someone is talking about AI as purely a buzzword without really understanding what it is.
you need only see BuzzFeed's stock skyrocket 150% in 1 day to understand when the CEO mentioned they would leverage ChatGPT, and now you see why the CEO is playing the AMC playbook now. next comes the insiders liquidating their holdings, while the leaders rambles on with BUZZwords
It means they're going all out on a pure garbage, 100% manipulative content format. With no pretense of any intent to actually inform, or connect the reader with other human beings in any meaningful way.
The very essence of generative AI applied to profit-driven journalism, in other words. And the ultimate realization of BuzzFeed's business model from the very beginning.
As an insider in the industry I can tell you the digital news era is well and truly over. We are in the influencer age now. And this has all been part of a purposefully executed plan by the big web platforms to keep people on their sites and apps rather than have them leave and go to external domains. Any online publication that wants to survive will have to run with a skeleton team full of workaholics. And that will be just to break even and get by.
It's not over entirely but that fight for clicks and eyeballs thankfully is. We're back to the subscription model and it's going to take time to get consumers full back to where we were 30 years ago. Companies like NY Times and Axios have been thriving.
buzzfeed news shut down a while ago. they were doing really good work for a few years, but for the last couple years the "buzzfeed news" site has been taken over by the regular buzzfeed content and the actual journalism has dried up.
shutting it down just seems like a formality at this point.
I remember visiting the BuzzFeed office back in '13 and hearing about how the BuzzFeed-y entertainment stuff was just a means to fund the actual hard hitting journalism.
That was the line that was repeated for years, but it just made me wonder why they didn't put out the news under a completely separate branding. The word "BuzzFeed" inherently sounds like low-brow, unprofessional shlock. You should not be experiencing a "buzz" when reading the news. It shouldn't be an endless "feed" of throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks content to keep my monkey brain stimulated.
Some background - they didn't IPO. They deSPAC'd, the idea being to raise a load of cash and then go on an acquisition spree, get scale, and therefore get leverage with ad buyers. So they did this thinking they'd raise $300m. But due to the weird way SPACs work, 94% of the investors walked away rather than close the deal, so rather than raise 300, they raised 16mil. So suddenly they're a public company, they've raised basically no money, they've got no scale - which was their entire plan. They've just been bleeding to death since then, and Buzzfeed News is something the CEO loves, but loses money hand over fist and he's finally had to let his baby die.
They also had a big unionization effort in 2019 and new contract negotiations in 2021. An honest effort, but it led to financially limiting conditions for a company that was increasingly lacking revenue.
The bubble era of digital news startups is well and truly over. There was never going to be a happy ending for an industry entirely reliant on the whims of social media algorithms to drive traffic, and ad impressions to monetize said traffic.
This applies to serious news sites, like BN that don't have the cachet of the Washington Post...which itself couldn't operate independently and was acquired by Bezos.
Organic reach for brands on social is dead, it's pay to play (promote posts, that is). Google giveth once but now they'll just gently nudge your towards spending more on ads.
Readit News
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.
This thread is no different.
More here: https://www.axios.com/2021/11/14/steele-dossier-discredited-...
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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 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.
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
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 a shame Buzzfeed news needed that substrate to survive on.
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,”
Dead Comment
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.
The main change is that web media seems far more comfortable than traditional with being _just_ fluff, so the journalism is increasingly endangered.
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.
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.
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.
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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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty?wprov=sfti1
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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.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/
- Help, The World Is On Fire And I Feel Like My Life Is Over At 24
- Multiple Women Are Reportedly Cooperating With The Criminal Investigation Into Jonathan Majors, And His Attorney Again Said He’s Innocent
- Two Former New Mexico State Basketball Players Accused Their Teammates Of Sexual Assault And Blamed The University For Doing Nothing To Stop It In A New Lawsuit
- A 34-Year-Old Man Who’d Recently Been Released From Prison Is Accused Of Killing His Parents, Two Of Their Friends, And Injuring Three Others In A Shooting Rampage
These are "featured" articles right now. I know interest is subjective but it just seems like none of that really matters for your day to day life. I stopped watching national news around 7 years ago and I have felt _immensely_ better since doing so and I don't at all feel like I've missed out on a thing. My life has seemed to slow down (in a good way).
The only news I pay any attention to is HN and my local news but even that is really only a few minutes a day.
Who is the target demographic for this news? All those stories could have been randomly generated and it wouldn't make a difference for the majority of visitors to that site.
I have a slight bias against journalism because I've personally been effected by a twisting of truth and being in finance (I run a trading firm) just the way investing/stocks are presented blows my mind (in a bad way)... that said, I'm never one to rejoice at people losing their jobs. I just really am curious as to why and what Buzzfeed news hoped to accomplish.
This is kind of like saying "I have a slight bias against maps because one sent me in the wrong direction." People need a way to know what's going on in the world.
Most of it is not even news, it's fear peddling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny
If you must watch the news, limit yourself to the old fashioned 30 minute nightly news shows on the major channels. Everything else is bad for you.
Maps giving the wrong directions is an accident. Journalists deliberately misleading for the benefit of their career/company is not an accident.
And continuing the maps analogy for the misinformation in finance, I would question the value of a map that often was entirely incorrect.
>People need a way to know what's going on in the world.
Why do people need to know what's going on?
I mean this genuinely because I have tuned out from national news, like buzzfeed, for a long time and it has only had positive effects on my life.
I was going to link to some of their good stories, but hilariously they have their own listicle of some: "17 Explosive BuzzFeed News Investigations That Made Waves In 2019" [0]
[0]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/heidiblake/17-explosive...
Dead Comment
What the heck does that mean? It sounds like someone is talking about AI as purely a buzzword without really understanding what it is.
first it was EVs, now it's AI
The very essence of generative AI applied to profit-driven journalism, in other words. And the ultimate realization of BuzzFeed's business model from the very beginning.
Very interesting listen from How I Built This interviewing Jim Vandehei who built both Axios and Politico. https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-pol...
Deleted Comment
shutting it down just seems like a formality at this point.
"Funny" how it panned out.
Deleted Comment
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BZFD:NASDAQ
The finance trend is going south. :-/
https://fortune.com/2019/02/13/buzzfeed-union-layoffs/
https://www.nyguild.org/front-page-details/buzzfeed-news-uni...
This applies to serious news sites, like BN that don't have the cachet of the Washington Post...which itself couldn't operate independently and was acquired by Bezos.
Organic reach for brands on social is dead, it's pay to play (promote posts, that is). Google giveth once but now they'll just gently nudge your towards spending more on ads.