On Thursday morning, the same morning that BuzzFeed News issued a 4/20-themed push notification about overdoing it on weed, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced the company’s decision to shut down the 11-year-old news wing of his viral-baiting, social-media-age-defining website. BuzzFeed News, the plucky, Pulitzer-winning, dossier-publishing outlet that shaped the public conversation on everything from sexual assault to millennial burnout to the British royal family—and exposed the alleged misdeeds of the likes of Uber, R. Kelly, and Ellen DeGeneres, amongst others—would soon cease publication. According to an internal memo, BuzzFeed will focus its news efforts in HuffPost, Peretti’s first national media venture, which BuzzFeed acquired in 2020.
I’ve written before on the outsize impact (both real and simply felt) of BuzzFeed-related news. (Disclaimer: It was always both for me, as an employee there from 2017–2021.) At its height, many of its writers and editors, by dint of their professionalized mastery of virality, became online brands unto themselves—at least among the media-obsessed set. (It is significant that the Twitter legacy check mark also finally began to vanish on this same day.) But BuzzFeed news, the lowercase kind, has always hit differently because of its role as a canary in the digital media coal mine; the abrupt shuttering of BuzzFeed News, the outlet, is likely the clearest-signaled end to the most decorated era of the internet thus far.
Founded in 2011 under the umbrella of its listicle-and-quiz-obsessed parent website, and eternally beleaguered by accompanying cat-website jokes and that uppercase letter f, the newsroom grew quickly under the direction of editor in chief Ben Smith to become the emblem of millennial journalistic possibility, both in the US and abroad. I still remember the particular mix of jealous derision and anticipation that my journalism school professors used when discussing BuzzFeed News; for those in search of a full rundown of the lore of the newsroom’s golden age, Smith’s forthcoming book, Traffic, couldn’t possibly be timed better for release at the beginning of next month.
BuzzFeed News was, in retrospect, the ultimate fantasy of the 2010s digisphere. As part of the BuzzFeed brand, which was valued at $1.5 billion at something like its high-water mark in 2015, the newsroom fulfilled the latter half of Peretti’s mission to spread “joy and truth” online. The potential math of converting clicks into cash that would fund hard-hitting investigative journalism felt like the ultimate proof of concept for content making in that fertile, Facebook-centric era.
Of course, over time, as Facebook and other tech platforms morphed into peevish landlords prone to turning off the heat, an advertiser-driven model to keep BuzzFeed News sustainable looked less feasible. During my time as a civilian reader and as an employee at the parent company, it was always understood that the frothy “dot-com” side, along with the e-commerce and video divisions, was what made the work of BuzzFeed News possible. Truth and joy had never felt more symbiotic.
Hence, I think, the resulting (and much-begrudged) BuzzFeed culture, which imbued the company and the newsroom with a sense, especially amongst the overwhelmingly millennial workforce, that the opportunity to work there was a kind of social compact that transcended the terms of conventional employment. While edgier competitors like Vice and Gawker were famed for their shocking internal hijinks, BuzzFeed at large felt like a rarefied, wholesome place where you could sincerely engage with the CEO in a public channel or hold forth on a Slack debate over whether it was ethical for the cafeteria to stock plastic straws (better for people with disabilities, worse for the sea turtles). In the words of one of the giant react buttons pinned to each of its articles and office walls: OMG.
At the start of the year, things had been looking up for BuzzFeed: The arrival of ChatGPT, for anyone acquainted with Peretti’s obsession with ever-iterable content generation, felt like a long-awaited boost for a company that has always prided itself on seizing on the latest technology to shape its work. In another universe, BuzzFeed News might have found such uncharted online environs to be a new way to prove the grand malleability of its journalistic mettle. How depressing—and perhaps demonstrative—that it wasn’t even given the chance.
BuzzFeed’s general jolliness, compounded by the expected growing pains of a former start-up, made BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News the subjects of intense public scrutiny whenever, well, capitalism happened in the form of cutbacks and layoffs (hence, too, the newsroom’s highly public unionization efforts). The furor coming today from current and former BuzzFeed News staff, along with other BuzzFeeders subject to the 15% cuts implemented throughout the company, reveals a shared sense of betrayal that the realities of digital media have laid bare: For every employee who’s dedicated themselves in service of the place synonymous with the internet’s optimistic spirit of experimentation comes the realization that such experiments require a great degree of gambling with people’s livelihoods.
Or, as the writing on the wall would say: WTF?
Delia Cai
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