Culture BREAKING: Buzzfeed News to shut down

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Featured on Apr 20, 2023 by Null: Buzzfeed is downsizing and Buzzfeed News is being closed.
Hannah Nightingale
Apr 20, 2023

On Thursday, Buzzfeed News announced that it would be shutting down, with CRO Edgar Hernandez and COO leaving the company and layoffs being announced.

In an email from Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, said, "we are reducing our workforce by approximately 15 percent today across our Business, Content, Tech, and Admin teams, and beginning the process of closing Buzzfeed News.

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"Additionally, we are proposing headcount reductions in some international markets," the email added.

Peretti said that Hernandez and Baesler have left the company, with President Marcela Martin taking on "responsibility for all revenue functions effective immediately."

"While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund Buzzfeed News…" Peretti wrote.

Peretti stated that "HuffPost and Buzzfeed Dot Com have signaled that they will open a number of select roles for members of Buzzfeed News. These rules will be aligned with those divisions’ business goals and match the skills and strengths of many of Buzzfeed NEws’s editors and reporters."

"We raised this idea with the News Guild this morning and look forward to discussing it further. Moving forward, we will have a single news brand in HuffPost, which is profitable, with a loyal direct front page audience."

Peretti explained that the decision to shut down the news branch of the company came about because of the pandemic, "a fading SPAC marked that yielded less capital, a tech recession, a tough economy, a declining stock market, a decelerating digital advertising marked and ongoing audience and platform shifts."

"Dealing with all of these obstacles at once is part of why we’ve needed to make the difficult decisions to eliminate more jobs and reduce spending," he added.

This is a breaking story and will be updated

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amateur professional lurk said:
honestly buzzfeed is the easiest new source to replace with AI. their articles were basically paint by numbers, not difficult to just slap an ai together to do that very same thing, only i think an ai would probably write better articles. actual real journalism is much more difficult to outsource to an ai.

thank allah, now i will be able to find out what gay lesbian fictional character i am based on my astrological sign and what my favorite candy bar is.
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Im almost certain this is what they are scheming as they fire people. Ive already seen articles i suspect were written by ai. The shadowy buzzfeed cabal was likely salivating uncontrollably when the ai trend began.
 
I legitimately have no clue how Buzzfeed survived as a new outlet for so long. I have never met single person in my life who thought of Buzzfeed as anything other then "that website with pop culture quizzes". A person who actually follows news has literally dozens of better outlets they can choose from if they want. They serve no purpose.
 
I’ve thought the “articles “ are being written by AI for a long time. It certainly seem so.
Endless shit regurgitating things seen as popular, grabbed straight from twitter I guess.
I’m only surprised they would address this so openly now for no reason. Maybe some insider was going to out them so they were forced to make a statement. Imo it’s laughable, there can’t be people who ever took BuzzFeed seriously. It’s always been just bullshit.

Edit: grammar
 
Catch The Rainbow said:
Buzzfeed news had some good hard hitting articles, they were the ones who exposed the whitmer kidnapping plot as a fedop. Fuck buzzfeed but they actually did some good
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I remember them publishing also being the first one being the first to publish something that back then was important (about 5 years ago). However it says a lot about how common that is/was that whenever it happened people went "it was from buzzfeed, can you believe it? Let me check if anyone else reported on it too"
 
RodgerDodger said:
Buzzfeed will be hoovered up by a behind the scenes ad agency conglomerate such as Redventures. AI generated listicles to pimp an advertising message.
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Not sure about that.
The decline of online ad revenue is real, that money spigot is shut off. Which explains why they didn't even try to salvage some skeleton operation of BN and instead just completely shuttered it. This is all a result of the dramatic decline in ad spend that really started to accelerate towards the very end of last year and these guys obviously do not see any meaningful ads recovery in the near/medium term which is why they didn't even try to save the brand by surviving until ads money returns.
This is all good news though since the exact same issue also hurts Vice/Salon/HuffPost/ and every other online news organization. So they are going to follow suit too eventually. The infinite free money is gone now and no one really wants to fund or pay for this content.

The fact that BF bought/merged with HuffPost is another millstone around the neck of BF. I don't think anyone has appetite to invest in left-leaning online outrage news anymore now that the ads money seems to be gone for a long time forward. So them being hoovered up I think has about zero % change of happening.
It is one thing to invest money in something that runs at a small loss and will never be profitable when you have access to infinite free money and no one really gives a shit about profitability (i.e. when times are fantastically good), it is a whole other thing to invest in something that is bleeding money with no path at all towards profatibility and when money has become scarse and expensive.

This is changing the landscape and will force online sites to change their profile to become profitable. It this means that you need to shift your political leaning and the demographics you target, then so be it and principles be damned. It will be about survival for these sites. No more mocking the exceptionally profitable DailyWire for their un-progressive evil takes no more, because maybe next quarter you will have to change yourself into DailyWires image, lol lol lol.
Other avenues to survive is to go towards a subscription model but that too means dramatic changes. If you want people to start paying a monthly fee to access premium content then you have to actually produce premium content that people want and are willing to pay for (example: Crowders mug club). And no, outrage clickbait is not content people will pay for. You can just go to youtube and get as much outrage-porn as you want, for free.
To get subscription money you actually need to produce content that people will be willing to pay for and you need to target an audience that is not permanently broke.

To just see how dire the situation is for these sites. Look at TYT. Last month or so it seems like Ana and BuffaloMan has gone to war against the far-left.
When fucking Cenk himself starts going hard against the far-left then you know that shit just got real. hahahaha love to see it.

EDIT: to add, I think most of these far-left outrage sites just have no future. Their audience is broke and no one can afford to buy ads on these sites anymore. Most of them will be gone by the end of the year.
 
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