BuzzFeed was riding a wave created by the social-media companies I was charged with covering. My time at BuzzFeed was ultimately inconsequential, but my perspective was privileged. Aside from a decision not to sell to Disney for $650 million, which would have killed BuzzFeed’s news division in its own way, there are notably few examples of paths not taken or strategic mistakes that would have made a difference.īen hired me at BuzzFeed in 2012 to help build the company’s tech-news vertical. It’s rich in detail but struggles to suspend a broad narrative about online news, and the internet, between BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti and Gawker’s Nick Denton, and can’t quite report itself out of the simplicity of what actually happened and why. In his new book Traffic, which was finished before BuzzFeed’s announcement but which publishes next week, Ben Smith, the site’s former editor-in-chief, makes an attempt at a first draft. The newsroom quickly multiplied in size, broke countless stories, and shaped other publishers’ coverage and business plans later, its parent company diminished, BuzzFeed News would unionize, win a Pulitzer, then get dragged, with the rest of the company, through a disastrous last-ditch SPAC offering, followed by brutal layoffs.īuzzFeed News’ closure - alongside a spate of other layoffs at media companies - marks the end of an era so recent that it doesn’t quite feel like history. In 2012, the small “web buzz” start-up started hiring reporters. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer Photo: Getty ImagesīuzzFeed, the archetypal new media company of the 2010s, announced last week that it was shutting down its news division.
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