[HN Gopher] BuzzFeed News is shutting down
___________________________________________________________________
BuzzFeed News is shutting down
Author : jbegley
Score : 364 points
Date : 2023-04-20 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thedailybeast.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thedailybeast.com)
| danso wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/everything
|
| [0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-news-wins-
| ge...
| thecosas wrote:
| This lead me to https://www.data-liberation-project.org/ which
| looks pretty great.
| gaws wrote:
| A shame JSV is a total creep.
| tivert wrote:
| > A shame JSV is a total creep.
|
| I take JSV means Jeremy Singer-Vine
| (https://www.jsvine.com/). Why do you think he's a "total
| creep"?
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Online communities should cultivate some discipline
| around those crowd-sourced background checks. Is the
| issue relevant to the project or topic? Where is the
| explanation and evidence? Can only people with a perfect
| record do anything now?
|
| Maybe the intention is to make half of HN go search for
| "<name> and <accusation>" to try and get the accusation
| auto-complete in future searches for <name>?
| instagraham wrote:
| They did some fantastic journalism. Completely changed my view
| of Buzzfeed.
|
| 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
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| kid64 wrote:
| The concept of debunking doesn't apply here, outside of the
| right-wing media bubble. The author estimated that 75% of
| the information was likely accurate. Is that what you think
| was debunked?
| briandear wrote:
| But none of it was accurate. A true fact-finding
| organization never assumes truth but they dig into
| finding it.
| kid64 wrote:
| Do you know which organization you're referring to? I
| suggest you read the reporting from the major outlets at
| the time, it's purely factual information about the
| dossier.
| hackernewds wrote:
| what is an example?
| addisonl wrote:
| They did a tell-all for a startup I was working at years
| ago and it was all accurate based on what I saw on the
| inside.
| positron6000 wrote:
| "After BuzzFeed News and ICIJ published a joint
| investigation, officials across the globe began taking
| action to finally thwart illicit financial activity and the
| criminals who move money through Western banks." -
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/fincen-files
|
| "Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their
| Own Customers" - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenda
| lltaggart/insuranc...
|
| "A Middle East Monarchy Hired American Ex-Soldiers To Kill
| Its Political Enemies. This Could Be The Future Of War." -
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/mercenaries
| -...
|
| "Secret NYPD Files: Officers Who Lie And Brutally Beat
| People Can Keep Their Jobs" - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/
| article/kendalltaggart/secret-n...
|
| "A Chicago Cop Is Accused Of Framing 51 People For Murder.
| Now, The Fight For Justice." - https://www.buzzfeednews.com
| /article/melissasegura/detective...
|
| "WWF Funds Guards Who Have Tortured And Killed People" -
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-
| wid...
| lelandfe wrote:
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jimderogatis/parents-
| to...
|
| Jim DeRogatis is the person most singly responsible for
| bringing justice to R Kelly.
| pwthornton wrote:
| 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.
| a4isms wrote:
| > It turns out chasing social media and search clicks for
| free ad-supported journalism is not a great business model.
|
| And it's an even worse business model if you rely on social
| media for your business model and one day Twitter (or any
| other platform eventually) decides that if you're going to
| make money sharecropping in their fields, you need to start
| turning over revenue to the landlord in the shape of
| checkmark payola for reach and gatekeeping fees for access
| to the API.
|
| It's the classic platform enshittification end-game: Social
| media embraced companies like Buzzfeed for providing the
| content that they used to build critical mass, then turned
| around and viewed them as ATMs to be plundered. Same story
| as app developers in walled gardens.
| dmreedy wrote:
| 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.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Looks like this is the last time I point out that this was
| always brand-laundering.
|
| So whenever buzzfeed is mentioned someone welll-akchuallys
| "buzzfeed news is a serious news outlet tho".
| throwaway202303 wrote:
| 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).
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| 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.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Ah, that's a shame. I came in here thinking I would celebrate.
| danso wrote:
| Well the future of cost-cutting BuzzFeed overall is far from
| solid:
|
| 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._
| bee_rider wrote:
| Now, I know what you're thinking. AI generated listicles?
| But keep in mind that human written listicles tend to be
| just as bland.
| rendall wrote:
| Same
| scythe wrote:
| I can add to that doom and gloom:
|
| >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,"
| iudqnolq wrote:
| You can move on to pointing out Teen Vogue. They've done some
| excellent serious coverage, including about abortion.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| 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.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Walter Duranty also won a Pulitzer for covering up Holodomor in
| Ukraine.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty?wprov=sfti1
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Interesting. I write many comments I expect to get downvoted.
| This wasn't one of them. Lots of Holodomor fans here.
| gpvos wrote:
| Don't comment about being downvoted. A downvoted comment
| with substance often will receive compensatory upvotes.
| stametseater wrote:
| 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.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| but pultzier was not always an industry award. back in the
| duranty days washingtone post directly contradicted nyt.
| codeflo wrote:
| Well, that's a colossal failure of branding if I ever saw one.
| Seriously, what were they thinking?
| jandrese wrote:
| This is what everybody asked and it was never clear why they
| didn't differentiate the brand more.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I think they counted on people in the comments section of
| every thread about BuzzFeed News bringing up the fact that
| they won a Pulitzer Prize once and that means it totally
| different from regular BuzzFeed.
| tivert wrote:
| I think the idea was to use BuzzFeed News to elevate the
| BuzzFeed brand.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Seems like they could have just pivoted buzzfeed.com to
| actual journalism and stop doing the culture war tabloid
| stuff altogether? Instead buzzfeednews.com links to
| buzzfeed.com all over the place with no obvious
| distinction between news and gossip
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/topic/twitter
| jandrese wrote:
| The tabloid gossip and listicles paid the bills for the
| journalism.
|
| Plus they would still have the problem where people see
| "Buzzfeed" and immediately turn away because they have a
| preconceived notion of what kind of content they produce.
| jandrese wrote:
| That's not how credibility works. It is very easy to lose
| credibility but creating it is a long and arduous
| process. One credible brand tied to a noncredible brand
| leaves you with two noncredible brands.
| tivert wrote:
| > That's not how credibility works. It is very easy to
| lose credibility but creating it is a long and arduous
| process. One credible brand tied to a noncredible brand
| leaves you with two noncredible brands.
|
| BuzzFeed (the listicle site) never had any credibility,
| so the only direction they had to go was up.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Who was behind that thought process... why did it need to
| be elevated? Was it even possible to do so? I think that
| answer to both of those is an obvious no. Somebody really
| liked the name they came up with, I guess.
| thestevesie wrote:
| 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.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Even if that was true (and I don't think it is), they broke
| some great stories and I would argue they were still a
| service to the world.
|
| I have no problem with extremist sites doing partisan hit
| pieces if they are good, worthy hit pieces.
| positron6000 wrote:
| what news outlets do you read?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| [flagged]
| aww_dang wrote:
| Pulitzer was a tabloid publisher and politician.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer#:~:text=which%.
| ..
|
| Perhaps the most infamous Pulitzer prize went to Walter
| Duranty for his efforts to cover up the Holodomor in the New
| York Times.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Literary_awards
| dralley wrote:
| 1619 was a series of essays written by different people. Many
| were very good and some were terrible.
| throwaway202303 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| 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.
| ar_lan wrote:
| 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.
| daveslash wrote:
| 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.
| nostromo wrote:
| Because the whole point was to improve the BuzzFeed brand.
| pinebox wrote:
| Sort of like moving your smelly dumpster in front of your
| classy restaurant to increase the dumpster's reputation.
| RajT88 wrote:
| This is a good metaphor, so let's run with it.
|
| It would certainly improve your reputation _among
| raccoons_.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| And now, the restaurant is on fire, while the dumpster is
| fine...
| JohnFen wrote:
| Which is what makes it a stupid idea. Credibility is hard
| to get, easy to lose. It seems obvious that the poor
| reputation of Buzzfeed would bring the news part down
| rather than the news bringing the rest of the operation up.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| 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.
|
| More here: https://www.axios.com/2021/11/14/steele-dossier-
| discredited-...
| pakyr wrote:
| From the day they published it, they included a disclaimer
| that the dossier contained
|
| > specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable
| allegations
|
| And that
|
| > The allegations are unverified, and the report contains
| errors.
|
| I don't really hold it against them that they published a
| document they had been given with a big disclaimer on it.
|
| As far as Semafor is concerned, I'm pretty sure SBF's
| investment was public record. Where did they fail to
| disclose it?
| gspencley wrote:
| 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.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| Thanks for this.
|
| 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.
| misnome wrote:
| > It's demise goes to show that humans do not want fact-
| finding journalism.
|
| Isn't it a more accurate description to say that this goes
| to show that if you dilute your fact-finding journalism
| brand with clickbait nonsense, then people will ignore all
| of it?
| briandear wrote:
| "At its finest?"
|
| The Steele Dossier was "good" journalism?
|
| It was partisan hackery.
|
| https://www.thewrap.com/buzzfeed-finally-updates-story-
| that-...
| throwaway202303 wrote:
| They mean main stream media voice of the elite reporting
| at its finest
| philippejara wrote:
| at its finest being very good doesn't mean that at it's
| worse shit didn't come out of it.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Curious what news organization you can think of that
| doesn't have a single miss. Bloomberg had "The Big Hack",
| the New York Post had the Hunter Biden emails, the New
| York Times basically invented a crime wave, etc.
| [deleted]
| JohnFen wrote:
| > It's demise goes to show that humans do not want fact-
| finding journalism.
|
| I don't think it shows that at all. What it shows is that
| if you take something good and slap a brand on it that
| people associate with crap, people will think your good
| thing is crap and avoid it, too.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _demise goes to show that humans do not want fact-finding
| journalism. Even highly paid humans like HN developers
| refuse to pay for journalism_
|
| Non sequitur. People didn't realise Buzzfeed News was fact-
| finding journalism because Buzzfeed proper was everything
| but. Plenty of people on HN pay for news, as evidenced by
| the constant complaining about paywalls.
| rc_mob wrote:
| Propublica is doing such good work, I'm glad to send them
| a monthly donation
| deckard1 wrote:
| People that don't know what BuzzFeed News is _definitely_
| do not know what ProPublica is. This thread is rather
| shocking to me.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Huh? I'm very familiar with ProPublica, but didn't know
| that Buzzfeed News was a legit journalistic organization.
| I just thought it was, you know, Buzzfeed's take on news.
| ar_lan wrote:
| I'd be curious on data for this - if that's actually
| true, or just your perception.
|
| Not wanting "BuzzFeed" to be someone's source of
| journalism is not the same thing as that person not
| wanting to consume high-quality journalism/news.
|
| That said, I could understand the argument that if
| someone is generally well-read in this world, they would
| definitely know BuzzFeed News was, for the most part, a
| separate entity. I can only speak for myself - I'm fairly
| happy with my mix of Propublica, The Economist, USA
| Today, and NYT, but I've also not really analyzed that
| mix much since 2019, and I definitely don't read
| everything all the time (it's too much to consume).
| ar_lan wrote:
| I don't know how you came out of my comment with this
| response.
|
| What I'm saying is there is already plenty of better (or
| just-as-good, or near-good) sources of journalism. I did
| not even know BuzzFeed News was _separate_ from BuzzFeed,
| so why would I waste my time even looking into them when:
|
| * There are already decent news outlets
|
| * My only perception of BuzzFeed is that their quality is
| extremely sub-par, which is _by their own doing_.
|
| In the competition for my attention, I'd rather lose out on
| a possible diamond in the rough that is BuzzFeed News, then
| subject myself to the far likelier possibility that
| BuzzFeed News was really just more "BuzzFeed".
|
| In this edge case, that filter is wrong, but ask yourself -
| if Fox News came out with a new source that was of
| Pulitzer-worthy quality and was honestly unbiased, would
| you still give it the time of day? I still wouldn't,
| because the chances it adds something of value higher than
| my current level of journalism consumption is much lower
| then the chances that this magical "Fox News" offshoot is
| actually something decent.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| You may be hoping for something that does not exist.
|
| Maybe just maybe Buzzfeed did both because in the end
| it's the only way that journalism has been able to
| survive.
|
| In the end you entertain and inform because to inform
| only means to go out of business.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer
|
| "In the 1890s the fierce competition between his World
| and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal caused
| both to develop the techniques of yellow journalism,
| which won over readers with sensationalism, sex, crime
| and graphic horrors. The wide appeal reached a million
| copies a day and opened the way to mass-circulation
| newspapers that depended on advertising revenue (rather
| than cover price or political party subsidies) and
| appealed to readers with multiple forms of news, gossip,
| entertainment and advertising.
|
| Pulitzer's name is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes
| established in 1917 as a result of his endowment to
| Columbia University. The prizes are given annually to
| recognize and reward excellence in American journalism,
| photography, literature, history, poetry, music, and
| drama. Pulitzer founded the Columbia School of Journalism
| by his philanthropic bequest; it opened in 1912."
| input_sh wrote:
| There's no money in investigative journalism.
|
| Good stories take months (sometimes years), so you need
| hundreds of good journalists to make good stories in a high
| enough frequency that people would even consider paying for
| a subscription.
|
| You're either chasing public grants (and people always
| question your impartiality), or you die. You can count on
| one hand the ones that have been in this game for longer
| than a decade and even then you'll have fingers to spare.
|
| Today we lost a great one.
|
| Disclaimer: I work for OCCRP.org which I would
| (subjectively) put in the same basket. No Pulitzer yet, but
| we got a Nobel Peace Prize nomination this year!
| p3rls wrote:
| Let's not kid ourselves, for every decent journalist in
| these organizations there's five useless ones who are
| primarily employed to remind us non-physicists of Murray
| Gell-Man
| kritiko wrote:
| To the extent that publications like The Atlantic have
| declined, I think it's because clickbait works, or at
| least it seems to if you're dependent on the online ads
| business model, so legacy publications have chosen to
| become more like Buzzfeed.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Anyone can nominate anyone for a Nobel Peace Prize.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think the most "negative toward the general populace"
| take I can get behind here is that our heuristic for
| "respectable journalistic institutions" is based too much
| on name-brands. I mean people could have skimmed BuzzFeed
| News and realized they were not BuzzFeed lists or whatever,
| and that's a point against us all, but it isn't that
| surprising.
|
| It doesn't really indicate that we don't want serious
| journalism, just that we're not really willing to give
| every service the benefit of the doubt.
| JohnFen wrote:
| From the general public's point of view, the entire point
| of a brand is that it can be used to quickly understand
| the quality of the product.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| I would venture to guess that a lot of HN readers pay for
| news from the various journalists on platforms like
| Substack.
| runnerup wrote:
| ProPublica
| JohnFen wrote:
| I always ignored Buzzfeed news as well, for the same reason.
| I had no idea that they weren't the same "quality" as
| Buzzfeed.
| [deleted]
| wmeredith wrote:
| 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.
|
| This thread is no different.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| It was an effort to build credibility for Buzzfeed as a
| whole, right? A mistake in retrospect but not an entirely
| stupid idea.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Yeah, news organizations weren't in such a fight for
| there lives when that idea/branding was conceived.
|
| But they really should have renamed it. Would that be so
| hard?
| hackmiester wrote:
| I literally ignored all BuzzFeed content so completely that
| I have never seen that conversation happen ever before. I
| only clicked this because it was about it shutting down.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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...
| spacemadness wrote:
| It's a pretty scathing omen for the ad run internet that this
| is the part that shuts down while their flaming dumpsterfire of
| a content mill lives on.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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.
| iamerroragent wrote:
| 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.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Is that just going to disappear when AI is so good at
| milling rage content that no publishers can compete?
|
| Why would someone choose to wade through a listicle when
| they can get their rage unfiltered and on tap?
| spacemadness wrote:
| Our ids tend to run wild on the internet, so it's not
| surprising. It is extremely disappointing that there is
| always someone willing to take advantage, but that is the
| story of humanity I suppose. My hope is somehow we are
| capable of creating something better than this.
| klodolph wrote:
| > More a comment on us as a species than anything else.
|
| I think this is less of a comment about us as a species and
| more a comment about the economic systems that we have in
| place. Our economic systems _used_ to support journalism.
| Tyrek wrote:
| Our economic systems used to be very bad at scaling. They
| also used to be very bad at incentivizing value-add
| economic activity. Which system do you want?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I don't want society to develop in the most economically
| advanced driveling pile of shit that ever existed.
| walleeee wrote:
| "it's just human nature" can be a powerfully self-
| fulfilling prophecy
|
| We ought to exercise what agency we have in shaping
| social systems, but not only this, we need to remind
| ourselves regularly that we _do_ have agency in order to
| exercise it
| JohnFen wrote:
| "The most common way people give up their power is by
| thinking they don't have any." -- Alice Walker
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > the ad run internet
|
| 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.
| jdworrells wrote:
| The early to mid 90's through the very early 2000's were a
| /real/ creative explosion, before the vultures descended on
| the Internet and took it in a revenue-seeking direction.
| Most netizens had personal webpages, chock full of their
| passions and sharing information. Now it's a vast wasteland
| of constantly regenerated rage-inducing content and vapid
| self-promotion and attention seeking. Our search engines
| have become ad businesses. Our "social media" only exists
| to siphon off our information and build dossiers on us to
| more precisely target ads to us and get us to buy worthless
| crap. There's been an explosion all right, but one more
| akin to a burst sewer pipe.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I am an Old. Pre-ads, before the <img> tag made someone
| out there think banners (and then animated banners, and
| then Flash, and then flash ads at the side of dancing
| silhouettes that sent your CPU fans whirring), this was
| still Someone Else's Hardware. Typically a university.
|
| Most of those old IRC networks ended in .edu, as a good
| example. We never really paid for what we got on the
| internet, it just switched from an "under the table" scam
| off of universities to ad-supported.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| The internet then was an elite group of people that had
| 1. Disposable income for computers (or access at
| University) 2. Disposable income for Internet (or access
| at University) 3. The ability to put together the skills
| to create the things you listed. The more I reflect on
| the changes the more classist I realize this
| statement/argument is (not making a moral judgement just
| highlighting the reality).
| officeplant wrote:
| As a fairly lower class rural kid I had internet in the
| late 90s. I was just lucky my dad decided to start up a
| local dialup ISP and sell internet to farmers.
| Mikushi wrote:
| > the same creative explosion
|
| What creative explosion? Trash news sites, social media?
| The world would be a better place without any of these.
| notacoward wrote:
| I challenge your axiom that there has been an ad-fueled
| creative explosion. Yes, there has been an explosion in
| _volume_ and perhaps in drama, but creativity specifically?
| Above and beyond what already existed in free, OSS, or
| subscription based media? A return to other models might
| mean less profits, fewer ultra-wealthy founders and VCs,
| but I 'm not at all convinced that it would lead to less
| creativity.
| dageshi wrote:
| There were a huge amounts of niche sites written to
| answer questions on niche topics. All with the aim of
| being helpful enough to get google to send them traffic
| they could monetise with ads. Many of these sites were
| peoples hobbies which they could further explore or even
| dedicate themselves to based on the income from their
| website.
|
| This wouldn't have happened without ads, no other
| alternative has ever been found that got the author of a
| website paid while not directly charging the reader.
|
| The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web
| without, hell without ads there probably wouldn't even be
| a search engine to find anything on the web and without a
| search engine nobody would be able to find anything of
| any use.
| notacoward wrote:
| > All with the aim of being helpful enough to get google
| to send them traffic
|
| All? That's such a ridiculous generalization that it's
| practically a lie. If that's all you remember, then I
| suggest that your experience has been too short and/or
| limited. Before Google even existed there were tons of
| sites that were there for reasons other than ads. (I've
| been involved with the internet since before it became
| public BTW, plus Usenet and other things before that, so
| I have some perspective.) Even after Google became the ad
| behemoth it is today, plenty of sites flourished while
| having nothing to do with it. I had my own blog from 2000
| until last year, moderately well known in some circles,
| but neither I nor most of the other bloggers I interacted
| with had anything to do with ads. There were forums
| without ads, e-commerce sites without ads (not counting
| their own), etc. The current situation, where everything
| seems to be a walled garden or infested with ads, is
| pretty recent ... and even now, there are plenty of sites
| that decline to play that game. Like the one we're having
| this conversation on.
| dageshi wrote:
| Well I got online around 98ish so I've been around for a
| while and seen close to around 25 years worth of
| development, which I'd say is the majority of the webs
| lifespan.
|
| And I re-iterate, whatever and however many sites there
| were knocking around on the early internet pale in
| comparison to the breadth of sites and information that
| came onto the web fueled by ads when people realised they
| could fund their hobbies and write about topics they
| loved at the same time.
|
| It's really very simple, if you can literally get paid to
| write on your website, you will write more. You will hire
| people to write with you. This is common sense and it
| will vastly outpace the output of the contingent who
| simply wish to write for the sake of it.
|
| Ads supercharged the webs development and I see nothing
| that could've replaced them, I say that as someone who's
| never been involved in the ad industry.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > It's really very simple, if you can literally get paid
| to write on your website, you will write more
|
| And most of what people write in order to get ad revenue
| is pure garbage. And even the stuff that isn't garbage is
| constrained by what advertisers approve of.
| notacoward wrote:
| > the breadth of sites and information that came onto the
| web fueled by ads
|
| Confuse correlation with causation much? The internet has
| certainly grown, but not just because of ads. In some
| ways it has _shrunk_ because of ads. Innumerable forums
| and blogs and even social-media sites like MySpace were
| shunted aside as VC- and ad-funded walled gardens like
| Facebook became dominant. That 's a _loss_ (and I say
| that as someone who worked at Facebook for a while). As I
| said, the volume has increased but the creativity hasn
| 't. I'll take ten truly creative people over a hundred
| YouTube or TikTok "influencer" types any day.
|
| > if you can literally get paid to write on your website,
| you will write more. You will hire people to write with
| you. This is common sense
|
| It makes me sad when I see people who _can 't even
| imagine_ a motive other than profit. Seems particularly
| common here, and I've learned not to engage with such.
| Have a nice day.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > All with the aim of being helpful enough to get google
| to send them traffic they could monetise with ads.
|
| You're not going back far enough. The heyday for the web
| predated Google.
|
| > The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web
| without
|
| This does not at all comport with what I've experienced.
| epgui wrote:
| Public funding works really well in functional countries.
| briandear wrote:
| How often does public funded media investigate those
| funding them?
| epgui wrote:
| Literally all the time, in functional administrative
| systems.
|
| You have to think a little harder than "where the funding
| comes from" (yes that's important, everyone knows it's
| important to follow the money... but it's not the full
| picture). Sophisticated administrative structures can
| insulate you against certain risks by altering how power
| is normally or naturally distributed. When you design
| these systems, you create the accountability mechanisms
| that you want: almost anything is possible.
|
| Similarly, when issues come up with existing structures,
| the answer doesn't have to be an ideological pole (in
| whichever direction). The most reasonable answer is
| usually just to tweak the administrative structures /
| accountability mechanisms. In other words, you don't have
| to try and reason about this in purely theoretical, vague
| terms: it's a very practical and concrete problem that
| can have as much context and nuance as you want.
|
| That doesn't mean it's easy, but I hate that almost
| everyone seems to not even spend a minute being creative.
| Similarly, I hate how people confuse the issue of "is the
| media free to editorialize" with "do I agree with this
| piece of editorial content", which is >90% of the
| criticism I seem to see in general.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I mean, I love me some BBC, but there are plenty of
| publicly funded media outlets that are essentially just
| state propaganda. I don't think public funding is a
| panacea.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| No, being a functional country is the panacea
| epgui wrote:
| It's _obviously_ not a panacea, but it solves or can
| solve a specific set of problems.
|
| For anyone that has trouble imagining what I could
| possibly be talking about, there are some examples
| discussed here [1].
|
| [1] https://www.international.gc.ca/world-
| monde/issues_developme...
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Aren't subscriptions at scale a viable model?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes. There exist many successful subscription models.
| That the are successful proves the idea is a viable one.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| that question has been downvoted without comments?
|
| people who contribute want to know the thoughts and
| insights of others, so comment!
| coldpie wrote:
| Maybe. The catch-22 of this is that subscription models
| more-or-less can't work while ad-based business models
| exist. If someone can profit by taking your paywalled
| content, slapping ads on it, and putting that up on a
| free site, then someone will do that, destroying your
| business model.
|
| We need to destroy ads as a viable business model before
| we can even try exploring other models. Installing an ad
| blocker is ethical.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > The catch-22 of this is that subscription models more-
| or-less can't work while ad-based business models exist.
|
| I suspect this dynamic also applies to software,
| including, perhaps counterintuitively, _FOSS_ software.
| "Free" (but ad-supported) competes for attention with
| both paid and free (actually free). Interest in
| developing FOSS is lower, I would wager, when interest in
| _using_ FOSS is lower, so we likely get less and worse
| FOSS in a world with lots of ad-supported (mostly
| spyware) software, than one without it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| We need to stop calling ad-supported stuff "free".
| Because it's certainly not. You're just paying with a
| different currency.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Vanishingly little of the "creative explosion" has made the
| creators meaningful amounts of money. A _fuckton_ of that
| was going on well before there was much money in Web ads,
| period.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think the ad ecosystem has _decreased_ quality and
| creativity on the internet, not increased it.
| anononaut wrote:
| If what we're seeing now is the logical outcome of this
| "creative explosion," I prefer no alternative. I would be
| willing to sacrifice quantity for quality at this point.
| Any sort of reversion of what it used to be, driven
| scholars, hobbyists, tech nerds, entrepreneurs, and so
| forth, would be welcome. Like back in the '00s. If you have
| something to say, by God say it, but generating or
| aggregating nonsense in order to farm clicks should die.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How will you convince the majority of the population
| reading Buzzfeed listicles?
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| I don't think there's anything to be done about this, at
| least apart from letting this transparently monstrous era
| of the internet slowly tear itself apart.
|
| It's unfortunate the internet went this way, but as you
| said, it happened because people "wanted" it to.
|
| Oh. Well.
| anononaut wrote:
| I would not. Let them rot on the vine.
| klyrs wrote:
| A... listicle... about how to make the internet a better
| place?
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| You can get that by using Gemini protocol sites alone.
| There's no reason to spend time on things you dislike.
| mysterydip wrote:
| The reason will shock you!
| geephroh wrote:
| [golf clap]
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| 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."
|
| 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...
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| That may be why people in this thread love them so much -
| confirms their priors and defends their idols
| openknot wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-buzzfeed-
| reporter-e...
| jhp123 wrote:
| Buzzfeed News' side of this controversy can be found here,
| with some additional details from the final Mueller report:
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bensmith/how-we-
| charact...
|
| My take is that Mueller was trying so hard not to find
| Trump guilty that he bent over backwards to interpret
| Cohen's testimony in an unrealistically benign light,
| splitting hairs over whether Trump's coaching amounted to
| "directing" or not.
| cragfar wrote:
| The whole "Buzzfeed News is actually good" was pushed after
| they released the Trump dossier (which multiple other news
| orgs passed on) while including a statement basically
| saying "we haven't corroborated any of this, good luck".
| They were basically used as a dumping ground for "sources
| close to the matter" journalism which WaPo and CNN then
| could use as a source to make it look more legitimate (same
| with business insider).
| Marsymars wrote:
| > The whole "Buzzfeed News is actually good" was pushed
|
| That most certainly wasn't when that push started.
|
| e.g. Here's a piece from Reuters in 2015, prior to Trump,
| "FEATURE-Beyond cute cats: How BuzzFeed is reinventing
| itself": https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-media-
| buzzfeed-idUSL2N0L...
| briandear wrote:
| They also published the fraudulent Steele Dossier. As an
| objective news source, they were typically partisan garbage.
| Perhaps they should have investigated the Clinton campaign's
| involvement in that Dossier and how they were subsequently
| fined by the FEC for accounting for that Dossier as a "legal
| expense."
|
| As far as the Pulitzers -- until they revoke the Pulitzer for
| the fraudulent "Russian Collusion" story, they have zero
| credibility anymore. https://www.heritage.org/civil-
| society/commentary/will-new-y...
| rc_mob wrote:
| you complain about partisan garbage and then link to the
| partisan garbage at heritage.org
|
| interesting tactic
| bee_rider wrote:
| Interesting that left-wing partisan rags tend to go out of
| business while right-wing partisan rags do fine.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > 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.
| nailer wrote:
| 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.
| mynameishere wrote:
| Their Pulitzer was for being a left-wing company accusing
| another left-wing company of being insufficiently left-wing.
| Chutzpah.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| No, it was for investigating the Chinese government's mass
| detention of Muslims:
|
| https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/megha-rajagopalan-alison-
| ki...
| kej wrote:
| Their Pulitzer [0] was for this series [1] about China's
| detention of Uighur Muslims.
|
| [0] https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/megha-rajagopalan-
| alison-ki... [1]
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-
| inter...
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Journalism is expensive. Has anybody really figured out
| sustainable funding for it?
| legitster wrote:
| Your local newspaper subscription (physical or online) should
| come bundled with a NYTimes/WSJ/WP subscription.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| The New London Day [0] is apparently held in a public trust
| [1].
|
| I'm not clear if that totally covers its operational costs, but
| it sounds like a good start.
|
| [0] https://www.theday.com/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_(New_London)
| seanhunter wrote:
| It's hard. The guardian newspaper in the UK is funded by a
| trust that was endowed by one rich dude
| https://www.theguardian.com/about
| throwaway049 wrote:
| [flagged]
| Stevvo wrote:
| There's more than four people on the internet, you know?
| throwaway049 wrote:
| Sure, but Chiles has friends in high places!
| Mizza wrote:
| Adrian Chiles is a midwit savant and I cherish him.
| secondcoming wrote:
| [flagged]
| SllX wrote:
| Yes, the same as before: subscriptions and ads. There's just
| less direct competition within the industry for those still
| standing and a lot more competition from outside of the
| industry for the time and money that would have gone to
| journalism.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > Journalism is expensive
|
| Is it? Why? Journalists don't make a lot of money. A lot of
| them are trust fund babies because you can't write for the New
| York Times and live in NY without outside help.
| Pxtl wrote:
| 1) Government (until Musk decides he hates you all).
|
| 2) Find a rich patron.
|
| 3) Disinformation for hire.
|
| or a combination of all 3.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Good journalism will alway be in demand.
|
| I personally like Breaking Points and I am happy to pay for it.
| [1]
|
| You wont find good journalism in NYT and Washington Post
| anymore bc they have not figured out that high quality,
| subscriber-only content is more sustainable than advertising.
| You will increasingly find good journalism if you subscribe to
| individual journalists that are not beholden to their
| advertisers.
|
| [1] https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/
| version_five wrote:
| Is the Economist profitable?
|
| That's one example that comes to mind of a potentially viable
| model - less clickbait, shorter news cycle, more depth, with a
| print option.
|
| Online-only news has been a race to the bottom, I'd guess that
| profitability is more likely at the higher end.
| [deleted]
| SllX wrote:
| Yes[1]. As are organizations like the Wall Street Journal,
| Financial Times, Reuters, the New York Times, Gannett, and
| Hearst Communications.
|
| [1]: https://www.economistgroup.com/results
| uncertainrhymes wrote:
| That is a good list -- interestingly, only Gannett (USA
| Today, amongst many other papers) and Reuters don't have
| paywalls.
|
| That isn't a criticism, just recognition that even though
| the other sites are still ad supported, that alone isn't
| enough.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Gannett's many local newspapers definitely have paywalls.
|
| They've also been pretty unprofitable in recent years.
| https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GCI/earnings
| dc-programmer wrote:
| They don't really do investigative journalism though. Most of
| their articles are summary + opinion
| SN76477 wrote:
| Freakonomics I believe it was, had a podcast on how Journalism
| is a public service. Meaning, it should be funded by grants.
|
| Why and how is it a public service? I wish I could remember the
| episode.
|
| 1. When journalists investigate their local politicians it
| helps keep those politicians clean.
|
| 2. Strong local papers and journalism is taken into account by
| loan officers who in turn save the municipalities tons of money
| by shaving off a percentage of a loan. This is massive returns
| when it takes 20million to build a local high schools,
| Libraries, etc.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| It was sustainable until Google eviscerated them.
| thestevesie wrote:
| cute talking point. but it actually turns out that Google was
| helping them. see the countries that have implemented laws
| demanding that Google pay news outlets, the news outlets got
| dropped and their traffic plummeted, so they demanding things
| go back the way they were before
|
| Of course, critical analysis is beyond the average know-it-
| all who gets their opinions from headlines with no real
| analysis
| positron6000 wrote:
| citation?
| criddell wrote:
| What about Craigslist killing classified ads?
| mfer wrote:
| Some thoughts...
|
| First, you need organizations interested in sustainable and not
| more and more shareholder returns. Sustainable is a different
| way to look at the financial planning.
|
| Second, newspapers have long been funded by ads. But, the
| current structure of the ad business puts most of the profits
| in the pockets of the middlemen. Newspapers would need to re-
| evaluate ads and how to functionally be successful.
|
| Third, you only need so many national or international level
| news organizations. Local news brings a of opportunity.
| Investment there may be worth while (I'd like to think so).
|
| Basically, we need to change the way we think about it.
| Innovation.
| coldpie wrote:
| > Third, you only need so many national or international
| level news organizations. Local news brings a of opportunity.
| Investment there may be worth while (I'd like to think so).
|
| Yeah, I agree. Lots of local papers have been bought up and
| hollowed out by national organizations. I think there's a lot
| of opportunity there. Smaller & more focused is the key. One
| reason I don't pay for the big news outlets, and even the
| local big-name newspapers, is because they are owned by and
| employ some really disgusting people, who I don't want to
| financially support. The bigger you are, the more likely that
| is to happen. More choice of many smaller outlets means you
| can be choosier.
|
| As a single example, here in the Twin Cities a handful of
| journalists are trying out the model at Racket[1]. They're
| mostly reader-funded, and because they're not doing big
| national stories, they don't need a shitload of subscribers
| or scummy ad money to keep the lights on. There's some hope
| to be found here.
|
| [1] A look at their first year of finances:
| https://racketmn.com/rackets-year-in-review-
| august-2021-july...
| danso wrote:
| Unlike many news orgs, ProPublica's funding has managed to stay
| solid during the post-President Trump years -- $60M according
| to their 2021 990, vs. $51M in 2019. I worked there in its
| first years, when nearly its entire $10M budget came from its
| founding donor.
|
| But PP, along with Axios and Politico, is an exception that
| proves the rule. The NYT is probably the only legacy news org
| that has an optimistic long-term future, due to its last-man-
| standing position and diversification into tech and games.
|
| (TV news is a different situation, obviously Fox News has done
| very well. CNN had major cuts during the Discovery-Warner
| merger, but I don't think they're on a downward spiral)
|
| https://www.propublica.org/reports
|
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/142...
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| https://assets-c3.propublica.org/pdf/reports/2022-Annual-
| Rep...
|
| Page 43:
|
| - 5.8 million monthly page views
|
| - 506,544 newsletter subscribers
|
| Page 44:
|
| - 2022 revenue $42 million
|
| - Online donations $4.3 million
|
| - The rest is grants and gifts
|
| - Expenses $40.2
|
| This is... not good at all.. it is basically a tiny blog that
| runs 90% on donations from a few rich people. I've seen
| single tweets with more views than what they get in a month,
| propublica sadly can't be sustainable for much longer I
| wouldn't think.
|
| This subject has been giving me anxiety since about 2006.
| Nothing seems to stem the decline and I am scared what kind
| of world we will end up in soon as a result.
| danso wrote:
| Their business model isn't based on website CPM, but on
| producing "impact" that gets them recognition and
| appreciation. Their recent stories on Clarence Thomas [0]
| dominated the news cycle last week. Even if the website
| story page got just 1M hits, far more people saw the story
| via other media outlets and government officials citing it.
| When PP puts out fundraising pitches, the Thomas story will
| be a highlight for this year.
|
| It's worth noting that investigative work has _always_ been
| like this. Even before news orgs had web analytics, they
| knew that a multi-month investigation into government
| spending /corruption might be a few thousand or just
| hundred readers, but as long as those readers included
| people in positions of power and influence -- e.g. a member
| of congress who can call for a congressional hearing --
| then that boosts the newspaper brand and influence as much
| as any popular story.
|
| PP focuses on investigative work rather than general news.
| It doesn't publish frequently enough, or about any specific
| topic, to drive regular annual readership (i.e.
| subscribers) -- I doubt there are many people who'd check
| PP's homepage on a daily or even weekly basis. So, better
| to attract charitable foundation grants and small donor
| contributions than to do a subscriber paywall.
|
| [0] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-
| scotus-un...
| jandrese wrote:
| Fox News has done very well because they aren't a journalism
| organization. They just repeat what their audience wants to
| hear and laugh all the way to the bank. If what they're
| talking about is in any way related to the truth it is
| entirely coincidental. They have in multiple lawsuits now
| argued that they are not a news organization and can not be
| held to any journalistic standards.
|
| Real journalism is difficult and ultimately expensive.
| Telling people what they want to hear is cheap and easy.
| aww_dang wrote:
| Journalism is largely partisan on all sides. Where
| partisans claim otherwise, they cite sources which adhere
| to their own biases.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| > Real journalism is difficult and ultimately expensive.
|
| I'm not certain that that's the case, at least in Canada.
|
| Time and time again, much of the lowest-quality
| reporting/journalism I've seen has been from the largest
| Canadian news organizations that have significant resources
| at their disposal.
|
| On the other hand, most of the best journalism I've seen
| has been from the organizations that are far smaller, and
| with far fewer resources.
|
| It has even gotten to the point where relatively average
| individuals who are merely live streaming or sharing
| videos/photos of events end up providing more detailed,
| representative, objective, and timelier reporting than the
| large news organizations.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Difficulty and expense being a requirement for real
| journalism doesn't mean that low-quality journalism can't
| also be expensive.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > Fox News has done very well because they aren't a
| journalism organization. They just repeat what their
| audience wants to hear and laugh all the way to the bank.
|
| This could be stated for all news organizations, especially
| those that claim to be impartial on paper. You could argue
| Fox News is worse, but don't pretend that the _New York
| Times_ or _Washington Post_ don 't have a slant - or a 30
| degree angle. Especially after the Nicholas Sandmann
| debacle in which they paid settlements for defamation. Or
| another example, MSNBC was banned from the Rittenhouse
| trial after being caught following the Jury Bus.
| jandrese wrote:
| It could be said that free markets are bad for
| journalism. Markets optimize for cost, so if you can
| create a product that looks like journalism but is less
| expensive to produce, it is likely to be the winner in a
| market system.
|
| This is why it is fascinating to watch what happens to
| experiments like NPR, although even in that case it was
| only a partial success.
| [deleted]
| briandear wrote:
| Create content people are willing to pay for. Most national
| level reporting is simply partisan garbage. They find stories
| to support an agenda rather than reporting stories without an
| agenda. Everyone is so jaded because every story has an agenda.
| For example, how many stories about Trump finances have been
| written by mainstream outlets? Countless. How many stories
| about Biden's finances? Very few -- unless they are right wing
| outlets. Is any journalist digging into the fact that we have
| US soldiers in direct combat in Ukraine? Has any outlet dug
| into violations of the War Powers Act? How many outlets have
| dug deeply into the corruption of Houston city and county
| government? How many stories about corruption in municipal
| initiatives? Garbage contracts? Or how congressmen are paying
| consulting companies that hire their spouses for no-show jobs?
| (As in the case of Dan Crenshaw.) How many news outlets have
| done anything in depth about election irregularities other than
| simply writing stories that claim it doesn't happen? How many
| news outlets have written stories about Covid corruption?
| Pfizer corruption? Vaccine research lies?
|
| Very few. But we know all about Trump's dealings with porn
| stars.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| We've been working on it for https://forth.news -- essentially
| a newsfeed for news.
|
| The thinking is that in the old days, when you had a print
| newspaper, there were ads and articles, but they were
| completely decoupled. You could read an article, or just the
| headline, or just glance at a photo, but regardless, you would
| see the ads. Now, of course, you have to decide to click
| through.
|
| BUT -- and this is the key part -- the newspaper-style ads
| still exist, they just exist upstream in the flow, and giving
| the revenue to the aggregators, not the people doing the
| reporting. (It also leads to incredibly misaligned incentives
| between the aggregators and the publishers, leading to things
| like clickbait...)
|
| Our hope is to be able to close that loop, share the revenue
| from in-feed ads with the reporting partners, and try to get
| away from the Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc model.
| aww_dang wrote:
| One reader's truths are the next reader's debunked
| misinformation. The next reader's sacred news outlet is a
| propaganda outlet for someone else.
|
| I know people like their favorite news outlets. They'll swear by
| the legitimacy of the reportage. Others dispute the same. Why
| bother disputing it here?
|
| Everyone has an opinion. Many will share their thoughts for free
| online. The value add of journalism isn't there anymore. I can
| click through to vapid takes all day. Few readers have the
| attention span to consume more than a paragraph at most.
|
| Pulitzer was a tabloid publisher, political activist and later
| politician. Who really cares about these awards? It isn't a
| sports league play-off or a golden cup. It is an appeal to
| authority.
|
| Muckraking has never been cheaper to achieve or consume.
| Inflammatory content has always grabbed eyeballs. Now those
| eyeballs have even more inflammatory, muckraking, outrage
| inducing content pursuing them.
|
| If trends continue, soap-boxers will need to pay their audience.
| Meanwhile traditional journalists are locking themselves behind
| paywalls, auto-play videos, and 20mb page weights. If you've read
| this far, please invoice me for 2 cents.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| [flagged]
| Z7YCx5ieof4Std wrote:
| - Furthermore, Peretti told the remaining staff that he would be
| focusing more of the company's energy going forward on AI -
|
| Here we go. AI generated content. At this moment it's not there
| yet. Going forward on AI is as dumb as removing (nude)images on
| imgur.
| clarle wrote:
| > 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.
| notatoad wrote:
| It's a slightly friendlier way of telling your staff "chatGPT
| is going to replace most of your jobs"
| jackvezkovic wrote:
| actually, I think the guy knows exactly what it means: automate
| stuff with AI and replace jobs
| hackernewds wrote:
| 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
|
| first it was EVs, now it's AI
| classified wrote:
| Are economists still claiming the market is rational? This is
| proof to the contrary.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Whats the AMC playbook?
| lisasays wrote:
| 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.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| Or worse, they've found they can point an AI bot at other news
| organizations articles and plagiarize them without any effort.
| alexander-wilms wrote:
| [flagged]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| [flagged]
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| And BuzzFeed will be delisted from the Nasdaq within months at
| this pace.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Wonder if they used the Vaulter playbook
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnYVH_Rrp00
| bananapub wrote:
| 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]
|
| [0]:
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/heidiblake/17-explosive...
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| [flagged]
| n4r9 wrote:
| The linked articles appear to refer to "BuzzFeed" rather than
| "BuzzFeed News". I wonder if you caught the topmost post
| which points out they're different?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35641611
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| If you read the actual sources used in the comment, they
| are referring to BuzzFeed News, not BuzzFeed the tabloid.
| The FAIR specifically calls this out and says the large
| majority of articles assessed were from the News division.
| The Steele Dossier incident denounced by WaPo, FAIR, and
| other Pulitzer-prize-winning left-wing journalists, was
| also the News division. Ryan Broderick was a News division
| scandal. None of the sources in the comment address the
| tabloid side.
| tootie wrote:
| The business was based around Ben Smith and it was downhill
| when he left. His new jam is Semafor which is also really good.
| pcurve wrote:
| Had no idea they went public.
|
| https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BZFD:NASDAQ
|
| The finance trend is going south. :-/
| drak0n1c wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://fortune.com/2019/02/13/buzzfeed-union-layoffs/
|
| https://www.nyguild.org/front-page-details/buzzfeed-news-uni...
| SilverBirch wrote:
| 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.
| pcurve wrote:
| ah.. thanks for the detailed explanation. That's unfortunate.
| :-/
| majani wrote:
| Jesus Christ, and this was at the height of the covid bubble.
| Faith in content sites is currently at rock bottom
| imwillofficial wrote:
| [flagged]
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| riadsila wrote:
| https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1649066484277051394
| majani wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| kaliszad wrote:
| Oh no, my joke registration of busfeetnews.com was totally in
| vain. :-(
| notatoad wrote:
| 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.
| i80and wrote:
| 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.
|
| "Funny" how it panned out.
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| notatoad wrote:
| i followed a bunch of buzzfeed news people on twitter
| during their heyday and always got the impression that a
| lot of it was a vanity thing to prove that buzzfeed could
| do real news. picking a name that wasn't intentionally
| buzzfeed-y would have been admitting defeat.
| robswc wrote:
| This is a genuine question and its going to sound silly and
| offensive but how much "news" do we actually need?
|
| 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.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| _> 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.
| robswc wrote:
| >This is kind of like saying "I have a slight bias against
| maps because one sent me in the wrong direction."
|
| 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.
| Clubber wrote:
| I stopped watching news for the most part as well. If
| anything is important enough for me to know, someone will
| tell me, guaranteed.
|
| 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.
| robswc wrote:
| >someone will tell me, guaranteed.
|
| Exactly. I'm not suggesting everyone be uninformed... just
| that they don't need to be informed about the majority of
| what is considered "news" these days.
|
| >Most of it is not even news, it's fear peddling.
|
| Wow! Not even a joke. I just went to what CNN considers
| relevant "United States" news and this is the page:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230420200421/https://www.cnn.
| c...
|
| Half of the articles are about random killings or violence.
| I don't see anything positive to come from visiting that
| page.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Humans already did a great job at turning almost all
| information online into pure noise and now we're enlisting AIs
| to help cover the last stretch.
| rvz wrote:
| [flagged]
| danso wrote:
| Buzzfeed is already using GPT to generate listicles and
| quizzes:
|
| https://futurism.com/buzzfeed-publishing-articles-by-ai
|
| This announcement is about Buzzfeed News, the investigative
| division which was already facing cuts last year:
|
| https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/buzzfeed-news-editors-...
| rvz wrote:
| That is even worse.
|
| Journalists still replaced and offshored to AI generated
| articles and clickbait. What would take 15 journalists would
| now take one manager to generate these articles and quizzes.
| It doesn't really help them at all.
|
| Out goes investigative journalists, in comes AI generated
| click bait at scale.
| throwaway049 wrote:
| Manager? A script and a chronjob should cover it.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I don't care who does it, same shit either way.
| flippinburgers wrote:
| The only thing that comes to mind is that the journalists
| should probably learn to code.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| That's the point. The "data science" enshittening won the
| battle over real journalism.
| Eumenes wrote:
| [flagged]
| spraveenitpro wrote:
| [dead]
| guender wrote:
| [dead]
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