In a move that brings to a close a pioneering era of online journalism, BuzzFeed is shutting down its namesake news division. After beginning as a quirky digital upstart and rising to a Pulitzer Prize-winning operation, it ultimately fell prey to the punishing economics of digital publishing that has laid low many of its peers.
It’s a sobering end for a publication once seen as a serious challenger to legacy media outlets that had been slow to adapt to the internet. It was also the final chapter of a venture capital-fueled digital period that left an indelible mark on how journalism is produced and consumed.
When BuzzFeed News was founded in 2011, in the run-up to the next year’s presidential election, it explored stories both slight and serious through listicles and click-bait-style headlines designed to go viral on social media. That mirrored the practice of its parent company, an internet laboratory of sorts that Jonah Peretti started in 2006.
The news operation soon drew attention for its ambitious, sharp reporting, however, and went on to open overseas bureaus and invest in investigative journalism. A number of alumni work for the more established news organizations it sought to disrupt, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News, and those newsrooms have embraced many of the practices that BuzzFeed pioneered in search of readers online.
But for all its accomplishments, the news division failed to make money, unable to square the reliance on digital advertising and the whims of social media traffic with the considerable costs of employing journalists around the world.
Ben Smith, the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, who left in 2020 to be a media columnist at The Times, said in an interview that he was “really sad” about the closing.
“I’m proud of the work that BuzzFeed News did, but I think this moment is part of the end of a whole era of media,” said Mr. Smith, who now runs the media outlet Semafor. “It’s the end of the marriage between social media and news.”
The closing of the news division is part of a broader round of job cuts at BuzzFeed, Mr. Peretti, the company’s chief executive, said in an email to employees on Thursday. The shutdown of the news division will affect about 60 of BuzzFeed’s roughly 1,200 employees, some of whom will be offered jobs at other parts of the company. The company will also cut 120 people across its business, content, tech and administrative teams.
The decision is the latest in a series of financial setbacks faced by digital media companies. Once the focus of enormous optimism and investment from industry titans including the Walt Disney Company and Comcast, new-media firms like BuzzFeed, Vox Media and Vice have failed to live up to their formerly lofty valuations.
Vox laid off 7 percent of its staff in January, blaming the uncertain economic climate. Vice, which has struggled financially for years, is desperately seeking a buyer. On Thursday, Insider announced that it was laying off 10 percent of its staff in the United States, a move the company attributed to broader economic headwinds.
BuzzFeed was part of a rising crop of media companies that capitalized on the growing dominance of tech platforms to deliver audiences to their stories, betting that profits would follow. BuzzFeed News peppered its headlines and boldface copy with phrases that would stop thumbs midscroll and was attuned to online conversations that many news organizations chose to ignore. Some of its traditional media competitors ultimately emulated BuzzFeed’s obsession with its readers’ habits, with editors glued to online dashboards created by companies like Chartbeat and Parse.ly to measure audience behavior.
But it was the tech titans, including Meta, Alphabet and ByteDance, that reaped most of the value from the huge audiences their platforms attracted, and the profits that those huge audiences suggested never materialized for BuzzFeed News. Digital advertising — a mainstay for digital publishing companies — is increasingly following young consumers to tech platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Rafat Ali, the founder and chief executive of the digital media company Skift, said the demise of BuzzFeed News was a stark reminder that news organizations risked becoming obsolete if they didn’t focus on developing multiple ways to make money.
“The age of disposable media is here,” Mr. Ali said. “When you build your business on a trend — in this case, social sharing — and that trend comes to an end, so does your business.”
In his memo, Mr. Peretti said he had “made the decision to overinvest” in BuzzFeed’s news division because he loved the work it produced but acknowledged that he had been slow to accept that social media platforms would not provide the financial support needed to make Buzzfeed News profitable.
“I’ve learned from these mistakes, and the team moving forward has learned from them as well,” Mr. Peretti wrote. “We know that the changes and improvements we are making today are necessary steps to building a better future.”
BuzzFeed will continue to publish news on HuffPost, another digital media pioneer, which BuzzFeed bought in 2020. Mr. Peretti said in his memo that HuffPost was profitable and less dependent on social platforms. He added that the company was moving forward “only with parts of the business that have demonstrated their ability to add to the company’s bottom line.”
The financial pressures on the news division had been apparent for years. In Mr. Smith’s coming book about the digital media era, “Traffic,” he writes that there had long been confusion “about what BuzzFeed News was for.” That became an issue during a contentious unionization drive at the company in 2019.
“I’ve come to regret encouraging Jonah to see our news division as a worthy enterprise that shouldn’t solely be evaluated as a business,” Mr. Smith writes. “Jonah resented what seemed like ingratitude from people whose work he so valued that he was approaching $100 million in losses.”
In better times, BuzzFeed News was a beacon for up-and-coming political and investigative journalists. The site won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for international reporting for stories that used satellite imagery to report on the Chinese government’s detention of Muslims.
While it won plaudits for its investigative work, becoming a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for an exposé into a corporate dispute-settlement process, it was also criticized for ignoring some of the norms followed by some of its more traditional competitors.
In 2017, BuzzFeed published a dossier full of unverified information about Donald J. Trump, who had just been elected president. The company’s decision to publish the dossier was met with opprobrium by some media critics, who said it was irresponsible to make the information public without extensive vetting. BuzzFeed and Mr. Smith, the editor at the time, defended the decision, saying the public had a right to information that was circulating at the highest levels of power in Washington.
That same year, BuzzFeed News was sued by a Russian executive named in the dossier, who said the news organization had defamed him when it published its story. BuzzFeed won the lawsuit, and Mr. Smith said in an essay for The Atlantic on Thursday that he would make the same decision to publish again.
Newsroom employees had been told not to go into the office on Thursday. Mr. Peretti held an all-hands video meeting after the announcement, with some members of management joining from a New York meeting room unfortunately named “Operation Doomsday,” according to a BuzzFeed staff member who was on the call and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
Mr. Peretti told the workers that he had failed them, the staff member said. “It is clearly a massive failure on my part, and I am deeply sorry for it,” Mr. Peretti said in the meeting, according to the person.
Mr. Peretti was asked if he would resign, and he said he was staying on at the company.
“I own this decision,” he said, according to the person in the meeting. “Nothing that is happening today is about the work of this team.”
Karolina Waclawiak, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, told employees in an email on Thursday that the newsroom had been making progress toward being profitable this year “only to be told — four months in — that we were out of time.”
A spokesperson for BuzzFeed said the company was planning to keep all of the stories published by the news division archived on its website in perpetuity.
BuzzFeed News signed off on Thursday in the somewhat irreverent fashion it became known for over the last decade.
“BuzzFeed News is logging off with a reminder that Blippi pooped on his friend,” read an Apple News push alert from BuzzFeed, alluding to a story by the outlet about an actor who plays a character from a prominent children’s show.
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