Ben Smith on the Death of BuzzFeed News

On the Media

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4.6 • 9.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The former Editor-in-Chief of BuzzFeed News on the end of an era of digital news, and what's next.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Brooke Gladstone and this is On The Media's Midweek podcast.
0:09.8	Stories of media layoffs and closures have been hardy perennial since the dawn of the
0:14.4	internet.
0:15.4	In 2023 alone, there have been layoffs at NBC, Fox and PR Spotify, Insider, ABC and Gennett.
0:24.6	Tom Lemon was fired from CNN and Tucker Carlson from Fox News.
0:30.0	Glocker closed for the second time and then in April.
0:33.3	The website Buzzfeed News is closing down.
0:37.0	Buzzfeed will lay off about 15% of its staff and it's going to completely shut down the
0:41.3	news unit itself.
0:42.3	It's going to amount to around 180 people losing their jobs.
0:46.2	The CEO, saying in an email to staff that he over-invested in Buzzfeed news because
0:51.1	he loved their work and mission so much.
0:53.8	That's why he's planning that he'd failed to hold the company to hire standards for profitability.
0:58.1	Just two weeks ago, Paramount announced that it's shutting down MTV News and just last
1:03.2	Monday, Vice filed for bankruptcy.
1:06.2	It kind of feels like the end of an era.
1:08.9	And these headlines don't even touch on the gutting of local news that's been long underway.
1:13.5	Over 360 local papers have closed since around the beginning of the pandemic alone.
1:20.4	There wasn't always so dire.
1:22.7	Buzzfeed was launched by Jonah Peretti amid the seemingly endless promise of digital news.
1:28.6	A lot of its early traffic came from a widget on the homepage of the Huffington Post, another
1:33.9	early internet news site.
	...

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