BuzzFeed News
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
BuzzFeed News was the news division of BuzzFeed, founded in 2011 when Jonah Peretti hired Politico's Ben Smith as its first editor-in-chief to build a serious newsroom atop BuzzFeed's viral entertainment machine. It grew into one of the largest internet-native newsrooms, with a mix of hard reporting, investigations and political coverage alongside the quizzes and social content, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021. On 20 April 2023, Peretti announced in a company-wide memo that BuzzFeed News would be shut down as a standalone organization as part of a 15% workforce reduction, with news efforts concentrated in HuffPost instead.
02 / BuzzFeed News FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
BuzzFeed News was shuttered because the company could no longer afford it: CEO Jonah Peretti said in his April 2023 memo that he had overinvested in the news division, and that combined with rough years from the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech recession and a decelerating digital advertising market, made it impossible to financially support BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization. The social-platform traffic model the newsroom was built on was also eroding: fewer people were using social media and less news was being shared on those platforms, while algorithmic feeds made audiences harder to reach and monetize.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Reuters: BuzzFeed announced it would shutter BuzzFeed News as a standalone unit (with ~15% company-wide layoffs); HuffPost remained the primary news brand.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
BuzzFeed News was founded in 2011 when Jonah Peretti hired Politico's Ben Smith as editor-in-chief to build a real newsroom inside BuzzFeed.
- 02
It grew into one of the largest internet-native newsrooms, blending hard news, investigations and political reporting with viral quizzes and social content; it won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021.
- 03
The pandemic, the tech recession and a decelerating digital ad market battered the business, while the social-platform distribution model the newsroom depended on eroded - less news shared, fewer users, algorithmic feeds harder to monetize.
- 04
On 20 April 2023, Peretti announced in a company memo that BuzzFeed News would be shut down as a standalone organization, as part of a 15% workforce reduction across the company.
- 05
News efforts were concentrated in HuffPost - a profitable brand with a loyal audience less dependent on social platforms - with select roles opened at HuffPost and BuzzFeed Dot Com for BuzzFeed News staff.
- 06
The post-mortem: even award-winning journalism cannot survive on a platform-dependent, ad-funded model once the traffic and ad dollars dry up; Peretti admitted he had overinvested in a newsroom the business could not carry.
- 07
No reliable realized loss figure with clear subject, period and basis has been disclosed; layoffs and ad declines are not a loss.