Founder Jonah Perreti pulls the plug on Buzzfeed News, the division of Buzzfeed.com that deals with quality online journalism.
Buzzfeed News, the news division of Buzzfeed.com that used to investigative journalism, is shutting down. That appears to be a memo from Buzzfeed CEO and founder Jonah Peretti to his staff The verge could view. Perreti also announced that Buzfeed will now work with 15 percent less staff – that’s 180 employees.
In 2021, Buzzfeed News was awarded a Pulitzer for a series of articles about the camps where the Chinese government detains the Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority in China. Buzzfeed News was also the first to report on the toxic working atmosphere behind the scenes at Ellen Degeneres’ talk show.
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Perreti cited the corona crisis as reasons for the disappearance of Buzzfeed News, but also the difficult economic situation, falling advertising revenues and changing reading habits. Perretti said he continued to invest in the loss-making Buzzfeed News because he was such a fan of its journalists’ work and mission. Now that support ends. Perreti suggested in the memo that there may not be a sustainable business model for quality online journalism.
From now on, the company will focus more heavily on HuffPost. Buzzfeed bought that rival news site in 2020. Some of the Buzzfeed News staff can work at HuffPost.
Buzzfeed has been experimenting with AI-driven articles and online quizzes for the past year. When Peretti announced at the end of January that the company wanted to collaborate with OpenAI, the parent company of the online text generator ChatGPT, Buzzfeed’s stock price rose sharply. In December, 12 percent of the workforce still had to be made redundant.
