[PLUG-TALK] The Corner Newsletter: The Death of BuzzFeed News (fwd)

Fri Apr 28 16:11:36 UTC 2023

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Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we explore how Big Tech behemoths have
always controlled the destiny of digital media outlets like BuzzFeed News,
which shut down last week.

Closure of Buzzfeed News Shows How Big Tech’s Business Model is Still
Killing Good Journalism

Karina Montoya

Last week, BuzzFeed announced it  will shut down
[https://www.msnbc.com/jose-diaz-balart/watch/buzzfeed-news-to-shut-down-170814533772]
BuzzFeed News
[https://www.msnbc.com/jose-diaz-balart/watch/buzzfeed-news-to-shut-down-170814533772],
the clickbait-driven digital newsroom that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for
international reporting. The decision is part of broader layoffs to cut 15
percent of the company’s workforce, which includes the HuffPost, Tasty,
Complex, and First We Feast.

In  a letter [https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1649068767924695040] to
employees, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti lists several challenges that led to
the closure of BuzzFeed News. Among them stands out that he “overspent” on
investigative reporting by BuzzFeed News, and that he was “slow to accept
that big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support
required for premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media.”

The rise and fall of BuzzFeed News is a clear example of how Big Tech
monopolies have always had the upper hand in running the internet. Perhaps
the big lesson of this story is that during the evolution of BuzzFeed News a
key market transformation was ignored: the growing dominance of Google’s and
Facebook’s business models across the web. Facing these tech giants, whose
every move buttressed their monopoly power, newsrooms never stood a chance.

Let’s recall how BuzzFeed News was born. Like many new digital-first
newsrooms during the 2010s in the U.S. and across the world, media
executives were trying to maximize web traffic, in a bid to get more
eyeballs through social media that they could then turn into an advertising
profit. At first, quizzes, cat videos, and memes were turned into ‘listicle’
headlines and took over the feeds of Facebook users. “Native advertising” –
advertising passing as headline news –  was born.

Peretti’s approach collided with legacy media transitioning to digital. Wall
Street Journal editor Gerard Baker  famously decried
[https://www.politico.com/media/story/2013/09/wall-street-journal-editor-gerard-baker-decries-native-advertising-as-a-faustian-pact-001773/]
the type of virality and advertising BuzzFeed News pushed to make revenues.

At the same time, BuzzFeed News founding editor-in-chief Ben Smith was
grappling with building a newsroom with “journalistic credibility.” By 2014,
he had realized that would also mean sacrificing traffic, as  Wired
[https://www.wired.co.uk/article/buzzfeed]  reported that year
[https://www.wired.co.uk/article/buzzfeed]. Ultimately, his efforts earned
BuzzFeed News many awards until  his departure
[https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/28/media/ben-smith-buzzfeed-new-york-times/index.html]
in 2020. But all along, both Peretti and Smith were battling bigger powers
that were gobbling up the internet.

The 2010s, after all, was also the decade when Google and Facebook started
consolidating various key digital platforms. Search, video streaming, social
media, email, digital advertising, and mobile were all starting to fall into
the hands of those same two giants. Facebook, for example, launched a series
of products that promised to be the “next big thing” for online journalism:
Facebook News Tab, Facebook Video, and Instant Articles, to name a few. With
all that, it disproportionately influenced what newsrooms produced.

By 2018, it was becoming clear that social media had developed the power to
determine the destinies of even the largest of news publishers. As Nick
Thompson and Fred Vogelstein  wrote on
[https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell/]
Wired
[https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell/]
in February of that year
[https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell/],
“Every publisher knows that, at best, they are sharecroppers on Facebook’s
massive industrial farm […] If Facebook wanted to, it could quietly turn any
number of dials that would harm a publisher – by manipulating its traffic,
its ad network, or its readers.”

In June of 2018, both the New York Times and NewsCorp were willing to speak
out in public about the threat, at an Open Markets Institute conference
titled “ Breaking
[https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications/event-6-12-2018]  the
News: Free Speech & Democracy in the Age of Platform Monopoly
[https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications/event-6-12-2018].”

In response, Facebook simply downgraded the relevance of all news that
showed on Facebook users’ feeds, unilaterally deciding to favor content
posted or liked by friends and family. Perhaps even more insidiously,
Facebook started to  funnel special payments
[https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/06/27/is-facebook-buying-off-the-new-york-times/]
to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and a few other
highly influential publishers, at the expense of smaller and upstart
journalism shops.

BuzzFeed will now revamp its news efforts on the HuffPost because — Peretti
claims — it still has a loyal audience less dependent on social media.
Smith, co-founder of the publication  Semafor [https://www.semafor.com/],
now advocates for a “post-social media” vision for journalism. About the
closure of BuzzFeed News,  Smith wrote
[https://www.semafor.com/article/04/20/2023/the-end-of-the-buzzfeed-era-in-news]
it “signals a vast shift in digital media that those of us who live inside
it are feeling intensely right now, the end of one era and the beginning of
another.”

What remains to be seen is whether working journalists — and their readers —
will find this new period any easier than the last. Or whether even harder
times are in the offing.

Open Markets-Led Coalition Urges Complete Ban on Noncompetes and Similar
Contracts

A coalition of 50 civil society groups led by the Open Markets Institute
submitted a joint  comment
[https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications/50-labor-public-interest-groups-led-by-open-markets-support-a-complete-ban-on-non-competes-similar-contracts]
to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) calling on the agency to close any
loopholes when it makes a final ruling on noncompete clauses. The comment
explains that functionally equivalent restraints like training repayment
agreement provisions, or TRAPs, also lock workers in place. Open Markets
Legal director Sandeep Vaheesan this week also published an opinion piece in
The Washington Post
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/13/noncompete-agreements-worker-restrictions-employers/]calling
on the FTC to ban TRAPs and other workarounds. Any failure to do so,
Vaheesan wrote, “would render the FTC’s admirable initiative all for
naught.” Read the comment  here
[http://chrome-extension://bdfcnmeidppjeaggnmidamkiddifkdib/viewer.html?file=https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e449c8c3ef68d752f3e70dc/t/643ffe0a45adfd6aab38402d/1681915402483/Coalition+Comment+to+FTC+re+Non-Compete+NPRM+-+FINAL+updated.pdf].