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BuzzFeed News writers are walking out in protest against the company
@Joe Bernstein:
In my seven years at BuzzFeed News, I've never faced an "or-else" traffic quota. We're walking off today, in part, to make sure our journalists never do. pic.twitter.com/BWavn6fndG
Ten weird tricks our management doesn't want you to know! Number three will blow your mind!
You work at BuzzFeed, no one will ever believe you're motivated by honest reporting. They would have fired you a long time ago if you were motivated by honest reporting over clicks.
I hope they get better pay, and more freedom, and part of making that happen is creating public support for their cause. They might have better luck at that if they didn't try to include journalistic credibility in their messaging.
I get where you're coming from, but I think you're being a bit harsh. Buzzfeed is terrible, I agree, but Buzzfeed News has done some great reporting in the past and if I recall was a separate entity from Buzzfeed itself. Some very smart people even hailed it as the future of news because of its business model in unison with its sister site.
They're past their glory days and I have no idea what happened to them (although I do have a theory) because even as one of their regular readers, I simply stopped reading them but I firmly disagree with the argument that they've not done honest reporting because they cared more about clicks.
How can you be overly harsh about a large, soon to be public, company? This isn't a human being we're talking about.
It sounds like you mostly agree but dislike the emphatic tone?
But I mean, this is BuzzFeed, they're infamous for clickbait, they invented some of the popular tropes.
Opinions aside, public perception of them, especially among the tech-centric, is pretty unanimous. And rightly so, companies that believe in shameless pandering shouldn't claim to be news organizations, regardless of whether they get it right some of the time.
Your post wasn’t about a large amorphous company. It was about the people who work there.
It wasn't. I hear that's how you read it, however. The only criticism of the people who work there regarded their choice of messaging.
“You work at BuzzFeed, no one will ever believe you're motivated by honest reporting.”
I’m with @kwyjibo on this, you’re being overly cynical and not empathetic at all.
I think our disagreement comes from the fact that you conflate Buzzfeed News with Buzzfeed1. I agree with your characterization of Buzzfeed, I find it tasteless. However, as I said in my first post, I think Buzzfeed News has done some great work of journalism that you can't find anywhere else. If Buzzfeed's tasteless articles and listicles allow Buzzfeed News journalists to do the work that they do, more power to Buzzfeed. There are hundreds of tasteless articles on the internet that I don't read every day. I can avoid what Buzzfeed does and solely focus on Buzzfeed News if I want to. It is a separate website.
I agree with you about their perception. As you can guess, I find that unwarranted, but I empathize because I myself had that perception in the beginning. To each their own.
1. This distinction was more clear when I was first following the website, but the way they reported on the Steele dossier muddied the waters a bit, at least for me. I felt as though there was some intentional or unintentional transference of institutional know-how between the sister sites that went against my idea of what journalism should be about. I don't know if that trend continued or the Steele dosier saga was an isolated event but it did contributed to me having less interest in them.
The complaint from OP tweet is, among other things, about clicks and revenue based requirements. Which means that BuzzFeed explicitly values clicks over other factors. You can't have engagement metric requirements and also honest reporting.
So, provided we believe the author of the tweet, BuzzFeed News disagrees with you.
Hence my footnote in the comment you're replying to. I think I made it explicit twice that I don't read them anymore. If their current workers are complaining about lack of independence from Buzzfeed management, then the Steele dosier was not an isolated incident as I feared, which is a shame because it was a great news organization.
So I guess what you're saying is that I was being too harsh about the BuzzFeed that you remember from the past? But I was, I think pretty self evidently, talking about the BuzzFeed from the present.
A company which is clearly a net negative to the world.
I think I elaborated myself enough. Thank you for the discussion.
You know, Buzzfeed is a big company. Like many big companies, they're hard to pin down. There is, to this day, excellent reporting on Buzzfeed. There is also a bunch of crap. I feel similarly about Vice. Yes, it's mostly crap, but every once in a while they publish something I just can't ignore.