BuzzFeed News is Dead, Long live BuzzFeed News
Or rather its URL’s, probably only on the Internet Archive, at least until AI takes over, and our algorithmic overlords... etc. etc. etc.
Jonah Peretti, CEO and co-founder of BuzzFeed, announced on April 20, 2023, that the company’s news division was being shut down and that 180 staff would be laid off.
I joined the Investigations team close to its founding in 2014, a few years after BuzzFeed News began. While I was there, the sensation of watching the team and the entire BuzzFeed juggernaut grow was extraordinary. My first emails were full of friendly, hilariously GIF-laden blasts welcoming a new hire to a new team. Everyone responded, GIF-to-GIF, shouting out the newcomer and the special talent they brought with them. In a short amount of time the welcome emails increased so fast, became such a blizzard of hype and happiness, it was impossible to read, let alone respond to them all. I had never before experienced something over a sustained period of time that felt so exponential.
It was exciting though. Mark Schoofs, investigative journalist and winner of a Pulitzer Prize and many other awards, was the head of Investigations, and later the head of BuzzFeed News. His ambition for all of us, individually and as a team, was completely energizing. Schoofs and his fellow editors had extremely high journalistic standards and were open to creative thinking and good ideas at every level of the process—in the writing, the layout, the linking, and the imagery.
Ghosts of the Orphanage, the book, grew out of a BuzzFeed News article I worked on for four years under Schoofs. It was published at 25,000 words, which was at the time, I think, one of the longest, if not the longest serious piece of journalism written for the Internet. We really didn’t know how it would be received by the BuzzFeed audience and beyond, but it was viewed more than 6 million times in the first 6 months.
The book owes its existence to many, many people, but one of the first and most critical was Mark.
Read Dru Moorhouse’s BuzzFeed News Exposed Injustice And Amplified The Voices Of Victims With Powerful Crime Reporting for a list of some of BuzzFeed News most important contributions.
I wanted to share some exceptional crime features written by my BuzzFeed News colleagues over the years. They resonated with readers because of their fierce reporting, gripping narratives, and above all, compassion and sensitivity for the victims at their center…
The stories here have exposed injustice, sparked investigations, prompted new legislation, and empowered and amplified the voices of victims and their families. They became the basis for documentaries, docuseries, and full-length books and won prestigious journalism awards.
On the day that BuzzFeed News shut down, a spokesperson told The New York Times that BuzzFeed would keep “all of the stories published by the news division archived on its website in perpetuity.” BuzzFeed News existed for twelve years.
I’m catching up on a few good pieces of engagement and media from the last month, including my first solo online reading. It was for the fantastic Gibsons Bookstore in Concord, New Hampshire. I thought it would be tiring to just talk to a screen, but I was buoyed by a strong sense of the listeners on the other side, and very much helped by their great questions at the end.
Gibson’s Bookstore Online Reading
Good Readings Magazine Podcast
This particularly thoughtful and engaged interview by Gregory Dobbs was recorded on the eve of the Australian publication of Ghosts of the Orphanage. It was a wonderful way to start.
Listen here.