This Is Not For Tears

Willy Blackmore contemplates what the end of the BuzzFeed era actually means.

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THIS IS NOT FOR TEARS

There’s one thing that positively everyone seems to agree on about the closure of BuzzFeed News: it’s the end of an era.

That’s what Ben Smith, the newsroom’s original editor-in-chief, wrote in his eulogy for his new site, Semafor, and has repeated in numerous interviews. The same phrasing, or something close to it, has featured in stories from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, CNN, The New York Times, The Financial Times, WBUR’s “Here & Now”, Axios, and even Le Monde — “Ainsi s’achève une époque aussi imaginative que déconcertante pour les médias.”

What that era was, exactly, is a little more subject to debate, as these many, many stories make clear. Was it all quizzes and the Steele dossier? (No.) Or a new form of journalism for the internet age? (Not exactly.) For his part, Smith wrote (rather hilariously) that with “the wind of Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest at our backs,” BuzzFeed News covered the internet as a real place, and treated those social sites as “the front page of the new internet.” (The wind of Pinterest at their back!) Social media certainly was the delivery mechanism, but unlike, say, Gawker (which serves as the foil to BuzzFeed in Smith’s forthcoming book, “Traffic”), where in the early 2010s digital-native bloggers were growing into reporters in large part by writing about the internet, BuzzFeed News was pretty traditional, even at the very beginning. It was a scoops-minded newsroom tethered to a viral-content machine, with the latter expected to subsidize the former. The era that’s ended is the one where anyone believed that business model could work. 

When it launched in 2012, BuzzFeed News published plenty of stories that would have fit in at Politico, where Smith previously worked. I remember reading an October surprise–like scoop that year about Mitt Romney’s father, former Michigan governor George Romney, who did not actually storm out of the 1964 Republican National Convention after Barry Goldwater received the presidential nomination — an anecdote earnestly repeated as fact by the younger Romney and many in the political press. The very same week, Gawker published Adrien Chen’s story that doxxed the notorious Reddit troll Violentacrez — a groundbreaking moment for digital media covering the world of the internet that showed how it can and does deeply affect people’s real lives.

Of course Buzzfeed would go on to have the dress and the watermelon (not to mention countless viral quizzes), both of which were instances that showed how being keyed into millions of eyeballs made it possible to make a cultural moment out of almost nothing. But that’s not really what BuzzFeed News was focused on. Instead, there were great stories about early influencer culture, munchausen by proxy syndrome, stripping during the shale boom, to name a few, and many more hard-news scoops. In 2021, it won a Pulitzer for its innovative reporting on Uighur detention camps in China — more of the serious (and rather straight) journalism it has always done. The difference is that unlike, say, The New York Times circa 2013, what it published looked like your social feeds: a mix of high and low, serious and trite, with plenty of gifs and memes and LOLs and WTFs. Instead of siding with snark over smarm, as Gawker did, BuzzFeed was reflecting everything that was happening across the social web — and scooping up huge amounts of traffic while doing so. And for a time it worked well enough that Disney wanted to buy BuzzFeed for $650 million.

But then again, everyone was able to get huge amounts of traffic in the days when Facebook prioritized publishers in the news feed algorithm. And since the pivot to video began in 2015, the digital-media industry hasn’t really stopped chasing that high, and the investor cash that came with it. So the era that ended is probably more accurately described as “the end of the marriage between social media and news,” which is how Smith put it to The New York Times, and which was a marriage that BuzzFeed embodied most fully. It’s only now, with interest rates rising and cheap money harder to come by, that the digital news ecosystem built on free content, digital advertising, and billions of people scrolling through their feeds is now finally, and maybe irrevocably, falling apart.

Indeed, digital media is nothing short of crumbling right now, as layoffs hit seemingly every outlet, including those that flew just as high as BuzzFeed during its peak. Vice Media, which was valued at $5.7 billion in 2017, laid off dozens from its news division last week, and may soon declare bankruptcy. FiveThirtyEight had half of its staff cut by Disney too, with founding editor Nate Silver set to leave the site. Earlier in the year, of course, Gawker died yet again as well.  

So what is next? The new era, or when exactly we entered it, is no less unclear. Unfortunately many of the same people will still be running the show, despite their admitted failures. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, who will continue to run HuffPost and BuzzFeed’s non-news content operations, is rather cynically predicting that both the home page and AI will be the next big things — in other words, just what his company is doing. But others do agree that the homepage is back, including Semafor’s Maxwell Tani — who wrote as much in one of Semafor’s many newsletters, which is the media future Ben Smith appears to be betting on. As newsletters continue to grow, some Substacks are shifting into full–fledged digital publications, but the homepages for outfits like Bari Weiss’s “The Free Press” are largely symbolic when essentially everything is funneled directly into subscriber’s inboxes. Still others believe that this will be the post-platform era, when smaller, like-minded communities will share content and conversations in walled-off corners of the internet, like Discord servers.

But all of this is already happening, and has been happening for a number of years as the status quo in digital media has been less dramatically floundering. If the closing of BuzzFeed News really does represent the end of an era (and I believe it does), it’s very possible that what’s truly next has yet to make itself known. And if there’s anything to be optimistic about right now it’s that workers have the opportunity to try to define what will actually be the new phase in this industry. 

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CAN I GET A BLUESKY INVITE? 

Hello, this is your captain speaking. We’re now 32,000 feet in the air. Please stay seated. If you gaze out the window, you’ll see lukewarm takes, shit posts, and bad faith discourse floating around you. Welcome to Bluesky, the invite-only social media platform that wants to be the next Twitter. 

We’ve been here before. Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter, laid off a huge chunk of the company, and turned the website into a glitchy right–wing chatroom, a few apps have attempted to become the next digital town square. Last year, Mastodon had a brief moment in the sun and in April, Substack threw its hat in the ring and launched Notes. Now, Bluesky, a decentralized app created by Jack Dorsey, is getting some of Twitter’s most prolific users to migrate away from the dying platform. But will the elusive stratosphere be the app that can finally replace Twitter? 

The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz joined Bluesky on April 12, after she scored an invite code from some tech friends. At first, she said the platform was mostly populated by tech people but now that more shit-posters and memers are creating accounts, it’s become more enticing. 

“The power of social media comes from the users, not Silicon Valley tech people,” Lorenz said. As long as Bluesky can get “culturally important users” and cater to their needs — like ensuring that their usernames aren’t taken by imposters — the tech columnist believes it will succeed. “This is the first app I’ve found that has recreated what I like about Twitter,” she said.  

Emilie Friedlander, a journalist and co-host of “The Culture Journalist” podcast, said Bluesky needs both more journalists and their audience for it to become a legitimate Twitter competitor for media workers. 

As a decentralized network that’s largely run by its community, rather than one overseeing entity, Bluesky’s lexicon and culture are in the hands of its users. Study Hall’s editor Erin Corbett has been pronouncing it “Blueski.” 

“It rhymes with brewski,” she said.

It’s so far unclear how users will refer to the site’s version of tweets — Lorenz said she’s seen people call them “skeets” or “skweets,” NBC News deputy tech editor Ben Goggin is more utilitarian and calls them “posts,” and Friedlander’s partner uses the verb “blued,” as the Bluesky equivalent of “tweeted.” 

To get an invite-code for your friends to blue, skeet, skweet, or chug blueski all over your timeline, you need to be on the platform for at least two weeks and you only get one code per week. So, we are still in the early stages of the network. Lauren Barton, a freelance journalist who slid past the coveted gates, revealed that the app is “very refreshing” and ripe with potential due to how more established media workers aren’t taking up so much space.

“Because Bluesky is a new platform, those journalists don’t have as much noise and it provides an opportunity for lesser known journalists like me to stand out and connect with those people on a more personal level,” she wrote.

Some of Twitter’s main characters — dril, Chrissy Teigen, and AOC — have already made accounts and will certainly wreak havoc on the site. Perhaps, this Bluesky hype will eventually dissipate into the clouds and the birds will sweep back to earth and reign supreme. Instead of jumping to the next platform, some of us might confront our social media exhaustion and log off.

That does sound really nice. But first, can you spare an invite-code? 

—Daniel Spielberger

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

—Alexis Soloski is joining The New York Times as a staff reporter for the arts section.
—Sabine Russ is leaving BOMB Magazine as senior editor. Benjamin Samuel, who has been the site’s managing editor since 2020 will take her place.
—Bob Sorokanich is stepping down as editor-in-chief of Jalopnik.
—Tom LoBianco is heading to The Messenger to cover the 2024 presidential election. He was most recently a politics reporter at Yahoo News.
—Matt Adams is leaving NPR after three years to become the director of audience engagement at the Texas Tribune. Dan Keemahill and Carlos Nogueras are also joining the Tribune as a data journalist on investigative stories and a Permian Basin reporter, respectively.                                     

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FUN NEW MEDIA PROJECTS 

Sure, things are looking grim right now in the media industry. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also try new things, right? What if we all just round up four of our friends and start a magazine or blog? Jo Livingstone and Danny Lavery launched The Stopgap on May 3 to fill a blog-shaped hole in our hearts. It’s an old-fashioned, general-interest blog about anything “languishing in your notes app,” like Colette’s “housemaid’s coffee” recipe. In a brief introductory Q&A on the website, Livingstone says this blog is for amateurism and enjoyment, and the motto for the site is: “It’s better than nothing.”

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EVERYTHING ELSE

—Southerly, which started in 2016 as a newsletter seeking “to shed light on the best journalism and the most pressing environmental, justice, and culture stories in and out of the South” is shutting down. The site later launched as an independent media operation in July 2018, publishing stories of environmental justice journalism written by more than 83 contributors. “It has been a wild, beautiful, daunting, frustrating, transformational journey, and the decision to find a new path is difficult,” writes founder Lyndsey Gilpin.
—Last week, Vice Media said it would cancel its program “Vice News Tonight,” citing plans to “restructure” the company. More than 100 people were laid off in the move. On Monday, The New York Times reported that Vice, once valued at $5.7 billion, is reportedly headed for bankruptcy if the company doesn’t find a buyer. Vice has become known in media for repeatedly laying off its employees over the years.
—Layoffs, layoffs, and more layoffs! Writer Cyrena Touros tweeted a notes app screenshot of the many layoffs and newsroom closures that have hit workers since the start of the year, and there are too many to fit in just one image. From Vox, Gawker, and NPR, to Reveal, BuzzFeed News, and PAPER, something’s gotta give. What can media workers of the world do now to ensure more job stability and a stronger workforce?
—Speaking of media unions, BDG Union reached a deal ensuring new salary minimums and six weeks of severance pay, along with health care coverage, PTO, and paid holidays for part-time workers. The Hearst Magazines Media Union also struck a tentative agreement with management that will “guarantee the writers, producers, and editors across all 28 brands their essential labor rights.” Direct action gets the goods!
—And on that note, as of 12:01 AM on Tuesday morning, the WGA is on strike after streamers and studios under the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers refused to negotiate a fair contract with TV writers, who don’t want to see their industry become a gig economy where writing is an “entirely freelance” profession. Does this sound familiar???????? Solidarity with our film and TV colleagues!