In 2012, BuzzFeed made the bold choice to branch out from its bread and butter of animal videos and “WTF!” tag lines, and move into more serious journalism. Almost a decade later, it has gained a reputation as a rising star in digital media, and has even claimed a very prestigious award; the Pulitzer Prize, for an investigative series which utilized satellite imagery focusing on the Northwestern Xinjiang region of China, to show the extent of China’s detainment of the Uyghur people.

However, the powerful drive pushing BuzzFeed News appears to have stalled out. In March 2022, the company announced plans to drastically shrink its news division by phasing out some major areas such as; investigative reporting, politics, science, politics, science, economic disparity and social justice.

BuzzFeed’s CEO, Jonah Peretti, shared an internal memo, as reported by Adweek, “Although this is always a difficult thing to do, it is essential to unify the business organizations and admin teams from BuzzFeed and Complex Networks in order to realize the opportunities that merging our strong brands offers… which sadly means that we will part with some colleagues…” Management has offered buyouts to 36 of the news division’s 100 journalists.

The union representing many of the BuzzFeed News employees released a response: “Once again, it’s clear BuzzFeed management is still learning a fundamental truth about their newsroom: now that we have our union, the era of them making unilateral decisions that affect our work and our lives is over. Yesterday, we were told that management aims to gut our newsroom through voluntary buyouts in our Investigations, Politics, Inequality, and Science desks… Announcing a dramatic reduction to our newsrooms after two years of bargaining and a year since economics were put on the table is not only insulting, it’s regressive bargaining. The bottom line is this: the news we deliver, including Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism, is vital to the readers we serve; this gutting of critical departments is a loss to the communities in which we live and work. There is no doubt this decision is devastating for our newsroom. This is why we unionized, and we won’t back down now.”

Pandemic Impact:

In a statment from BuzzFeed to TheWrap, BuzzFeed is making this move in response to the financial hardships caused by the pandemic.  “The global economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic has inflicted increasing negative impact on our business. In recent weeks, we have been confronted with even greater revenue declines than expected,” Peretti wrote in an email to staff. “Based on our projections and our goal to keep losses under $20M, we determined we must further reduce costs to sustain BuzzFeed through this crisis and position ourselves for the eventual recovery.”

BuzzFeed Inc. announces layoffs hours before its first quarterly earnings report:

In 2020, BuzzFeed was doing so well, that along with Verizon Media, it bought HuffPost. As reported by CBNC, and Techcrunch, Peretti said “I have vivid memories of growing HuffPost into a major news outlet in its early years, but BuzzFeed is making this acquisition because we believe in the future of HuffPost and the potential it has to continue to define the media landscape for years to come. With the addition of HuffPost, our media network will have more users, spending significantly more time with our content than any of our peers.”

Still expaning, only one year later, BuzzFeed also acquired Complex Networks, enabling the company to go public via a special purpose acquisition company around Decemeber 2021.

Buzzfeed’s stock began trading at a strong $9 per share, however, the price has drastically fallen since Decemeber 2021, and is now trading in the $5 range, at almost a 50% loss.

According to a New York Times article on March 15th 2022, nearly 80 current and former BuzzFeed employees have accused the company of “bungling” its debut into the stock market, and dissuading workers from selling their shares at a higher price.

The American Arbitration Association, which resolves disputes out of court, has recieved two formal complaints from the employees stating  “the company had failed to properly instruct them on how to trade their shares immediately after the initial public offering in December. The groups are asking for compensatory damages estimated at more than $8.7 million.”

However, a spokesman for BuzzFeed shared in a statement that “BuzzFeed prioritized communication with former and current employees last year to provide them with the information they needed to manage their equity.” and went on to say, “It’s regrettable that the stock price declined, but there is no merit to the claims and we intend to rebut them vigorously.”

Regardless of the reason(s) why BuzzFeed is drastically scaling back their newsroom, it’s a loss; not only for the organization and employees, but also for the public. Transparency and accountability in media are always crucial, but especially so now, in our current era of misinformation and misdirection.

Buzzfeed News was producing some ground breaking journalism, earning another honor for FinCEN File, and being named a Pulitzer finalist in the International Reporting category in 2017. That series focused on an enormous cache of secret US government documents, and ended up being one of the largest reporting projects in history, with more than 400 journalists, 100 news organizations in 88 countries, collaborating for over a year and a half. Former BuzzFeed Editor-in-chief Mark Schoofs, deputy editor-in-chief Tom Namako and executive editor Ariel Kaminer, have all exited, and hopefully, the rest of the news staff can relocate, and be able to continue with their important work.

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