What was the BuzzFeed Era?

I never worked at BuzzFeed, but my brief career as a journalist roughly tracks the narrative arc of the BuzzFeed Era: the period from roughly 2010 to 2018 when it was still possible to believe that journalism was changing for the better.

Some fifteen years prior to the BuzzFeed Era, Craigslist had started punching holes in the traditional revenue model of the newspaper business. Then came Facebook: less a hole-puncher than a gatling gun. New social media platforms and content distribution networks hurt local news the most, but they were eating away at the big national outlets as well: those institutions that would come to be called, elegiacally, “legacy media.” And this crisis in legacy media’s funding model was accompanied by a crisis of credibility. While The New York Times made an urgent case for the relevance of solid, scrupulous, impartial reporting, the paper was simultaneously running egregiously false stories that functioned as state propaganda for the coming Iraq War.

These twin crises gave rise to the Blogosphere Era, the period directly preceding the BuzzFeed Era. During the Blogosphere Era — which ran, let’s say, from around 2001 to 2009 — scrappy activists and independent journalists started cobbling together an alternative to the Times or Post Opinion pages. Some of them, like Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas or Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, built online communities around their work and even started to earn a decent living. Others, like Ezra Klein, started out blogging in their spare time and attracted enough of a following to find themselves in the pipeline to mainstream respectability.

If you were a part of the progressive blogosphere during this time, the late Blogosphere Era was a time of almost hallucinatory boosterism. As the nation soured on the Bush Administration and the Iraq War, Democratic candidates and officials came to faintly echo sentiments that liberal bloggers had been shouting about for years. Members of the blogosphere were popping up in mainstream outlets and on television; some of the larger blogs were reinventing themselves as full-fledged news sites.

Facebook and Twitter probably helped to kill the blogosphere, but by 2009 it was already well on its way to metastasizing into something else anyway. This is when the BuzzFeed Era begins. Legacy media had been on the decline for years, and now it seemed that blogs or something like them could serve as a viable alternative: not just a replacement for the old news, but an improvement.

But the new media needed to become financially sustainable and it needed to scale. Fortunately, the peak of digital media boosterism coincided with a second tech boom, undergirded by super low interest rates and an overabundance of easy money. The very people who had killed the old journalism funding model were eager to invest in any venture that could promise a new and better (and more profitable) one.

But venture capital comes with certain expectations. A little website like Talking Points Memo, built on a niche subscriber base and a handful of staff, can sustain itself over the long term, but it can never become The New New York Times or The Future of News. TPM is not a unicorn and investors were chasing unicorns. They were seeking the journalism version of Amazon: something that would get big quickly, drive all of its competition into extinction, and only then start to rake in a profit — the sort of mammoth profit that only monopolies can generate.

Thus, the BuzzFeed Era.

BuzzFeed was The Future of News. It was big: big enough to be all things to everyone. The site that was still best known in some circles for its coverage of the dress and for helping you figure out whether you were a Hufflepuff or a Ravenclaw was simultaneously publishing world-class investigative journalism and political analysis. The latter stuff — the serious-minded, award-winning stuff — wasn’t what brought in the ad revenue, but it did bring in prestige and awards (including a Pulitzer). And it seemed to point the way toward some sort of future for high-quality journalism, where the clickbait stuff generated enough cash to justify subsidizing great writing and reporting.

It was a mirage. Not the writing and reporting, much of which was truly great. Sustainability was the mirage. In fact, the venture capital that kept BuzzFeed afloat made it unsustainable virtually by definition: to justify the investment, the company needed to keep growing well beyond its ability to pay for its own existence. If interest rates went up and the easy VC money disappeared, or if Facebook substantially altered the news feed algorithm that BuzzFeed had mastered, then things would fall apart very quickly.

As it happens, Facebook changed its algorithm, interest rates went up, and now BuzzFeed is shutting down its news division. Many smaller competitors — including a few I used to work for — have already followed similar trajectories, becoming too big to fail and then rapidly failing anyway. Meanwhile, the stodgy old New York Times appears to have been journalism’s quasi-monopolistic unicorn all along. Ben Smith, the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, is a media columnist there.

The BuzzFeed Era is over. Actually, it ended a few years ago; probably sometime shortly before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The impending demise of BuzzFeed News is anticlimactic, albeit still depressing and horrible.

So what’s left? For a few years during the BuzzFeed Era, some of us got to do journalism. All this talk about a new digital frontier provided the illusion that we were doing journalism under unusually free conditions, but in reality we were as subject to the vicissitudes of finance capital as any other low-level private sector bureaucrat. I remember that when I or one of my colleagues was able to produce something we were proud of, it felt illicit, like we were getting away with something. And we were getting away with something; the best journalists working at BuzzFeed and elsewhere got to produce truly spectacular, and deeply unprofitable, journalism. It could not last, and it didn’t.

During the BuzzFeed Era, one could plausibly argue that the journalism industry was going through a period of creative destruction. And it was, sort of. But what it created was something that couldn’t survive even a subtle shift in the economic temperature. On a longer time horizon, it’s starting to look more like plain old destruction.