The collapsing media landscape

[Rob Ray]

Came to mind after seeing, in quick succession:

Vice Media stops publishing on website and cuts hundreds of jobs

Vice Media Group filed for bankruptcy in May and was bought by Fortress Investment Group.

www.bbc.co.uk

Independent in talks to take over BuzzFeed and HuffPost in UK and Ireland

BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti told UK staff he was excited about deal, described as ‘strategic partnership’

www.theguardian.com

Reach using AI to speed up 'ripping' and use same article on multiple sites

Reach is rolling out an AI tool that enables its journalists to rewrite stories which have already appeared on other sites in its network.

pressgazette.co.uk

Which are just the latest in a longruning tale of woe. Vice is a particularly noteworthy one because it was the poster child for the new media revolution that was supposed to replace the legacy firms, but it looks like they're all going down unless they have backers with deep pockets. Imv it's a great unsung of the modern turn to conspiracy and poorly informed online shouting that it's directly washing into a void left by the longstanding decline of quality journalistic output, and I really don't see how it's to be arrested - advertising-based news is an absolute shitshow, totally squashed under the social media giants..

 

[ska invita]

Was Buzzfeed doing anything useful / filling a media gap? Ive genuinely never looked at it

What is Huffpost equivalent to a newspaper (politically/content wise)?

Vice went from being a free hipster magazine in a few shops to a behemoth, surprised how big it got.
Local press collapse is sad for sure

 

[Rob Ray]

Buzzfeed started out as a listicles site but experimented with running a serious investigative crew and built up a surprisingly strong award-winning reputation in the mid-late 2010s, which was gutted in 2022. Huffpost was a major liberal news source during the same period, at one point in the early 2010s it was one of the biggest US media sites and pretty much equivalent to the Graun (valued at $315m in 2011) then went into decline under Verizon and then Buzzfeed.

All three of them were particularly invested in the Meta ecosystem and took a hamering when Zuckerberg reined back on news share within it.

 

[PR1Berske]

It shows, and underlines, that the Internet isn't a library. Everything you've written can be deleted in a fingerclick. Everything "other" can be bought by a multinational....and then deleted.

 

[skyscraper101]

Buzzfeed was mainly 'top 10 this' and 'top 10 that' and loads of other listbait/clickbait. It got old very quickly.

Vice was a bit more interesting as far as 'out there' stories go. I liked the youtube channel too.

Huff post, I guess it would see itself as centrist alternative to right wing conservative news. I actually don't know a lot about it but just spent the last 10 minutes reading about co-founder Arianna Huffington and was surprised to learn she used to be a a bit of a telly personality in 1970s Britain, co-hosting Saturday Night At The Mill, and guest on Call My Bluff etc.

 

[Rob Ray]

It's also concerning that the failure of existing commercial models leaves them vulnerable to buyout by wealthy political activists. Ultimately the threat here is that we return to forms of purely patronage-based journalism.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

The answer is that people have to pay for stuff really isn't it. God knows how that's going to work though - I can sit here and say that and also know that if someone asked me to fork out, say, a quid a day for their coverage I'd probably laugh in their face.

 

[phildwyer]

Huff post, I guess it would see itself as centrist alternative to right wing conservative news. I actually don't know a lot about it

It's quite unbelievably appalling. They literally published this photo of an editorial meeting over a boast about how "diverse" they are.

 

[skyscraper101]

The answer is that people have to pay for stuff really isn't it. God knows how that's going to work though - I can sit here and say that and also know that if someone asked me to fork out, say, a quid a day for their coverage I'd probably laugh in their face.

It works for sites like the FT, Economist etc. But their audience is generally affluent enough to justify it.

I can't imagine sites like Buzzfeed or Vice could ever compete here.

 

[Rob Ray]

Both affluent and getting something out of it. B2B and specialist niche work in roughly the same way as the FT and Economist - people pay for the percieved expertise and focus on matters they need to know about which more mass mid-market outlets won't cover properly. See also: Private Eye for the political class.

 

[Rob Ray]

It's quite unbelievably appalling. They literally published this photo of an editorial meeting over a boast about how "diverse" they are.

View attachment 413336

Your own viewing habits disqualify you from commenting on others.

 

[Yossarian]

Buzzfeed was mainly 'top 10 this' and 'top 10 that' and loads of other listbait/clickbait. It got old very quickly.

The main Buzzfeed clickbait site is still going strong, it was the news side that was killed off. In their words:

BuzzFeed launched a news section in 2012. It hired a ton of people, opened international offices, produced podcasts and shows, formed a union, won a Pulitzer Prize. Then it shuttered international offices, laid people off, and on Friday, May 5, shut down for good and archived its website.

“We Were Always Playing An Entirely Different Game”: The Ultimate Oral History Of BuzzFeed News

BuzzFeed News has been described as a chaos agent, a pirate ship, a reputable news organization, and, most notably, a “failing pile of garbage” by former president Donald Trump. We wanted to tell our own story — in our own words — about what it was like to be a part of it.

www.buzzfeednews.com

 

[ska invita]

The main Buzzfeed clickbait site is still going strong, it was the news side that was killed off. In their words:

BuzzFeed launched a news section in 2012. It hired a ton of people, opened international offices, produced podcasts and shows, formed a union, won a Pulitzer Prize. Then it shuttered international offices, laid people off, and on Friday, May 5, shut down for good and archived its website.

“We Were Always Playing An Entirely Different Game”: The Ultimate Oral History Of BuzzFeed News

BuzzFeed News has been described as a chaos agent, a pirate ship, a reputable news organization, and, most notably, a “failing pile of garbage” by former president Donald Trump. We wanted to tell our own story — in our own words — about what it was like to be a part of it.

www.buzzfeednews.com

i wonder how much of that was based on the common speculative tech model of spend money you dont make and see what happens in the future

 

[NoXion]

The main Buzzfeed clickbait site is still going strong, it was the news side that was killed off. In their words:

BuzzFeed launched a news section in 2012. It hired a ton of people, opened international offices, produced podcasts and shows, formed a union, won a Pulitzer Prize. Then it shuttered international offices, laid people off, and on Friday, May 5, shut down for good and archived its website.

“We Were Always Playing An Entirely Different Game”: The Ultimate Oral History Of BuzzFeed News

BuzzFeed News has been described as a chaos agent, a pirate ship, a reputable news organization, and, most notably, a “failing pile of garbage” by former president Donald Trump. We wanted to tell our own story — in our own words — about what it was like to be a part of it.

www.buzzfeednews.com

It's a real shame that part of the operation wasn't able to carry on.

 

[cupid_stunt]

It's quite unbelievably appalling. They literally published this photo of an editorial meeting over a boast about how "diverse" they are.

View attachment 413336

In view of your record of making dishonest claims in your posts, perhaps you can provide a link to where this was originally posted, can we can see the context?

 

[editor]

In view of your record of making dishonest claims in your posts, perhaps you can provide a link to where this was originally posted, can we can see the context?

It is a real photo, but it's eight years old, from 2016.

 

[cupid_stunt]

It is a real photo, but it's eight years old, from 2016.

Fair enough, but was it posted in the context of boasting about how "diverse" they are?

 

[ska invita]

Fair enough, but was it posted in the context of boasting about how "diverse" they are?

interesting tbf

This Tweet From a 'Huffington Post' Editor Shows the Problem With White Feminism

On Friday, Huffington Post Executive Editor Liz Heron tweeted the below photo of an editors' meeting. It was intended as a humble brag — well, maybe not so humble — about gender diversity among the ranks of editors at the company. (Disclosure: I…

www.mic.com

 

[Cloo]

I was watching a (very good) video by Vice the other day and wondering how they hell they funded this stuff. I guess the answer is that they couldn't.

 

[ska invita]

I was watching a (very good) video by Vice the other day and wondering how they hell they funded this stuff. I guess the answer is that they couldn't.

I think it was Murdoch money wasnt it?

 

[cupid_stunt]

interesting tbf

This Tweet From a 'Huffington Post' Editor Shows the Problem With White Feminism

On Friday, Huffington Post Executive Editor Liz Heron tweeted the below photo of an editors' meeting. It was intended as a humble brag — well, maybe not so humble — about gender diversity among the ranks of editors at the company. (Disclosure: I…

www.mic.com

Fair enough, but that tweet from the editor makes no boast about how "diverse" they are.

 

[cupid_stunt]

It's quite unbelievably appalling. They literally published this photo of an editorial meeting over a boast about how "diverse" they are.

View attachment 413336

In view of your record of making dishonest claims in your posts, perhaps you can provide a link to where this was originally posted, so we can see the context?

<taps watch>

 

[phildwyer]

<taps watch>

Liz Heron tweeted it herself, incredibly enough. It seems that she is too stupid to understand the problem, and sincerely believed it reflects well on her:

 

[Silas Loom]

Three of the women look south-east Asian and one looks black.

 

[Larry O'Hara]

It shows, and underlines, that the Internet isn't a library. Everything you've written can be deleted in a fingerclick. Everything "other" can be bought by a multinational....and then deleted.

Exactly: which is why hard copy publications are so important

 

[Larry O'Hara]

Liz Heron tweeted it herself, incredibly enough. It seems that she is too stupid to understand the problem, and sincerely believed it reflects well on her:

To answer Ms Heron is it that most are now unemployed?

 

[Yossarian]

The Huffington Post has had a Black editor-in-chief since 2021

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/24/media/huffpost-eic-danielle-belton/index.html

 

[cupid_stunt]

Liz Heron tweeted it herself, incredibly enough. It seems that she is too stupid to understand the problem, and sincerely believed it reflects well on her:

I am aware of that tweet, it doesn't 'boast about how "diverse" they are', as you dishonestly claimed.

 

[phildwyer]

I am aware of that tweet, it doesn't 'boast about how "diverse" they are', as you dishonestly claimed.

What do you think she hopes her readers will "notice about our editorial meeting?"

 

[Silas Loom]

Vice was historically very blokey in a Nathan Barley sort of way. An all-female editorial meeting might well have been quite a significant marker of cultural change.

It just seems a really weird thing to pretend that you are incensed by. But then you’re fucking weird, Dwyer.