Viral News At The Bottom Of The Bottle

Michael Hedges April 24, 2023 Follow on Twitter

As that bottle of Sriracha sauce ages in the refrigerator nobody remembers how tasty it was when first opened. When all that’s left is something sticky on the bottom and lots of air. Adding a little water and shaking madly doesn’t fix it. Squeeze the bottle with all your might. Nothing comes out. How disappointing.

The big squeeze on digital media continues. Actually, the big digital squeeze started when the sauce - money - ran out. Or away. Great digital minds, however, are ready with a new recipe, maybe a bit thinner.

BuzzFeed co-founder and chief executive Jonah Perretti administered the final shake to BuzzFeed News last week. He had been “slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media,” he said in a statement, quoted by CNN (April 21). BuzzFeed News will be “wound down.” BuzzFeed News had never been profitable.

BuzzFeed News has had in illustrious dozen years. There was the Steele Dossier publication, followed by a 2021 Pulitzer prize. But the celebrated investigative reporting team was disbanded, news bureaus closed. BuzzFeed News has been winding down for some time but more so as social media platforms lose their steam. That was the business model. Mr. Perretti said the company, still publishing HuffPost, is embracing AI, the next big thing for investors. BuzzFeed also published Complex and Tasty, which continue. BuzzFeed went public in 2021 via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) offering valuing the company at US$1.5 billion.

The announced end to BuzzFeed News attracted considerable media watcher attention. Many settled on “end of an era” stories, confirming the portal’s once vast reach within the digital news sphere. “The digital media era that BuzzFeed was the poster child for is long over,” wrote Axios (April 20). About 180 employees across the entire company are now looking for work. “For every employee who’s dedicated themselves in service of the place synonymous with the internet’s optimistic spirit of experimentation,” wrote former BuzzFeeder Delia Cai in Vanity Fair (April 20), “comes the realization that such experiments require a great degree of gambling with people’s livelihoods.”

Digital publishers everywhere are exploring solutions to these weighty issues. In varying circumstances, they are coming to different conclusions about both business models and digital journalism. At the Clabe Editors Conference in Madrid, Spain last week digital editors were mostly upbeat. “Digitization has completely turned us upside down, but now we are beginning to see the way,” said The Objective director Álvaro Nieto, quoted by media news portal Dircomfidencial (April 21).

Business models are viable, he said, "as long as you don't lose your grip on expenses, which were the mistakes made by our ancestors, those large companies that today are in great trouble (that) massively hired staff, paid enormous salaries, rented huge venues, spent money on drivers, secretaries and foodies. We have to adjust to the new circumstances.”

“We have finally found profitable models,” added ElDiario director Ignacio Escolar. “It is a model in which you do not have to be a subscriber to read, where readers support us so that we exist, being free and maintaining decent conditions in our team.” The membership model, he added, is “the greatest innovation.”

“I think that the only way in which newspapers can live off their readers, as many others continue to try, is not simply by putting up a paywall,” he continued, “but by changing the editorial model. Readers don't pay for viral news, they pay for quality information.” ElDiario has been profitable for the last two years.

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