Maybe some investors are ok with an organization in a company losing $10M yearly but it doesn't really strike me as toxic for them not to be ok with this.

>Buzzfeed said quarterly revenue grew 18% year over year to $146 million. Profit rose to $41.6 million

It's not the organization, just the division.

News is responsible for the very good image that Buzzfeed has. Why do they give it up when they can finance it?

Oh please, Buzzfeed does not have a good reputation, yes some articles were pretty good, but it's far from something people would be willing to defend as a good news source.

Investors don't have to shoulder costs for a service that no one cares about. You want a "what flavour of jelly bean are you" quiz you go to Buzzfeed. You want serious news you read one of the countless other site that covers world news. Yes it's cynical, but if I had money in Buzzfeed I would have pressured the CEO too.

Their news does have a good reputation. Their news org is high quality.

Despite that they are burdened by the Buzzfeed name. Just look at this thread arguing back and forth about this. They should really spin it off and shed all the Buzzfeed branding.

They did just win a pullitzer for their international reporting last year. I'd say that goes quite a way towards improving their reputation.

That's not what I meant, the articles from Buzzfeed News were good, I don't deny it.

That being said, their reputation as "Buzzfeed" is bad, if you repeat a piece of information to someone and say that you "read it on Buzzfeed", there will be an inherent bias that the source is bad, because most people associate them with terrible pop-culture articles on Facebook and don't even know that they won a pullitzer prize.

In that context, their reputation is permanently damaged for most people. If Buzzfeed really want to create "serious" news branch they'd have to call it something else at the very least.

BuzzFeed News can't rely on one prize to boost their reputation when they have a severe retention problem. Two of the three reporters on that winning team no longer work there.

I mean, it’s not like every award every given is equivalent, is it?

It would make more sense to split it off into a different brand.

I rank BuzzFeed on the same level as the Huffington Post. You want real news? Go to the Associated Press directly, or Reuters.

NYT can be ok, but their monetization tactics are kind of weird

Buzzfeed is goofy. NYT is establishment partisan. Buzzfeed is a better brand.

Buzzfeed is goofy partisan. How is that better?

Yeah by organization I meant "org" not the entire company.

Sure. Just like TI, HP, and many others killed off their R&D departments because they didn't make direct profits, only ate money and produced ideas that other departments would monetize. Penny wise, pound foolish. Fuck the future, I want my money now.

Unless you're indicting the entire Western economic system (which is fair but also not something I'm going to argue about), blaming investors is nonsense. Corporate officers are responsible for having and selling a vision. If these companies got rid of the R&D departments, management owns that, not investors.

> blaming investors is nonsense.

Pardon my French, but this is bullshit. Activist investors pressuring buzzfeed are directly responsible for their actions. At best, they looked at the orgs under the umbrella and decided that the best move is to axe BFN. Experience tells me that either they're focused on short term profits, or silencing journalists they dislike.

And, yes, this is partly an indictment of the entire western economic system. Rapacious focus on short term profits will be our downfall. This is merely one example of many.

I think we can both agree investors are powerful. In the case of Buzzfeed and HP and so on the investors may be more powerful than management.

But I'm saying that no matter what, management is responsible for actions they take.

Investors are the ones making the decision for higher profits in the short term over long term viability of the company. It is absolutely in the investors, usually profit hungry corporate investors like superannuation or the local equivalent.

Foresight isn’t profitable. Sustainability isn’t profitable. They want next years bonus cheques not a healthy retirement fund.

> blaming investors is nonsense. Corporate officers are responsible for having and selling a vision.

That's a strange point to make in a discussion about how investors are pushing management into making the short term decision.

Every time I change the oil in my car it loses me money, but it's important to the overall function of the car.

A CEO of a public company is responsible for selling investors on what he/she is doing. If News is fundamental to the company or to his vision then he is responsible for explaining that or selling that vision. If investors don't believe in it I don't blame them per se I'd just say the company either shouldn't be public or they should have a CEO that can reasonably explain to investors why they should care that News exists.

Tale as old as time

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30768059

It’s much harder to go private than it is to go public. Blaming the CEO is a short sighted perspective.

Public companies can't choose their investors. They can choose their CEO.

buzzfeed news is not important or even relevant to the overall function of buzzfeed.

IT is a "cost center." Cut it all?

Maybe the problem is having investors instead of patrons.

This is what people mean when they say capitalism won't solve all our problems.

> More toxic investors who think the world needs more ads, less investigative journalism.

You're talking on Hacker News where people routinely bypass paid content by posting workaround links. The same people who get angry when people stealing their SAAS subscriptions. This is the pot calling the kettle black.

I'm not sure that subscription fees are the panacaea to the proliferation of PR instead of journalism that you seem to think. When you had to pay for newspapers, they still had ads in them.

Those ideals died long ago when they took 500M+ of venture capital. Years later, those investors are taking their losses and public market actors can and will force them to make the hard decisions, like cutting the CEO's vanity project. Call it ruthless if you want, but any option post-VC, whether it's PE or public markets, is going to involve a lot less "lighting money on fire" projects. Outside that environment, a company is simply worth the sum of it's discounted future cashflow, with direct monetary incentive to maximize it.

I would not take anything with "buzz" in the name seriously. To me it is still gossip.

It's simply unfortunate branding.

Funny I was using chrome on android the other day and the number of sites with huge ads that obscure content reminds me of popups in the early 2000's. Some mainstream sites are practically unusable. I suppose they've driven their engagement metrics by making a tiny 'close' button that's designed to make you inadvertently click the stupid ad.

I say we draft the ad people to defend Ukraine before we let them back into society on parole.

Talk is cheap if you aren't the one footing the bill. The investors are likely in the top .001% in spending money on investigative journalism, but if they don't spend even more money on it, they get to receive criticism for killing journalism from people who made more lucrative investments.