Buzzfeed News, one of the many popular leftist news and celebrity gossip sites, is closing down after its parent company Buzzfeed suffered significant financial losses and has no more interest in keeping the news section going.
On Thursday, April 20, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti was cited in media announcing the closure of the news division as the company continues to lay off staff across various divisions. Peretti said:
“While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization.”
According to Daily Mail, Buzzfeed has lost $10 million annually and will be laying off 15% of its staff. Silk-News.com reported that in late 2021 Buzzfeed was eyeing to raise some $250 million via Special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) funds, also called “blank check” funds, but ended up raising only $16 million.
Peretti also told media that HuffPost, a sister publican of Buzzfeed News that puts a leftist spin on the news and creates daily liberal opinion pieces, is more profitable at this time, so the company will concentrate more effort there.
Buzzfeed News has been trashed by conservatives as a fake news factory many times, particularly during the Trump presidency.
In early 2017, a New York Post op-ed piece wrote that BuzzFeed took fake news to a new level by posting baseless allegations about the integrity of the 2016 presidential election as well as President Trump’s alleged sex scandals. The post used Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith’s own words against him:
“Fake news will become more sophisticated, and fake, ambiguous, and spun-up stories will spread widely.”
In 2019, Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept slammed Buzzfeed News and other leftist news outlets for making wild allegations against President Trump and Micheal Cohen, which blew up in their face. Most of the unsupported allegations published by the leftist media, as Greenwald noted, propagated the Russia-collusion story that was later retracted by CNN and resulted in some journalists losing their jobs.
Some conservative Twitterati went tongue-in-cheek on the news of Buzzfeed News coming to an end. Carpe Donktum wondered that with Buzzfeed News gone, who would run background checks on him and threaten his loved ones?
And they had memes to share.
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1649096462662520833
Simon Ateba, Chief White House Correspondent for Today News Africa, posted that Buzzfeed’s Vice President (VP) of Communications Matt Mittenthal verbally attacked him in a direct message on Twitter when he saw Ateba sharing the news of Buzzfeed News closure.
As Silk-News.com noted, Buzzfeed News isn’t the only leftist media source going through loss; Vice and Insider are in the same boat while Vox also laid off 7% of its staff earlier this year.