Thursday night, Business Insider’s Oliver Darcy obtained a memo from BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith simply titled “🇺🇸👀” reminding news division staff not take “partisan stands on social media” as they enter “the home stretch” of this year’s election.
According to hacked DNC emails published by Wikileaks, BuzzFeed president Greg Coleman made a $10,000 donation to the Democratic National Committee on May 23 for an event hosted by BuzzFeed chairman Ken Lerer and attended by President Obama—just two weeks before BuzzFeed’s advertising department canceled a $1.3…
Earlier this week, Ze Frank—the leader of BuzzFeed’s burgeoning video empire, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures—issued a public memo to his employees explaining the terms of their employment. The crux of the memo—the necessity of which was sparked by Frank firing two women for appearing in videos produced by other…
After Elena Kadvany, a writer for the local site Palo Alto Online, published the moving letter a sexual assault survivor read aloud in court to the man who raped her, BuzzFeed writer Katie J. M. Baker also published the letter for BuzzFeed’s much larger audience. It was a worthwhile way to use a huge platform, which…
This morning, BuzzFeed announced it has killed a deal with the Republican National Committee to run ads across the website throughout this election season. In an email to staff, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said that the company decided to end the agreement because Donald Trump is simply too offensive:
On Friday, Gawker reported that YouTube and Facebook would simultaneously livestream BuzzFeed’s live interview with the President of the United States, which took place today at 2:50 p.m. But it turns out that only the former service was able to hold up their end of the bargain. As you can see in the video below,…
Last month, BuzzFeed successfully convinced hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting Facebook users to watch a pair of employees use rubber bands to make a watermelon explode. Next week, the news and entertainment behemoth will use Facebook and YouTube to interview the President of the United States.
We are, right now, in the midst of a digital media upheaval. What was previously conventional wisdom—that a media company with hopes of turning a profit needs, above all, to achieve scale—is being proven false. The new conventional wisdom is that video will be digital media’s savior, but it is only a matter of time…
Have you heard about this hot new trend where you feed unsuspecting people all sorts of wacky things on camera and then laugh at their nescience? It’s gonna be huge. Just ask the NYPD.
Here are two recent articles about BuzzFeed:
Last Friday, the media industry toasted BuzzFeed for successfully drawing the attention of nearly 800,000 Facebook users to a livestream of two employees wrapping hundreds of rubber bands around a watermelon until the fruit exploded. The gambit capped another quarter of widespread confidence in BuzzFeed’s business…
BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith has an inside baseball report about a January 5 meeting between Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and the editorial board of The New York Times. According to Smith, many Times employees believe Trump conveyed to the paper—during a portion of the meeting deemed off-the-record —that his extreme…
The year 2015 was the year female journalists let their boyfriends dress them for content. The trend began last February, when xoJane published a personal essay titled, “I Let My Boyfriend Dress Me for a Week,” by Kelsey Lawrence. In order to promote honesty in their relationship, Lawrence wrote, she asked her…
Racist territorialist Cliven Bundy has done crazy shit, but here is one crazy thing, contrary to a story broken today by Buzzfeed, that he hasn’t done: filed a federal lawsuit claiming, among other things, that Barack Obama threatened Donald Trump.
A battle between a Buzzfeed reporter and DeAndre Cortez Way, the rapper better known as Soulja Boy, is brewing over privacy, fraud, and, of course, hoverboards.
In an email to editorial staff on Tuesday, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith addressed questions about whether expressing opinions about Donald Trump violates company ethics guidelines governing political partisanship on social media. (Smith’s ruling: it doesn’t.) The email was leaked to The Blaze.
Li Hongjun did not usually take selfies. But out in the orange grove, he was not in his usual state of mind. It was early February, and the lunar New Year was approaching. It’s considered good luck to set out a bowl of oranges during the Chinese holiday, so Li, figuring he could use some luck, decided to buy some for…
We in the media love nothing more than to call out our colleagues for fucking up, which means that this morning turned out to be a great one for me, since I get to make fun of a competitor for bungling its pointing out of a mistake made by another competitor.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal cast doubt on a story candidate Ben Carson was told about himself in his 1990 autobiography involving a fake psychology test. Now, BuzzFeed News reports, it would seem that Carson was indeed the victim of a hoax—just not the hoax that he thought.
