Nobody in journalism really knows exactly what’s ethical or unethical, but a standard that we could perhaps come to some sort of consensus on is if a reporter is moved to the point of tears by a person, she shouldn’t write about that person in her capacity as an impartial news reporter.
Over the past few months, a wave of unionization has swept across new media. On Friday, the media union movement got its first official enemy. Now writers get to find out who is a friend, and who is just a friendly-looking man with his hand in your pocket.http://gawker.com/how-progressiv…
Jonah Peretti, the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, is a big fan of labor unions—as long as they come nowhere near BuzzFeed. According to BuzzFeed reporter Cora Lewis, Peretti told employees this week that “I don’t think a union is right for BuzzFeed,” citing the fact that BuzzFeed is structured more like a tech startup…
Late last month, Recode reported that NBCUniversal is preparing to invest $250 million in BuzzFeed, a play that would value the site at $1.5 billion. This newest round of funding (last year, it was merely $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz) raised a still unanswered question: How is BuzzFeed doing financially?…
There was a time—say, in January—when getting an interview with President Barack Obama was the biggest fish a budding new media behemoth could reel in. But now we have way too many of those fish.
The media is often granted access to important people. What responsibility—if any—do news outlets have to not be dirty, desperate, pitiful whores in exchange for this access?
Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka of Recode are reporting that Comcast subsidiary NBCUniversal plans to invest $250 million in BuzzFeed. According to the Swisher and Kafka, the deal “will value the booming digital publisher at around $1.5 billion.”
Thursday night, BuzzFeed news editor Rachel Zarrell reacted to a deadly shooting at a Louisiana movie theater by tweeting, “Don’t pray. Push for gun control” and “If this were someone in my family I’d want every person alive screaming about gun control to anyone who would listen.” Within an hour, however, Zarrell…
In late January, BuzzFeed published a lengthy standards and ethics manual, with which the site intended to hold itself accountable for various missteps (such as surreptitiously deleting articles). Unlike most other news outlets that bother with ethics manuals, however, BuzzFeed decided to specify its stance toward a…
Janine Gibson, a former editor at the Guardian and one-time pawn in the New York Times’ rite of bloodless succession, will be the editor of BuzzFeedUK, the Times reports.
Today the Washington Post published a lengthy and (mostly) flattering profile of Benny Johnson, the serial plagiarist who was fired from BuzzFeed last summer and now peddles viral conservative content at Independent Journal Review. “D.C. has always been the city of second chances, now it just moves at meme speed,”…
On Thursday, at about 4 p.m. Central Standard Time, several news outlets reported that Dennis Hastert, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and Illinois congressman, was indicted for, among other offenses, lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The media entities included BuzzFeed News, the…
This is the day that the New York Times, National Geographic, and BuzzFeed, among others, began publishing stories directly to Facebook. The instant-publishing partnership is the newest concession to, or accommodation with, Facebook’s ever-greater dominance of how people encounter and read (or watch) material.
In late 2012, the morning after the second presidential debate, BuzzFeed published an article titled “The Debate Romney Won,” which floated the Romney campaign’s theory that the Republican candidate “came out on top — horserace analysis be damned” in the October 16 debate. The piece is mostly notable for the decision…
On April 16, Gawker contacted BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith with evidence that his site had deleted a post criticizing Pepsi, a BuzzFeed advertiser, under pressure from the beverage manufacturer. In response, Smith invited Gawker to interview him and BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti at the company’s New York office. A…
Do you work at BuzzFeed? Have you worked there in the past? If yes, send us an email. We’re researching several stories about the company, and we’re willing to make it worth your time if you can help us out. Anonymity guaranteed.
Earlier this week, BuzzFeed launched an internal review of any posts that its editors or writers had deleted from the site since editor-in-chief Ben Smith was hired in January 2012. In an interview on Friday, and a memo sent to staff on Saturday, Smith revealed that the review has already uncovered three instances…
BuzzFeed beauty editor Arabelle Sicardi, who wrote a post criticizing a Dove soap advertising campaign that was later deleted (and eventually restored) at the request of editor-in-chief Ben Smith, is resigning from the site, according to an internal memo distributed by BuzzFeed Style editor Julie Gerstein.
What's amazing about BuzzFeed's perpetual amnesiac/wayward-husband approach to its ethical guidelines (Today is the first day of the rest of our ethics!) is that the person who has to give voice to this ever-evolving set of rationalizations about the trial-and-error nature of developing ethics is the stolidly…
Yesterday we reported BuzzFeed’s decision to delete a staff-written post that criticized a viral advertisement for Dove beauty products. In response, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith released a rather incredible internal memo that instructed the site’s writers not to “advance [their] personal opinion” and…
