I worked at BuzzFeed. Here’s the truth about why it’s on its last legs

Some of that was about the perks: when you’re used to newsrooms where the only freebie on offer is a barely functional (and barely drinkable) coffee machine, unlimited snacks and soft drinks feels like luxury. We were bombarded with BuzzFeed-branded hoodies and merch. 

Christmas bonuses included Apple Watches, cash, blankets, swag bags and more. Twice a week, the newsroom had high-end free lunches delivered from luxury banquet meal providers. This is not how journalists are used to being treated at work.

By far the best bit, though, was being in a young newsroom full of people who wanted to experiment and do news differently. BuzzFeed was producing news by millennials, for millennials, and even this felt radically different from anything else in the media at the time – the core customer of almost every newspaper was and remains baby boomers. TV news audiences average in their 60s or older. 

Most ambitious young journalists soon learn to tailor their newsgathering to that audience’s priorities, and to frame stories to suit that audience. Nowhere is this more obvious than on issues like housing. 

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Across the media, rising house prices were presented as an almost universally good thing – and if you own a home, they largely are. If you’re a 20- or 30-something looking to buy your first home, though, they’re a disaster. Having a news outlet focused on a millennial audience lets you say that.

I was part of an influx of (slightly) more experienced journalists brought in to help BuzzFeed – best known for its viral lists (never actually called “listicles” internally) and quizzes – punch up its news output. BuzzFeed UK already had news reporters, but at the time I arrived wasn’t using common newsroom tools like news lists (which tell you who is working on what story). It didn’t even have a morning news meeting (usually known as “conference”). 

After initial pushback when the new bosses introduced those – the young team worried they would cramp their style – it was quickly if slightly reluctantly acknowledged that they did help things. BuzzFeed got good at news, and fast: not by replacing the bright, young team that was already there, but by adding a bit more experience in the room and letting the 20-somethings shine. BuzzFeed alumni have now worked almost everywhere across the British media: it was a genuine collection of talent.

Working in the media, you are constantly reminded at almost every publication you work for that the industry’s best days are behind it. Newsrooms used to have far more people, more money, more ability to report – and certainly more power. Being in a growing newsroom was a genuine thrill. 

Over the space of two years, BuzzFeed UK went from something of a joke – reporters got so tired of trying to explain to press officers that they really were calling from “the cat website” that “buzz feed dot com, the website” became a running in-joke – to winning news provider of the year at the British Journalism Awards. An industry that had initially treated a millennial news site as a punchline became unable to ignore it.

The core news product of BuzzFeed relied on good reporting that was relevant to a younger audience. News stories weren’t required to go viral in the same way that lists and quizzes were – BuzzFeed understood the numbers would be lower, but you were encouraged to maximise the audience that looked at a piece. That meant a headline that looked more like how you’d summarise a story to your friend than one a newspaper would use. 

One great trick for explainers ahead of elections or British political shenanigans was to add “Explained For Americans”. Not only would this bring some Americans to an article, but British people turned out to be much likelier to read a piece explaining how British politics worked if it was supposedly aimed at Americans, rather than, say, “For Dummies”. The news priorities were anything but dumbed down, though: BuzzFeed News led the way on stories on disability welfare cuts, LGBT rights, Russian assassinations on British soil, and more.

The thing is, BuzzFeed News is no more. It was shuttered years ago. BuzzFeed more broadly is still around, though reportedly on its last legs as it tries a pivot to AI-generated content. Almost every millennial newsroom is the same: HuffPost flourished for a time, and withered away. VICE was briefly supposedly valued at $5 billion, only to go bankrupt years later.

For a time, it looked like news for millennials was not just possible, but the future of the media – and then in quick succession, every millennial-focused newsroom collapsed, to the barely-disguised schadenfreude of some of their old media competitors. The site had always been a bit of a joke, they suggested. Eventually you run out of other people’s money.

In the wake of its collapse, BuzzFeed’s infamous lunches and other largesse started to look less like generous startup perks and more like folly. The story became that BuzzFeed had just burned through money without a care in the world, and eventually investors noted that. The reality was more complex.

BuzzFeed had raised money from investors who treated it like a technology company, as if it might be another Facebook or Google – eventually generating huge, exponential returns. The striking thing on joining BuzzFeed from the Guardian, though, was how little technology it had: the Guardian’s analytics tools (measuring traffic) were vastly better than BuzzFeed’s. Its tools to let you test multiple headlines on a piece were decent, but not groundbreaking.

Whatever story BuzzFeed’s top bosses told investors, BuzzFeed was a media company, not a tech one. Whatever money it made would rely on how many stories its team could produce. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a business model, though. 

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BuzzFeed News was there to provide credibility and reliability. The team producing the viral lists and quizzes were the engine of the business – they demonstrated in any given month what would go viral, what people were clicking, and how to present it. The commercial team would then offer brands custom campaigns based on those trends, which would largely organically go viral themselves – bespoke advertising campaigns people would voluntarily click on, instead of actively ignore. 

A senior BuzzFeed exec once told me that BuzzFeed News got her into meetings with major brands, while the audience numbers the viral side of the team produced landed her the deals. BuzzFeed generated serious revenue, even if it was never quite possible. After its first round of cuts, BuzzFeed UK’s internal numbers suggested it was breaking even, still with a sizeable newsroom. It wasn’t an impossible model.

The problem was BuzzFeed’s millennial news team was doomed before it even began, because the winning bar was set impossibly high. Technology investors are looking for a return of 10x or even 100x what they put into a company – they make lots of bets, expecting most of them to lose, but the winners have to win big.

Media companies don’t deliver those kinds of returns. A successful media company delivers a profit, and a return, but not on those scales. Pleasing its investors, and keeping its growth story going, meant BuzzFeed had to try harder and harder to look like a tech company, while never even being close to being one.

The result is something like snuff media: Jonah Peretti was the founder of BuzzFeed and the co-founder of HuffPost, which he later bought. This made him the man that founded the two biggest millennial newsrooms, only to kill off both.

Peretti fiercely opposed a unionisation effort by the BuzzFeed UK team, and then “pivoted” the company so many times that BuzzFeed pirouetted itself into a death spiral: its future was video, then live video, then Netflix content deals, then synergies, then… God knows what. Now, it’s AI, not that there is anyone left to notice or care.

But the death of BuzzFeed News, while boomer-focused “legacy media” lives on is, more than anything, a synthesis of the millennial experience – in the job market, in trying to get a home, in more ways than we care to imagine. Old-school newspapers just needed to break even, or lose only a tolerable amount of money each year that their owner could live with.

I left BuzzFeed voluntarily in 2017 to write a book – meaning I signed no non-disclosure agreement on my exit. That meant I watched from the outside as the newsroom we’d collectively built was dismantled from afar even more quickly than it had been assembled. Ozymandias is one hell of a poem.

Older millennials are in their 40s now. No one has bothered even trying to build newsrooms for Gen Z – they rely on TikTok or YouTube influencers for their news. There’s not even an attempt to build structured media for them. There are almost no newsrooms aimed primarily at an audience under 50. That seems unlikely to end well for anyone, least of all society itself.

BuzzFeed and VICE needed to deliver unprecedented returns never seen in history just to survive. The winning line was set so much further away that it wasn’t even a race. There’s some poetry to that, in a way: by the very way they were born and died, millennial newsrooms showed how the game of life itself is rigged against millennials.

That’s a depressing note to end an article on, and BuzzFeed viral teams – though not news – had a “no haters” mantra, and a rule that articles should end on an upbeat note. So, I’ll end by noting one thing: if you ever meet a former BuzzFeed writer and want to give them a rage aneurism, just say “Number Eight Will AMAZE You!”. 

The rant you will get in return (“we never did those headlines”) will, ironically enough… amaze you.