BuzzFeed News, a pioneering digital news site that won a Pulitzer Prize, said Thursday it will close after 12 years.
The site’s co-founder and chief executive, Jonah Peretti, who wrote the company couldn’t maintain a standalone news organization and cited “more challenges that I can count,” including the pandemic, declining advertising and “a tech recession.”
He also blamed himself, writing that he was “slow to accept” the challenges in building a site around free digital journalism. “I could have managed these changes better as the CEO of this company and our leadership team could have performed better despite these circumstances,” Peretti wrote. The digital news had also courted controversy by publishing the Steele dossier.
Parent company BuzzFeed Inc. plans to lay off roughly 180 employees — representing 15 percent of the company’s total workforce of about 1,200 — and begin shuttering BuzzFeed News, which was started in late 2011 as an adjunct to BuzzFeed.com, a website that specializes in creating more frivolous content such as viral “listicles” about celebrities and popular culture.
It also notched other journalistic triumphs. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for a series on the mass detention of Uyghurs Muslims by China.
Like many other start-ups, BuzzFeed News struggled to build a profitable business model around digital journalism.
When the company went public in 2021, it anticipated the move would bring in more investment with a deal valuing BuzzFeed at $1.5 billion.
.
