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by shade23
3713 days ago
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I fancy BuzzFeed quite a bit.Yes the sheer volume and omnipresence can be discerning and irritating.But while they use this model I enjoy the fact that they give serious readers good long form writing too[1].
So keeping apart all of the reasons for why buzzfeed might/will/will-not grow/crash/stalemate in the market.I enjoy serious journalism which they sometimes do add. I hope they someday manage to incorporate that into their business model too. [1]:https://www.buzzfeed.com/news |
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I mean, go pick up a copy of the New York Times, which is the gold standard of print journalism. It has hard news, sure, but it also comes with a lot of... fluff. Style/trend pieces! Entertainment coverage! Movie & restaurant reviews! A crossword puzzle! And other newspapers offer even more fluff. A comics page! A gossip page! A picture of a bikini model! Today's horoscope!
The thing about journalism is that fluff is always what has paid the bills. Even in the golden age of newspapering, a paper that was nothing but 100% long-form hard news wouldn't sell. Except for a tiny, tiny number, people never picked up a newspaper for the hard news; they picked it up to find out how the Mets did yesterday, or to read the funnies, or for some other bit of fluff that appeals to them. Fluff is what makes mass-market journalism economically possible. The money the fluff brings is what pays for the hard-news reporting, because that reporting has never paid for itself.
The major business mistake newspapers made in the modern era was forgetting this, and letting a key part of the fluff that sold papers -- the classified ads -- get stolen out from under them. They let themselves get sufficiently divorced from the realities of their market that they thought classifieds weren't important. But they were! They were what kept the lights on, not high-minded fantasies of being the next Woodward & Bernstein.