Here is the Columbia Journalism Review playing catch-up, and taking a look ahead, March 11:
In retrospect, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti’s March 2014 memo to staff, titled “Is History Repeating Itself?” reads like an extended challenge to the rule that every headline ending with a question mark can be answered with a “no.” Peretti told his LOLing troops that “we’re at the start of a new golden age of media” and compared their digital outfit to an early-stage Time Inc.
So much can change in five years. “There were times when people would overhype digital media and be irrationally bullish about it,” Peretti tells me, not mentioning that he was one of those people. “And there are times when people are irrationally bearish about it. We’re probably at a moment where people are being more pessimistic than they should be.
The cynics can be forgiven just this once. As tech giants have strip-mined the digital landscape, BuzzFeed’s adolescence has been rocky, with the past 15 months seeing rolling cutbacks and tempered global ambitions that peaked with a mass culling of about 200 staffers—roughly 15 percent of its workforce—in late January. The layoffs came during a frenetic period in which Vice, HuffPost, and major newspaper companies also announced bloodlettings. But the news from Peretti’s shop cut deepest into the digital imagination: even BuzzFeed, with its massive reach, creative entertainment, and world-class journalism, couldn’t overcome the harsh realities of an advertising business controlled by Google, Facebook, and, increasingly, Amazon.
We’ve arrived at new media’s latest sky-is-falling moment. As national newspapers push ahead with subscriptions, cable news goes all-in on politics, and the video-streaming wars heat up, venture-backed startups like Vice and Vox have tried to rebrand themselves as something other than digital-centric businesses. In the wake of such doomsday proclamations across many corners of the industry, Peretti on Friday published a new memo to staff that was no less grandiose in its billing: “How To Save The Internet.” He’s now evangelizing to a leery crowd....MORE
