First up, the BZFD story at Wolf Street, December 7:
Fate of “Free” Online Publishers: BuzzFeed’s Existential Crisis after its SPAC Merger
It burned through most of its $700 million of investor cash. So now what?
On the first day of trading after its merger with a SPAC, on December 6, 2021, shares of BuzzFeed [BZFD] jumped from the pre-merger price of $10 to $14.77 intraday, and then collapsed. On June 6, the lockup period expired, when certain insiders could sell, and the already beaten-down shares plunged another 40% in one day. Today the stock was trading as low as $1.02 and closed at $1.04, a new low, down 93% from the peak. If the stock drops further, the company may have to try to do a reverse stock split, maybe 1 to 25, such as Hippo, or whatever, to keep its shares from getting delisted.
Charts like this give me the willies about the free-money era, deeply infested with consensual hallucination, as I call it, that was already coming to an end when the SPAC merger was pushed out the window. But there is more to it, as we’ll see in a moment:....
....MUCH MORE
In 2017 - 18, Talking Points Memo had a couple stories to which we linked on the great funding free-for-all:
Is Venture Capital Destroying Online Journalism?
Media—"Data Lords: The Real Story of Big Data, Facebook and the Future of News"
Now where this gets really interesting is the fact that newsonomics and journalistic integrity are inextricably tied together. This is the Gordian Knot that Izabella Kaminska is approaching.
Here she is at NiemanLab:
Fixing journalism’s credit score to earn back audience trust
And yesterday on Twitter
The logic we should apply to this problem is similar to that we already apply to other information/trust problems such as those pertaining to payments/finance etc. Banks have always relied on correspondents for a reason. And of course so have major media brands.
— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) December 9, 2022
....MUCH MORE (THREAD)
It almost sounds as though she is aiming for a guild of like-minded journos.
Should that be the case I would be willing to consult, gratis, on livery and decorum.
e.g. don't encroach on the scriveners turf, they can be right bastards should they feel slighted.
Finally, here is her (and Dario's) latest at The Blind Spot:
"In The Blind Spot (City Regulation, Coal, Anon Archaeology)"
