BuzzFeed’s downfall again proves the cliché: Go woke, go broke
December 26, 2024
It is a cliché these days to say “Go woke, go broke”. But the point about cliches is that they often contain a great deal of truth – that’s how they get repeated enough to become cliches. This is why the stories of the major corporations dumping DEI are such a good sign. Take a look at what happened to BuzzFeed, which really did go woke:
“The BuzzFeed that exists now is a zombie business.”…‘It pivoted into oblivion’….
BuzzFeed just sold the company that makes “Hot Ones” to meet a looming debt payment. There’s not a great deal left inside the company now other than a couple of websites – which aren’t notably money-making in themselves.
We at AIM have been following this for some time. From the decision to go public in 2021:
BuzzFeed’s deal to go public as a company was markedly less successful than the company might have hoped. The shareholders gave them a 94% rejection rate by one measure. Which isn’t a grand gesture of confidence in BuzzFeed’s prospects.
Those shareholders – the rejection was refusing to take part in the Spac flotation on the market – were probably right too. The execs started to bail soon after, June 2022:
The recent unprecedented plunge of BuzzFeed stock is due in part to insider selling by BuzzFeed’s key executives,
Total turnover is of the order of $400 million a year or so (or four times the last announced quarter’s $106 million). On which they’re losing nearly $100 million a year (4x Q2 2022 losses of nearly $24 million).
It’s not obvious that the financial performance has got much better – not if they’re selling off a show to pay the debts. So, why did it all go wrong? Well, from the time that BuzzFeed News itself closed down:
As an example of the journalistic excellence at BuzzFeed News that actual news of the closedown is carried at NBC but not at, umm, BuzzFeed News. Odd really, especially as they’ve been able to take the time to bring us this story: “Le Creuset’s New Color Is The Trend Child Of Millennial Pink And Alison Roman’s Shallot Pasta. The launch of the “shallot” shade from Le Creuset is apparently a big deal — in our newsroom, at least.” Well, yes, perhaps views of what constitute breaking news vary across newsrooms – or perhaps not across newsrooms that are going to remain open.
But this is something that we’ve been detailing over time. The fact that BuzzFeed News isn’t actually very good at that news and journalism thing.
Now that could be just unkind but:
BuzzFeed, which was once the darling of progressive “explanatory” journalism — that’s journalism that pretends to explain issues when it really propagandizes them — has become a cautionary tale for similar digital media companies such as Vox and Vice, all of which once believed that they could simply insert progressive talking points in between clickbait articles aimed at youth and the world would be theirs.
That is the way it’s worked out. Vox has lost its founders and Vice is bankrupt.
Again, perhaps we have been unkind over the years. But there’s a significant warning here. Just being woke, progressive, doesn’t even work in journalism, let alone elsewhere. If it doesn’t work, even here, then we want it kept well out of the major corporations. Even, out of society as a whole and definitely government.
This is where BuzzFeed finally has a use. That example is an exemplar of the cliché go woke, go broke. As we don’t want the entire country to go broke then we’ll have to make sure it doesn’t go woke, right?