BuzzFeed News is closing up shop. Web visitors can still find all the quizzes and listicles they have come to love—those exist on the nonnews side of BuzzFeed—but the journalism division is shuttering.
The death of BuzzFeed News marks the definitive endpoint of a certain form of social media–driven, millennial-centric journalism; as such, it is being eulogized by many former contributors, including Charlie Warzel, who correctly observes that "The Internet of the 2010s Ended Today." Ben Smith, the former editor in chief of BuzzFeed News who infamously published the Steele dossier—a substantially discredited intelligence document that sought to tie former President Donald Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin—and current Semafor editor in chief lays the blame at the feet of social media. BuzzFeed News' doom was at hand, he writes, "when consumers found their Facebook feeds toxic, not delightful; when platforms decided news was poison; and when Facebook, Twitter, and the rest simply stopped distributing links to websites."
