I’m a little surprised that there wasn’t a thread already…
Mass layoffs across the world (including Australia) - anyone know what’s going on?
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Don’t know unfortunately, but if it means less inexperienced ‘journalists’ injecting their opinion into reporting on Australian politics, it’s a great thing.
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I know a young woman who works as lifestyle editor at Buzzfeed in its Sydney office. I think everyone at the office is worried about their jobs.
Not enough money/advertising coming in through the more “magazine” style content?
Either way, it sounds like worrying times for BuzzFeed worldwide.
Not great signs for the website to consider it’s news coverage as something it should reduce (and ominous considering this news comes not long after HuffPost Australia shuttered).
Hopefully Buzzfeed Australia’s loss will be Ten Daily’s gain.
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As someone who works for a competitor, Buzzfeed did punch above their weight in Aus. Very sad to see a strong news org shooting itself in the foot.
Whether you like it or not, more variety in news is healthy for Australian media.
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Along with 10 Daily, would Junkee (who I’m pretty sure are competition in at least some areas) be another website which could potentially benefit from cutbacks at BuzzFeed?
SBS News have also started advertising as of this morning for a senior digital journalist and editor.
In a period of some not-so-great political reporting, Buzzfeed have actually broken stories and have produced some decent news content that is a lot more accessible to Millennials/GenZ then a lot of other news outlets have.
as @pelican points out, more variety is good - the challenge is becoming how thats achievable and to still be profitable
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any job loss is sad but I think people are being overly generous and romanticising the quality of coverage this outlet provides. The bulk of it is fluffy lifestyle or entertainment content, not hard news. They do hard news well, but for me I observed a distinct bias in favour of the political left. I get that youth are their audience and they traditionally vote Greens or Labor, but serious news organisations don’t just hold a mirror up to the audience in terms of coverage, they also challenge them by presenting (with as equal prominence as possible) alternative views that may be disagreed with.
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Yeah, I’m personally more than happy to point out how ridiculous some of the fluffy lifestyle/entertainment content from BuzzFeed is. Granted this is from a few years ago now but Flurrygate Parts 1 and 2, anyone? 
The thing I think people are really concerned about is the prospect of these cutbacks at BuzzFeed being more likely to affect the actual news side of the website (which yes, has broken legitimate stories) rather than the entertainment/lifestyle side.
I’d agree that BuzzFeed (and similar millennial-targeted websites) are likely to have a distinct left wing skew to their coverage but at the same time, there are plenty of news organisations which have a distinct right wing skew to their coverage.
The issue here is payment. People need to pay for news. I want online publishers to band together, similar to how free tv came to be. Advocate, run campaigns and show and tell audiences why they should pay and what the consequences of not paying are. The future and diversity depends on it.
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Agree with this, while it’s certainly not the ABC it’s at least one more voice contributing to an ever-dwindling range of them in our media landscape, which in itself is a good thing. Losing staff (including actual journalists) at an outlet like this is no better for our media landscape than NewsCorp announcing another round of redundancies at The Australian.
Still, as has been mentioned, while we see the way in which the old media marketing model has been destroyed by changing technology, we’re really yet to see many operators demonstrate a way of making it work in this new world. Maybe it’s because anyone now can be an amateur journalist and easily gather an audience, so there’s far less a market for professional journalists, and more to the point organisations that employ them?
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Its all well and good to say that - but you’ve also got to have a product that is worth paying for. While there is decent ‘free’ content (be it ad-supported or otherwise), publishers are going to struggle to convince people to pay for content particularly where the quality is declining.
I have digital subscriptions for Daily Telegraph and the SMH - I like the ability to download the ‘as-print’ newspaper and read it on my iPad (especially now that home delivery is getting harder to obtain in my area) but I often wonder why I bother, the quality of the content is declining and its becoming less news and more opinion. Fairfax (or is that Nine now) Regional went paywall before Christmas - its nearly impossible to justify subscribing, content can be next nothing (and not everything in the printed paper goes online) and the quality rapidly declining - its a shame, because I can’t see Nine’s regional papers lasting very long and this may just accelerate that.
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As with most news websites these days, the “fluffy” stuff including quizzes etc (ie. clickable) was supposed to pay (via advertising) for the harder news. It’s an unfortunate reality.
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Yes I understand that but I won’t have people eulogise it as though it’s Four Corners.
Does it matter?
The quality of journalism was good from the reporters there and they face losing their jobs.
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Most of the ‘journalism’ or churnalism was bad. The good stuff was in the minority. An informed public does matter don’t you think? Or do you just want to be spoon fed food that tastes good? Real life and your brain is different to your gut.
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