One Viral Media Company That Isn’t Evil, Just Misunderstood
BuzzFeed’s boss explains why the site has been quietly deleting thousands of its own posts.
Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch
If you ask BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti, it adds up to One Viral Media Company That Isn’t Evil, Just Misunderstood. And, perhaps, one that could have handled certain things a little better.
In the past three years, BuzzFeed has grown from a
relatively obscure viral-content skunkworks to one of the most widely
read media outlets in the world. According to the Web traffic analytics
firm Alexa, it’s the 44th-most-popular website in the United States, putting it in a class with Fox News and the New York Times.
BuzzFeed’s mastery of the dark arts of making things go
viral on Facebook has endeared it to tech investors, including Silicon
Valley power players Andreessen Horowitz, who recently led a $50 million
venture capital round. But it has also invited envy and scorn from
rivals. And it has opened the site’s practices to a level of
journalistic scrutiny that its creators never anticipated.
In 2012 my former Slate colleague Farhad Manjoo revealed that several of BuzzFeed’s most popular listicles were lifted in large part from other websites,
including Reddit. In the years since, the site has been hit with
lawsuits and public accusations from people who feel it has exploited or
flat-out stolen their work. Last month the site fired staff writer
Benny Johnson after a pair of sharp-eyed bloggers documented several instances of evident plagiarism; for example, a U.S. politics quiz whose answers appeared to be partly copied and pasted from Wikipedia.
The latest backlash came this week when Gawker’s J.K. Trotter reported that more than 4,000 old BuzzFeed posts
seem to have simply disappeared from the site. The discovery came as
Trotter was following up on a July post in which he revealed that at
least four posts, including three by senior editor Matt Stopera, had mysteriously vanished.
Those revelations sparked fresh fury in media circles, where
retracting a story is viewed as a serious blow to one’s journalistic
credibility—and to do so without notifying readers is a cardinal sin.
Retracting four thousand posts without telling anyone is simply
unheard of. To many in the industry, it smacks of a disregard for
journalism’s basic tenets of accountability. That apparent disregard is
especially galling when it comes from an upstart that is raking in VC
rounds and gobbling up top journalists from established outlets that are
struggling to survive.
In a phone interview on Tuesday, Peretti confirmed that BuzzFeed
embarked on a project earlier this year to take down old posts that
didn’t meet its editorial standards. He said he didn’t know exactly how
many posts had been deleted in all. But when asked about Gawker’s estimate of more than 4,900, he said, “I wouldn’t be shocked if it was a number like that.”
Peretti acknowledged that BuzzFeed took the posts down
without alerting readers. In retrospect, he said, “We probably could
have communicated better, or handled it better.”
But he insisted that the purge was not the blatant breach of
journalistic ethics that it might seem. To understand why, Peretti said,
you have to remember that BuzzFeed began as a tech company, not a media company.
As Peretti explained at length in a recent interview with Felix Salmon, he and his fellow Huffington Post
co-founder Ken Lerer started it in 2006 as a side project, a digital
laboratory focused on understanding how things go viral on the Web.
Rather than creating content of its own, BuzzFeed built
software designed to detect and track content that was beginning to
circulate widely on other sites, whether journalistic or otherwise.
Along the way, a few BuzzFeed employees—including
then-intern Matt Stopera—began toying with ways to create viral content
of their own. Those included the thinly sourced listicles that would
later become BuzzFeed’s bread and butter. But, Peretti told me,
they also included scores of other experimental posts and pages that
would make little sense to readers today.
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