“We’ll wait until the water situation is resolved and then we’ll send you off.”
Joel Anderson, former sports reporter and national: I left in the summer of 2017, before things got bad. But I always, always suspected that things were not sustainable. I worked in media long enough to know that eventually we would have to make money, and we kept hiring a lot of people. I’m probably wrong, but I think we hired about two people a day from 2014 to 2015. We opened a lot of offices overseas and domestically. Everyone seemed to understand that the trip would be fun, but short. My editor, one of the nicest and nicest people I know, always said, “Joel, just spend the money!” It was a nice thought, but it seemed so short-sighted. I came from places where they had taken out coffee makers and even cut toilet paper. The bills were always due.
Tom Warren, Investigative Journalist: I think the writing was on the wall in international offices long before that. Colleagues we worked with in France and then Germany were unceremoniously let go, and the London office faced wave after wave of heartbreaking redundancies. There was a lot of anger in those early sackings – we all had a sort of co-dependent relationship with BuzzFeed and people felt they were being let down.
Adam B. Vary, former entertainment journalist: In October 2017, the New York Times and The New Yorker published their blockbuster stories on Harvey Weinstein, and Ben, who had spent years treating the Entertainment News desk with benign neglect, was suddenly gone. fix on the fact that we had not, somehow, I landed the biggest and most difficult entertainment news of my life. By the end of that month, our team split, our editor (my third, out of five!) resigned, and an internal memo was leaked to the outlets pointing out “the holes in our Weinstein coverage” by changes. It felt punitive and arbitrary, and I’m still a little mad about it, but more importantly, it exploded that magical feeling from my first four years at BuzzFeed. I realized how precarious everything really was, so when the first round of layoffs came in 2019, it felt like the site’s trajectory was no longer upward.
Julia Furlan, former Head of Audio: One afternoon, water started pouring down a ceiling pipe right over the Pod Squad desks, so we had to move all our stuff. A reporter from the Wall Street Journal had already started asking our producers if we were being fired, and the executives said, “We’ll wait until the water situation is resolved and then we’ll fire you.” Instead, I said, “No, do it now,” and so we were unceremoniously called one by one into his office while the water continued to pour in the newsroom. They fired the whole team; it was freezing They said we didn’t have the numbers, but the truth is they had no idea what they were doing with us.
Albert Samaha, senior culture reporter: The union was really born when management shut down the Pod Squad in October 2018. Everyone on that team was well-loved, very talented, and did exceptional work, and they were mostly women and people of color The news was shocking, and the meeting in the newsroom when Ben and Shani announced it was gut-wrenching. A bunch of people were crying. I really couldn’t believe that the leadership had no idea how to make podcasting profitable, when we had such an impressive lead in such a clear direction the industry was going.
That was the moment I lost faith in people making the big decisions. It was the moment that radicalized me, from someone who casually supported the idea of a union to someone who volunteered to help lead the organizing effort. That night I went to my first union meeting and the NewsGuild conference room was filled with other colleagues who were also making their first appearance. Before that day, only a handful of colleagues were actively involved in the effort. Afterward, nearly the entire editorial staff was on board.
David Mack, Senior Reporter: Once we started closing international offices (RIP BuzzFeed Canada, BuzzFeed France, BuzzFeed Mexico, BuzzFeed News Oz), it became clear to everyone that we had expanded too fast and the good times were coming to an end. We were still trying new things, but the years of out-of-control spending were over. Gradually, we became more of an establishment outlet and less of an underdog startup. When Ben left the Times, I realized there were Ben’s boom years and Ben’s bust years, and I think he’d admit he wasn’t having as much fun towards the end with our first mass layoffs in early 2019 .they were horrible. I saw the managers crying. i cried But we pushed on as best we could, even as we spent the next few years trying to fight while having our limbs chopped off like Monty Python’s Black Knight. Still, the closure comes as a shock. We were told that we had more time and were achieving the goals that had been set for us.
Venessa Wong, Senior Culture Reporter: BuzzFeed’s business model was changing. When I joined in 2015, native advertising seemed like the future. Because we didn’t rely on banner ads and pop-ups like other sites, our history pages were so clean. However, from the perspective of someone removed from the company’s decision-makers before the financials were publicly reported, the business looked off. The company already had it dismissals in 2017 because it had not met revenue targets, and many more rounds would follow. When BuzzFeed spun off an independent news website (BuzzfeedNews.com) in 2018, I was very concerned that we would be isolated from the lifeblood of BuzzFeed.com and its large audience, not to mention its sales and marketing resources. . When BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost in 2020 and we were told we would continue to operate completely independently and compete with them for stories, many of us worried how long the company would want to have two newsrooms.
Gina Rushton, former reproductive rights journalist, Australia: I wouldn’t change a second of it, except perhaps the inevitable end of being a forgotten outpost when we were unceremoniously fired at 2am on my birthday in the first scary days of a pandemic. This is embarrassing, but I remember trying to calculate how my salary compared to the cost of the frozen yogurt machine in the New York office.
Rosie Gray, former political reporter: I returned to BuzzFeed in 2019 after working for the Atlantic for a couple of years. I really missed the atmosphere and energy I remembered from BuzzFeed’s heyday. But it was immediately clear that things had changed a lot. Even before it officially started, there was a round of layoffs. Things felt less free and more tense. That was the year we unionized, which was so important considering what happened the following year.
2020 is when it really started to get risky. First, Ben announced he was leaving at the Times, just before the Iowa caucuses. This really threw us on the political team – we were all very angry, not so much at the concept of Ben leaving, but that he would find out at the most inconvenient time possible. Then, obviously, the pandemic came soon after and it was chaos. We fought for the work-sharing agreement instead of layoffs, and I’m still very proud that the union was able to save those jobs at that time. Although it didn’t last. My memory of 2021-22 is basically of a place that was struggling to find its footing. When they offered buyouts last year, I was ready to go. It wasn’t the same place he had loved so much.
Clarissa-Jan Lim, Senior Reporter: I had always heard that BuzzFeed’s Asian employees would get confused with each other. At the end of 2021, when people started going back to the office and traveling to New York for summits with their respective desks, this happened to me, twice in the course of a week. Two different white men at BuzzFeed News mistook me for two different Asian women in our newsroom. Only one apologized!
Sam Henig, former executive editor and interim editor-in-chief: When I led the search for a new editor-in-chief last year, Karolina [Waclawiak] he wrote in his memo that he wanted BuzzFeed News to agree to be “a little chaotic.” He was the perfect person to lead BuzzFeed News into its next chapter, to bring back that fun, crazy energy of Ben Smith’s early days: the kind of joy that pours onto the page. Given Karolina’s invigorating editorial vision and the solid plan we had worked on with colleagues across the company to grow and diversify revenue, I left the fall thinking that some of the best days for BuzzFeed News were still ahead of us. .
Scaachi Koul, Senior Culture Writer: Towards the end, I felt a bit like Chicken Little. He would tell everyone at work, “I think something bad is about to happen.” I’ve historically been right about everything, but I’ll tell you, I wasn’t thrilled to be right about this one. What worried me the most was that our travel budget disappeared practically overnight. Our earnings reports, now very public, looked nasty. They changed the granola in the office to corn flakes. This, I thought, means doom. But the hardest thing about working in media is that a lot of things are fatal, and then the real fatality comes and all you can think is, I can’t believe I was right about that.
Zia Thompson, Public Engagement Editor: On a Monday in April, our office manager said that Wednesday’s lunch would be from a “cutting-edge mobile pizzeria with robotics created by a team of former SpaceX engineers.” Normally I would have stayed home, but I was very intrigued by the idea of robot pizza. That Wednesday I went to the office and at lunch I ate a slice of pizza so mediocre that if I hadn’t known it was digitally printed, I would have guessed it was.
The next day, BuzzFeed News was shut down.
Brandon Wall, Director of Newsroom Strategy and Experiments: There’s actually something my old boss Michael Rusch, who goes by the name “Weed Dude” online, told me that stuck with me over the years, and it was the first thing I thought of when I heard that BuzzFeed News was shutting down. He said something to the effect of “I’m asking you to quit your newspaper job to get on a rocket. The thing about rockets is that they go fast, but the ride can end very unexpectedly. BuzzFeed can last a year, it may last five, it may last a century, we just don’t know.” I really appreciate the poetic foreshadowing of a guy who went by “Weed Dude” online telling me in 2015 that BuzzFeed might come to a screeching halt like a rocket one day, and then a SpaceX rocket exploded the day BuzzFeed News closed… on 4/20/2023.
