The social media era of news is over
On Thursday, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced that the company is shuttering its news division. Starting in 2012 under the editorship of Ben Smith (then of Politico, now running Semafor), BuzzFeed News never made a profit — but it did win lots of journalism awards and became a large part of the digital journalism ecosystem. More people than I can count worked there at some point in the last twelve years. The writing had been on the wall for BF News for a while, but the speed with which its demise occurred is still sort of a shock to the system. Places don’t often just cease to exist. Rockets may experience "rapid unscheduled disassembly,” but newsrooms mostly don’t.
