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.

This post isn’t really about BuzzFeed, as I never worked there and have no deep insider knowledge about the goings on. But I do want to talk about this moment for publishers.

“It’s the end of the marriage between social media and news,” Smith told the Times.

That sounds right to me, and though it going to be hard for publishers, I find it difficult to say it’s a bad development for the world. It probably should have happened sooner, and I worry that it has now happened too late to be any good.