Three weeks ago I wrote a post about Buzzfeed which opened like this:

I visited Buzzfeed yesterday for the first time in several months. I don’t remember why.

I spent a few minutes looking over the recent articles, mostly the headlines but I clicked on a couple. I came away with a strong sense that the site was very much on its last legs. I can’t really explain why it felt that way but it did. In fact, I second guessed myself and went back a bit later to look at it again.

What was it about the site that felt so busy and empty at the same time, sort of like the row of games at a low-rent carnival. There are lots of flashy attention grabbing headlines and images but you get the feeling the carnies working behind the scene just want to empty your wallet. Maybe that was always the case but it feels even more the case now.

You could just feel that it was circling the drain. Today we’re learning that Buzzfeed News is shutting down as part of another round of layoffs.

BuzzFeed News, a pioneering digital news site that won a Pulitzer Prize and stirred controversy by publishing the Steele dossier, said Thursday it will close after 12 years.

In a staff memo, Jonah Peretti, the site’s co-founder and chief executive, said his company would lay off 15 percent of its employees and begin shuttering BuzzFeed News, which was started in late 2011 as an adjunct to BuzzFeed, a site that specializes in creating more frivolous content such as viral “listicles” about celebrities and popular culture.

BuzzFeed and its sister publication, HuffPost, will continue, but the news site will be wound down, Peretti wrote.

Buzzfeed News won a Pulitzer in 2021 for its coverage of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Those really were good stories and deserved the attention they got.

On the other hand, Buzzfeed’s decision to publish the Steele dossier without checking anything in it was a major fail by former editor Ben Smith. In a better journalistic world he would have been fired rather than mildly criticized.

As we would learn many months later, the entire dossier was an unreliable mish mash of rumors and innuendo paid for by the DNC and the Clinton campaign. By publishing the allegations sans any kind of fact-checking, Buzzfeed helped create the accuse-now-facts later tenor of resistance journalism that existed for most of 2017 and beyond. That more than anything may be the site’s legacy.

Years later when a lone reporter at the Washington Post went back and asked the reporters who’d trumpeted the dossier to explain themselves, few would even respond. The whole thing was just an embarrassment that no one really wanted to talk about. One of the few who did respond, Howard Fineman, told the Post, “at least initially, the press deserves more credit for steering clear of it than the feds! Remember, it took Ben Smith and BuzzFeed to put it out there in January 2017, after the dossier had been essentially bootstrapped into a semblance of credibility by the fact that the feds already had used it!” It never had credibility and if any bootstrapping was done to pretend it did, that was done chiefly by Buzzfeed.

And of course, Ben Smith failed upward to the NY Times and is now running another new site. He’s said to be very sad to see his former site fail.

Mr. Smith, who left BuzzFeed News in 2020 to be a media columnist at The New York Times, said in an interview that he was “really sad” about the closure.

“I’m proud of the work that BuzzFeed News did, but I think this moment is part of the end of a whole era of media,” said Mr. Smith, who now runs the media outlet Semafor. “It’s the end of the marriage between social media and news.”…

Shares of BuzzFeed, which went public in late 2021 via a deal with a special type of shell company, fell by more than 20 percent in midday trading, to around 70 cents per share.

CEO Jonah Peretti took the blame the the failure in a memo to staff. “We know that the changes and improvements we are making today are necessary steps to building a better future.”

BREAKING: BuzzFeed news is shutting down. @peretti’s memo: pic.twitter.com/k3vGnHOkcl

— Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) April 20, 2023

These aren’t even the only media layoffs happening today. Insider is also cutting 10% of its staff.

The news outlet Insider announced to staff via email Thursday morning that the company lay off 10% of its workforce, including staff writers…

Insider Incorporated president Barbara Peng announced that layoffs in an email to staff this morning that was obtained by Gizmodo and first reported by The Daily Beast. Peng wrote that staff members affected by the layoffs would be receiving a notification 15 minutes after her email to the company was sent.

News is a tough business for everyone these days.