A quick announcement: Hi folks. If you’re online like I am, you know that Substack has evolved a bit to include a social media component, Substack Notes. It’s resulted in quite a few new subscribers to my Substack, and I’m still figuring out the best way forward — but at the moment I’m feeling an instinct to treat Substack posts as a more of a blog and less of a newsletter. That might mean more frequent posts — maybe even a couple a day — instead of one now and again. But I’m not sure that’s the right instinct. And I know that for some of you, Substack really is just a newsletter. So let me know how this works for you.
And welcome! Now on to the main thing…
BuzzFeed News is shutting down.
In an email to staff shared with NBC News, BuzzFeed Inc. CEO and co-founder Jonah Peretti said the move was part of a 15% workforce reduction across a number of teams.
"While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization," he wrote.
This got me musing a bit — maybe because I recently turned 50 and I’m contemplating my personal and professional mortality.
But when I started in journalism, right before the Internet blew up — my first daily newspaper had one computer that could connect to the web, and then only slowly, it certainly didn’t have a web page at the time — I had what I thought was a pretty modest goal for myself: Find a good newspaper, make a long career there, leave a legacy in whatever community where I landed.
It didn’t work out that way. The Internet did happen. Instead of being on a daily deadline, the deadline was always now, as soon as you could publish. Newspapers — already in decline — saw their subscription numbers and ad revenue plummet. I built things. They failed, and disappeared. (Literally: Some fragments of things I did still exist on the Internet Archive, but that’s the only place you can find them.) I moved on. And the idea of making a long career any particular place, or with any particular institution, kind of disappeared.
That’s not just a journalism thing. Folks across a wide range of industries have experienced it. Live long enough — more than just a few short years, really — and you’ll end up telling folks about the time you were the proverbial buggy whip maker.
So when people talked about Buzzfeed being the “future of news,” I think what they thought was not just that it’s model would be replicated by lots of other news outlets — that did happen — but that it would become a new institution like the old ones, the New York Times or Washington Post say, where young journalists would aim to be and set themselves up for long careers and powerful people across American life would take seriously and just saying “I’m from BuzzFeed News” would strike fear into the hearts of the corrupt.
That didn’t happen.
And I don’t think will happen all that much anymore. I suspect we’ve entered the era of pop-up institutions.
What’s that? If you live in a town of any size, you’ve probably noticed a few storefronts in the business district that get occupied for a few days or a weeks at a time and then disappear. They’re pop-up shops, and they’re designed for short lifespans.
I wonder if the same thing is happening in journalism, and beyond.
We’re no longer building things meant to stand and live for decades and centuries beyond our short, mortal efforts. The New York Times has been around since the 1800s. The Washington Post has also been around awhile. But they’ve struggled. And who knows about the upstarts that have tried to challenge them. Will Politico still be around in a decade? Or Vox? Or any of the publications where my work now appears?
Maybe this isn’t new. Maybe everything has a natural lifespan, and some things live longer than others. Things are here. They serve a purpose. Then they go away. That’s life.
That’s what happened to BuzzFeed.
And it sure looks like what happens in social media. I’ve been on Friendster and MySpace and had fun, and then on Facebook and Twitter. I’m no longer on Facebook, dubious about Twitter, and playing around with Substack Notes. I’ve joked a few times that places like Twitter have already gone through the legacy media of building a business, becoming important, and then hoping for a billionaire bailout. It’s all just happening faster.
Maybe this is just how things work now.
The hectic nownownow pace of the digital era makes me think that building and maintaining institutions — those keepers of the flame that don’t just serve the public in the here and now, but pass along knowledge and traditions from one generation to the next — just won’t exist in the future. There will be no new New York Times coming from the digital era.
Instead, there will be Gawker. And after that, BuzzFeed. And the thing after that. And the thing after that. And the thing after that.
Maybe that’s dymanism. Or maybe we’re loosing our roots and traditions and stability and the rest. Probably a bit of both. We live in the era of pop-up everything now.