It’s become a familiar refrain for journalists: do more with less. And in the case of BuzzFeed journalists, it's a lot less.  BuzzFeed’s new

BuzzFeed, After Gutting Its Newsroom, Asks Reporters to Produce Even More

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2023-03-19 16:00:03

It’s become a familiar refrain for journalists: do more with less. And in the case of BuzzFeed journalists, it's a lot less. 

BuzzFeed’s news division has been repeatedly battered. Buyouts last spring saw the site’s acclaimed investigations team—as well as its science, politics, and inequality verticals—gutted. Top editors, including the site's then editor in chief, Mark Schoofs, departed. To make matters worse, toward the end of 2022, founder and Chief Executive Jonah Peretti announced even more cuts (though neither BuzzFeed News nor HuffPost—which BuzzFeed also owns—were impacted by those layoffs). According to the Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed’s roughly 100-person newsroom downsized by about 40 percent in the past year. All of which made BuzzFeed News editor Karolina Waclawiak’s recent request for more content somewhat ironic, if not inevitable. 

“There are so many things outside of our control—the advertising market, the economy, a recession,” Waclawiak told staff at a meeting reported by the Journal. “But what we can control is how many stories we publish each day.” Waclawiak reportedly framed her plan to boost the news division’s volume and traffic as part of an effort to shore up profitability this year, while acknowledging that the newsroom is “much smaller than it used to be.” (Perhaps that informed Peretti’s decision to embrace AI technology to create content, as he announced earlier this year.) But Waclawiak assured staff that the newsroom's increased publishing volume “had improved the visibility of its content on external platforms including Apple News and NewsBreak, leading to higher revenue,” according to the Journal, which reports that traffic referrals from Facebook, which BuzzFeed previously relied on, have been flagging. 

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