Last week, BuzzFeed announced it will shut down BuzzFeed News, the clickbait-driven digital newsroom that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for international reporting. The decision is part of broader layoffs to cut 15 percent of the company’s workforce, which includes the HuffPost, Tasty, Complex, and First We Feast.

In a letter to employees, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti lists several challenges that led to the closure of BuzzFeed News. Among them stands out that he “overspent” on investigative reporting by BuzzFeed News, and that he was “slow to accept that big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required for premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media.”

The rise and fall of BuzzFeed News is a clear example of how Big Tech monopolies have always had the upper hand in running the internet. Perhaps the big lesson of this story is that during the evolution of BuzzFeed News a key market transformation was ignored: the growing dominance of Google’s and Facebook’s business models across the web. Facing these tech giants, whose every move buttressed their monopoly power, newsrooms never stood a chance.

Let’s recall how BuzzFeed News was born. Like many new digital-first newsrooms during the 2010s in the U.S. and across the world, media executives were trying to maximize web traffic, in a bid to get more eyeballs through social media that they could then turn into an advertising profit. At first, quizzes, cat videos, and memes were turned into ‘listicle’ headlines and took over the feeds of Facebook users. “Native advertising” – advertising passing as headline news –  was born.

Peretti’s approach collided with legacy media transitioning to digital. Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker famously decried the type of virality and advertising BuzzFeed News pushed to make revenues.

At the same time, BuzzFeed News founding editor-in-chief Ben Smith was grappling with building a newsroom with “journalistic credibility.” By 2014, he had realized that would also mean sacrificing traffic, as Wired reported that year. Ultimately, his efforts earned BuzzFeed News many awards until his departure in 2020. But all along, both Peretti and Smith were battling bigger powers that were gobbling up the internet.

The 2010s, after all, was also the decade when Google and Facebook started consolidating various key digital platforms. Search, video streaming, social media, email, digital advertising, and mobile were all starting to fall into the hands of those same two giants. Facebook, for example, launched a series of products that promised to be the “next big thing” for online journalism: Facebook News Tab, Facebook Video, and Instant Articles, to name a few. With all that, it disproportionately influenced what newsrooms produced.

By 2018, it was becoming clear that social media had developed the power to determine the destinies of even the largest of news publishers. As Nick Thompson and Fred Vogelstein wrote on Wired in February of that year, “Every publisher knows that, at best, they are sharecroppers on Facebook’s massive industrial farm […] If Facebook wanted to, it could quietly turn any number of dials that would harm a publisher – by manipulating its traffic, its ad network, or its readers.” 

In June of 2018, both the New York Times and NewsCorp were willing to speak out in public about the threat, at an Open Markets Institute conference titled “Breaking the News: Free Speech & Democracy in the Age of Platform Monopoly.”

In response, Facebook simply downgraded the relevance of all news that showed on Facebook users’ feeds, unilaterally deciding to favor content posted or liked by friends and family. Perhaps even more insidiously, Facebook started to funnel special payments to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and a few other highly influential publishers, at the expense of smaller and upstart journalism shops.

BuzzFeed will now revamp its news efforts on the HuffPost because — Peretti claims — it still has a loyal audience less dependent on social media. Smith, co-founder of the publication Semafor, now advocates for a “post-social media” vision for journalism. About the closure of BuzzFeed News, Smith wrote it “signals a vast shift in digital media that those of us who live inside it are feeling intensely right now, the end of one era and the beginning of another.”

What remains to be seen is whether working journalists — and their readers — will find this new period any easier than the last. Or whether even harder times are in the offing.

A coalition of 50 civil society groups led by the Open Markets Institute submitted a joint comment to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) calling on the agency to close any loopholes when it makes a final ruling on noncompete clauses. The comment explains that functionally equivalent restraints like training repayment agreement provisions, or TRAPs, also lock workers in place. Open Markets Legal director Sandeep Vaheesan this week also published an opinion piece in The Washington Post calling on the FTC to ban TRAPs and other workarounds. Any failure to do so, Vaheesan wrote, “would render the FTC’s admirable initiative all for naught.” Read the comment here. 

A coalition of 50 civil society groups led by the Open Markets Institute submitted a joint comment to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) calling on the agency to close any loopholes when it makes a final ruling on noncompete clauses. The comment explains that functionally equivalent restraints like training repayment agreement provisions, or TRAPs, also lock workers in place. Open Markets Legal director Sandeep Vaheesan this week also published an opinion piece in The Washington Post calling on the FTC to ban TRAPs and other workarounds. Any failure to do so, Vaheesan wrote, “would render the FTC’s admirable initiative all for naught.” Read the comment here. 

The Open Markets Institute this week hailed the U.K. government’s new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill, saying it would place the U.K. at the forefront of global action to regulate digital markets. “The Bill contains many highly encouraging measures, including a new pro-competition framework for Big Tech firms, a tougher merger control regime, and new rules on harmful practices including subscription traps and fake reviews,” OMI Europe director Max von Thun said. Open Markets also hailed the U.K.’s decision this week to block Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of video game maker Activision Blizzard. Commenting on the move by U.K.’s Competition Markets Authority (CMA), von Thun said, “After unwinding Meta’s acquisition of Giphy, the UK’s CMA has once again demonstrated its willingness to stand up to Big Tech’s attempts to buy out the competition.” Von Thun was quoted by Wired, AP News, and PBS Newshour discussing the decision.

The Open Markets Institute and leading European civil society organizations urged the European Commission to formally abandon the consumer welfare standard for enforcement of competition law. The OMI-led submission was in response to a Commission call for evidence to help shape guidelines for the EU’s Article 102 TFEU antitrust law regime. The groups also called on the Commission to take measures to tackle corporate dominance itself, instead of only addressing abuses of that dominance, through greater use of structural remedies and preventing acquisitions that create or entrench dominant positions. Read the full submission here.

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