They shot themselves in the foot naming their serious, professional, and separate journalism branch “Buzzfeed News” which I agree, reads like an oxymoron.
I wasn't aware - can I ask do you know of any similar efforts where the revenue generating side and the 'meaningful to humanity / pulizter' side have maintained the mitochondrial relationship? It doesn't seem to hold up well to business administration tactics.
Movie studios do this a lot - they’ll have their smaller production houses make movies that compete for awards and then the larger big budget companies make the blockbusters that subsidize the other stuff.
Same with book publishing. Big publishing houses probably lose money on most of their literary National Book Award-chasing titles, but the prestige is worth it, if not subsidized by the more mass market books they put out.
A Sunday issue of a broadsheet arguably fits the bill. A normal newspaper and 4x the volume in additional supplements with lightweight content about travel, housing and movies to wrap ads around, sometimes with an insert or two entirely produced by a sponsor. Of course, they started off with news and diversified into lots of sub-papers that pay bills rather than the other way round and their travel listicles are marginally more highbrow than Buzzfeed and there's an argument the format is slowly dying, but the basic concept is the same. Same goes with the commercially successful online version of the UK's Daily Mail having a huge amount of online-only lightweight celebrity content in a clickbait sidebar sitting alongside its more right–wing campaigning style reporting
Wikipedia considers Fox News thusly: "There is consensus that Fox News is generally reliable for news coverage on topics other than politics and science."
Yeah I have to agree, I'm sure it's nice to be able to get published and I've heard the market isn't too easy to make a mark, but as for the company, they won't exactly be missed.
On a side note, it's a little bit comforting to see that companies like this don't strive.
I naively used to think that BuzzFeed could be a new business model for investigative journalism, with revenue from the native advertising in its other arms going towards Pulitzer Prize-level work. What a shame.
