by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News April 20, 2023
BuzzFeed News has ceased operations, calling to mind the old newspaper maxim: “Get it first but get it right”.
The parent company of the site that first published the debunked Trump dossier written by ex-British spy Christopher Steele dossier, is being shut down, according to a memo from BuzzFeed Inc. CEO Jonah Peretti on Thursday
In 2017, then-editor in chief Ben Smith made the decision to publish the Steele dossier, which contained allegations of an “extensive conspiracy” between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to win the 2016 election over Hillary Clinton, that the Russians could blackmail Trump with a tape of prostitutes urinating on him in a Moscow hotel, that Trump and the Kremlin had been in regular contact for nearly a decade, and that Trump aide Carter Page was an intermediary for former campaign manager Paul Manafort with the Russians, among other salacious charges.
Subsequent investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to back any of the Steele dossier’s key claims and specifically discredited many of them.
“BuzzFeed News will forever be best remembered, or worst remembered for releasing the Steele dossier into the public domain without any verification whatsoever. It opened the door to years of speculation by other media outlets that all proved to be a nothing burger without the bun. So that’s their legacy,” Fox News contributor Joe Concha told Fox News Digital.
Peretti said scrapping the site was part of a broader shakeup that includes laying off 15% of staffers companywide — which amounts to 180 jobs. BuzzFeed Inc. also owns the online news sites HuffPost and the Complex Networks.
BuzzFeed’s so-called newsgathering operations will shift to HuffPost, which was acquired from Verizon in 2020, Peretti said in his memo.
“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,” Peretti wrote.
In December, BuzzFeed laid off 1,522 employees across six countries.
At the time of its initial public offering in March 2021, BuzzFeed was valued at around $9.80 a share.
As of Thursday, the company’s stock was trading at around 72 cents a share — a 93% decline.
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