The Far Left Is Tearing Buzzfeed Apart, Staffer Leaks Audio of CEO
The Far Left Is Tearing Buzzfeed Apart, Staffer Leaks Audio of CEO. In the leak the CEO Jonah Peretti is talking about how leaks caused them to speed up the layoff process and caused undue stress for the staff. In a hilarious twist someone actually leaked a recording of him asking staff not to leak meetings.But the people coming at Buzzfeed are not conservatives its the far left. The leftists are now accusing Buzzfeed of mostly targeting people of color and other marginalized writers in the layoff process.Many of these leftist writers wrote on social justice and feminist issue as well pushing the idea that Buzzfeed is getting rid of the overly ideological or subgroup writers.
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BuzzFeed recently laid off many of its staff members, and they've been involved in numerous scandals since that day.
Many of the employees were outraged that BuzzFeed was refusing to pay out what's called paid time off, but after negotiations, they've agreed to do so.
However, we're now learning that someone secretly recorded the CEO Jonah Peretti in a meeting, revealing that he's concerned about people leaking their meetings.
So it's kind of weird.
But interestingly, the people who are coming down the hardest on BuzzFeed are not conservatives.
It's the far left and their own staffers.
Today, let's take a look at the leaks and the numerous scandals affecting BuzzFeed since they've decided to lay off much of their staff.
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The latest news!
Jonah Peretti cautions against leaks in leaked audio of BuzzFeed All Hands-On Meeting.
Now, in my opinion, this story is actually kind of silly, but what it shows us that's really interesting is that within BuzzFeed, staff members are kinda pissed off.
This story from Splinter News, which is a far-left website.
With BuzzFeed's latest round of mass layoffs over, CEO Jonah Peretti hosted an all-hands meeting on Wednesday to face questions about his handling of the past week, as well as what the future would bring for the company that only a few short years ago was valued at $1.7 billion.
Starting this past Friday, BuzzFeed staffers across multiple teams and offices around the world were notified that their positions with the company had been eliminated.
The layoffs at the company stretched across the weekend and into this week.
When the dust finally settled, the company had cut 15% of its workforce, reportedly around 200 people, resulting in entire news desks and many longtime figureheads at the company gone.
Even by the already depressing standards of digital media layoffs, BuzzFeed's slow-moving massacre was a horrific culling.
That left many staffers questioning a company who once went by the motto, no haters.
A recording of the Wednesday's all-hands meeting was provided to Splinter by a source who requested anonymity to share the audio.
The meeting covered a range of topics including the company's bungled layoff schedule and its initial decision not to pay many layoff employees for their accrued paid time off.
After public outcry from BuzzFeed workers, both past and present, Peretti agreed to give his former employees what they'd rightfully earned.
Attempting to explain why the company had staggered its layoffs over several days, including an entire weekend, Peretti claimed the original plan was to avoid having people wait through the weekend.
He said that he'd intended to announce the layoffs on January 29th, but that news of the mass layoffs was leaked early, as we brought more managers into the process to try and prepare them for having the conversation.
Pariety acknowledged that the overall layoff process had been terrible and said that BuzzFeed would be doing a post-mortem to avoid a similar one in the future.
There were a lot of breakdowns in that process, he said.
I'm sorry for those breakdowns.
The bottom of the story has an update.
A BuzzFeed spokesperson replied in an email.
We have no comment on an off-the-record conversation between BuzzFeed employees and their CEO.
The reason I find this story so fascinating is that one of the reasons they had this scandal over layoffs was because someone inside the company leaked information about what was going on, and it caused them undue stress.
And then at the meeting, where Jonah Priddy is explaining this to his staff, someone leaked the audio.
There is a serious loyalty problem with BuzzFeed.
They haven't done anything really to garner the trust of their staff, and thus private matters are being aired out to the public.
But there's another story.
Apparently now, BuzzFeed is accused of being racist because the people that got laid off were mostly people of color and other marginalized writers.
This story from NextShark.
BuzzFeed is being accused of laying off mostly people of color and LGBT employees.
Last week, BuzzFeed announced that they would be laying off 15% of their staff, over 200 employees, to help the company turn a profit.
The process was staggered over a period of several days, causing panic within the company over the fate of the staffer's job status.
Following the chain of layoffs, computer science student Alexandre Muriak has developed a website called Hire a BuzzFeeder to help these former employees find new jobs.
Since then, the link has been shared by thousands of Twitter users, including remaining BuzzFeed staff members.
However, those following this news closely are accusing BuzzFeed of laying off mostly people of color and LGBTQ employees.
Among these minority ethnic and LGBTQ former staff are some well-known figures within Asian American communities.
These writers and producers have frequently created content on race, culture, mental health, and issues facing the LGBT community.
They add, even those who have been spared from these layoffs have noticed the pattern of valued people of color and LGBTQ creators who no longer have a job, and went on to criticize the decisions made by the company.
This from Jasmine Robbins.
Whether you support Buzzfeed or not, the facts are that hundreds of people who made or worked
on content speaking to marginalized and underrepresented groups are being laid off, and that is a
problem.
It would seem that many people have accused Buzzfeed of terminating mostly their identitarian
or far-left ideological writers, which says to me that maybe this far-left stuff wasn't
really paying out, and thus they've gotten rid of these people.
To make this even more interesting, an op-ed was published in the New York Times calling this a democratic emergency, which it's not, but let's take a look at this story.
From the New York Times, the BuzzFeed layoffs as democratic emergency.
Digital media has always been a turbulent business, but last week's layoffs suggest a reason for panic.
I'm gonna stop right here and say, They really don't.
It was only a handful of companies that laid off their staff, and many of these people who got laid off were ideological writers, not hardcore journalists.
There were legitimate reporters who got laid off.
National security reporters, for instance.
National reporters.
But I'm not going to stress about the loss of gender writers, because that's kind of an extremely niche sub-subgroup, and people have criticized BuzzFeed for trying to target these microscopic communities Which are a ridiculously small market share which can't become profitable.
The story says, Coming in a time of economic prosperity,
at world historical levels of interest in the news, last week's cuts tell a story of impending slow-motion doom,
and a democratic emergency in the making with no end in sight.
Consider, we are in the midst of a persistent global information war.
We live our lives on technologies that sow distrust and fakery, that admit little room for nuance and complication, that slice us up into ignorant and bleeding tribes.
It is an era that should be ripe for journalists and for the business of journalism.
A profession that, though it airs often, is the best way we know of inoculating ourselves against the suffocating deluge of rumor and mendacity.
And for a while, it looked like we could do that.
The past half decade has been a season of bold and optimistic innovation in media.
In addition to the Trump bump, there was new money from venture capitalists and giants in cable and telecom.
Big brands looking to attract millennials began to spend haltingly and then generously on advertising, leading to a Cambrian explosion of news sites, new formats, new business models, and consumers began opening up their walls to support journalism.
Turning around the fortunes of the New York Times.
He goes on to say, He says,
It is the rare publication that can survive on subscriptions, and the rarer one that will be saved by
billionaires.
Digital media needs a way to profitably serve the masses.
If even Buzzfeed couldn't hack that, we are well and truly hosed.
I tweeted out this story earlier today, saying, And this user, at Eldermark, responded, and I thought it
was actually a pretty apt response, saying, How entitled do you have to be?
What I find particularly fascinating about what's happening at BuzzFeed is that they're being torn apart by the far left.
Conservatives are doing astronomically well on social media, and we can see centrist, more heterodox sites like Quillette doing increasingly well.
You can see creators like me doing increasingly well.
So I have to wonder, why is there a democratic emergency?
Why is this the end of journalism?
It's not.
Things are actually going really, really well in a lot of different ways.
The people who are getting laid off were identitarian writers.
Not all of them, but many of them were.
We can see that, even the left has pointed out, it was the far-left ideology, for the most part, being laid off from these companies.
And we can see that moderate and centrist voices are kind of doing really well.
So it's no surprise, then, that the far-left is kicking and screaming all the way down.
They're the ones who are being purged from BuzzFeed.
They're the ones being laid off.
It would seem that this gamble these companies took didn't work out and didn't make sense.
Yesterday, New York Mag published a story talking about how BuzzFeed was trying to over-serve these microscopic communities.
The sub-subgroups of marginalized voices that are too microscopic to actually generate any views.
The same thing happened at Fusion.
Which is now Splinter, which, interestingly, is the one who published the leaks from BuzzFeed.
When I worked there, they talked about how they wanted to serve as something like .001% of the American market, and I'm really confused why they would target sub-subcategories.
One way I explain it is, imagine if you wanted to make a fansite for Star Wars fans.
It's a decently large group, and you can probably make some good money.
Catering to Star Wars fans.
But let's say you then made the site specifically for gay Star Wars fans.
Well, now you've dramatically reduced the size of who is going to actually read your content, and your viewership will decline because of it.
But let's say you went one step further and said it was specifically for Latino and gay Star Wars fans.
These are sub-subgroups.
You can't run a business that way.
It would be ridiculous if someone made ice cream specifically for one community.
I understand we're talking about media, but you'll see this in the Gawker Media Group, which is now the Gizmodo Media Group.
The reason why it's actually like 10 different websites is because each site is serving a subcategory of people.
Effectively, this is just a race to the bottom.
You service a smaller and smaller subgroup until you reach the most marginalized voice, the individual.
So why not BuzzFeed?
Why not make a website specifically dedicated to each individual person where you only write about them and the things they care about?
It seems ridiculous, right?
If you want to attract an audience and survive, you can't produce content that caters to a microscopic market.
Now, it does make sense for a site like Gizmodo to break their site up into numerous different sites to cater to specific interests, but eventually, it becomes too small, and then you have to lay people off, and what happens?
BuzzFeed lays off their sub-subgroup writers, and those writers respond with a backlash.
And now the left is coming at BuzzFeed and leaking their private conversations.
Completely unsurprising.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
Are there any news organizations you see doing particularly well that counter this narrative?
For one, I'll cite myself.
I am now launching a new platform.
We're going to be building up Subverse and doing a daily show.
It seems like things are going really great for those that are embracing new technologies and new ways of generating revenue.
I and many others were taking in a pay-what-you-will model before any of these other companies.
BuzzFeed started doing that too, but BuzzFeed has to cut out the bloat.
Maybe they'll be profitable once they fire these people.
But with Quillette, with me, with others, it sounds like things are actually going pretty good for journalism.
Comment below, we'll keep the conversation going.
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