BuzzFeed News shuts down as parent company pivots to AI content

BuzzFeed’s chief executive, Jonah Peretti, told staff the company was closing its news division, BuzzFeed News, and cutting about 180 jobs — roughly 15% of BuzzFeed Inc’s workforce — across the wider business. BuzzFeed News had won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for international reporting, the first digital-native outlet to receive one for its own work, but had never turned a profit under a company whose core BuzzFeed brand ran on advertising and traffic rather than subscriptions.

Peretti said in his memo that BuzzFeed would concentrate its journalism at HuffPost, the profitable news brand it also owned, and put resources instead behind BuzzFeed’s entertainment and quiz content, alongside AI tools the company had been experimenting with since earlier that year. He took responsibility for the closure directly, writing that he had “overinvested in BuzzFeed News” out of attachment to its mission rather than sound business judgment. A company spokesperson said explicitly that no journalism jobs were being replaced by AI; the AI push and the shutdown were parallel decisions rather than a direct substitution.

The closure nonetheless became a fixture in arguments about journalism’s economics in the AI era, because of timing rather than a demonstrated causal link: BuzzFeed had announced in January 2023 that it would use OpenAI’s technology to produce quizzes and other content, and its stock had risen sharply on that announcement before falling back. Coming three months later, the closure of the company’s serious-journalism arm read to many observers as a statement about where a media company under financial pressure judged AI-generated content could substitute for reporting, even though management’s own account distinguished the two. BuzzFeed’s stock continued to trade well below its post-SPAC listing price over the following two years, and the company faced a Nasdaq delisting warning in 2023 before stabilising its balance sheet in 2024.