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February 5 - February 10, 2019
he sold the newspaper his family had owned since 1933 to a tech billionaire, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The Post’s sleek new offices were no longer festooned with the famous front page “Nixon Resigns” from Watergate days. They were dominated by flat-screens displaying real-time traffic statistics on how many readers were looking at each story. Prominent was a Bezos mantra, in blue and white: “What’s dangerous is not to evolve.”
The newspaper industry had shed $1.3 billion worth of editors’ and reporters’ jobs in the past decade, some 60 percent of its workforce since 2000.
In 2014 I had been fired as executive editor of the Times,
had publicly attacked the leak investigations, observing that the Obama White House was rivaling Nixon’s for secrecy,
They sent him to the Isidore Newman School, an exclusive private institution in uptown New Orleans dually distinguished by its brainy student body and storied football program, whose alumni included the writers Walter Isaacson and Michael Lewis, and the football legends Peyton and Eli Manning.
In a sense, BuzzFeed was born as a prank. For an online promotion, Nike launched a website where shoppers could personalize their shoes by selecting the color patterns and appending a nickname or chosen phrase. The 27-year-old Peretti submitted his design for a pair of shoes emblazoned with the word “sweatshop,” an obvious reference to Nike’s reputation for manufacturing its products overseas with cheap labor. An email came from Nike informing him this constituted “inappropriate slang.” The real reason for the rejection, Peretti knew, was that Nike was defensive about its sweatshops.
He knew his projects relied on an audience he characterized as the Bored at Work Network, which had arisen as “a by-product of alienated labor” and had already become, by his estimation, “the largest alternative to the corporate media,” with enough manpower for “building world class encyclopedias . . . vanquishing political leaders . . . finding life on other planets and curing cancer.”
“Digital is painting in oil,” Lerer told me. “You can always paint over it.” A story that was wrong on first publication could be corrected right away. Accuracy, in any event, was not going to bring as many readers as the sheer amount of output. The challenge was to feed the beast.
Some staffers almost never left the long plastic tables where they sat at computer screens finding stories already published elsewhere on the web, lifting and quickly repackaging them as Huffington Post originals, and siphoning off advertising that might otherwise have gone to the actual creators. Employees quit in droves. One former staffer described the work environment as “so brutal and toxic it would meet with approval from committed sociopaths.”
In the five years between the new millennium and the founding of HuffPost, the worldwide population of internet users quadrupled in size to one billion. The volume of information being trafficked online grew 28-fold.
But Google made no secret of the fact that these were not its stories. Huffington Post’s aggregators, by contrast, were humans who lifted as much of the original report as copyright law permitted. They then republished it on their site with only oblique reference or link to the original article.
To editors who were brought up on journalistic ethics and knew all too well how costly it was to fund original reporting, the ascendance of bootleggers was beyond galling.
Shareability was the beginning and end of BuzzFeed’s model, as well as its organizing logic. “Buzzfeed wasn’t a content site,” Lerer told me, recalling the company’s early days. “It was to see how to make content travel virally.”
Still, its notorious reputation could make life hard for writers. Music writer Amy Kellner described her attempt to profile an all-female band called Bratmobile in an article titled “Rebel Girls: The Time Bratmobile Hurt My Feelings.” In the article, Kellner explained how she was refused an interview because of Vice’s sexist reputation, despite the fact that she was friends with the band.
To the founders, staying punk was a business principle, though McInnes’s insistence on championing the posture in its logical extreme—telling the New York Times in 2003, for example, “ ‘No means no’ is puritanism”—would ultimately become an obstacle to his partners’ ambitions.
Recalling this period, he said, “There’s a quote from Napoleon, which is, ‘Conquest has made me, and conquest will sustain me.’ And so I used to say, ‘Alcohol has made me, and alcohol must sustain me.’ Because everything I did—my hilarity, my lunacy, all the stories, all the crazy things I did—was all just booze-fueled.” One day he woke up and recognized, “I was just sort of overweight and tired.”
Beyond McInnes’s extremism, other aspects of the young company’s culture offended some establishment partners. One was the absence of women employees. Some were repelled by McInnes and Smith, who openly recruited women to work for the magazine with the intention of pursuing them at the office, others by freelancers like photographer Terry Richardson, who had been tainted by at least seven sexual harassment allegations since 2001. Another issue was the presence of drugs, especially cocaine, in the office.
Sulzberger had preserved his boyish looks by staying trim through exercise, yoga, and rock-climbing. Some found his manner awkward, as if uncomfortable with what was expected of him. He was plenty smart but felt compelled to talk about the number of books he read.
News and opinion sites like the Huffington Post were robbing the Times blind, siphoning off for free the cream of its news report, its digital advertising, and its readers. Gawker, a gossip site, was feeding readers the internet equivalent of crack.
their eyes glazed over when Nisenholtz explained crucial tools such as search engine optimization. SEO was what Peretti and the tech team at Huffington Post were using to make sure their articles ranked first when people searched for topics on Google. The items and stories at the top of Google’s results always got the most eyeballs, and eyeballs produced ad dollars. By crafting snappy or intriguing headlines, one could game the system, a phenomenon later known as clickbait. But at the Times, editors clung to their notion that the website would be a simulacrum of the print paper. They insisted
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It wasn’t that Graham was unaware of the changes transforming his profession. It was a short-sightedness about how the Post could make money from them. Before investing in new technologies or digital endeavors, he wanted to be shown a definite path to profits. In meetings he’d often say, “I am willing to invest in the future if you can show me the future.” And when decisions had to be made about whether to change both the business and the editorial models, Graham chose to keep the focus of the Post local, on the D.C. region.
Graham was known as someone who took Buffett’s longer-term view of the stock market and resisted quarterly Wall Street pressure, but even he was not immune. The only way to sustain profits seemed to be to cut personnel. Each journalist cost nearly half a million dollars when you added in healthcare costs and other coverage fees. The old-timers cost even more.
Classified ads made up 40 percent of the Post’s revenue—far more than for the Times—and were wiped out virtually overnight by the advent of Craigslist, Monster.com, and other online services. It seemed no amount of cutting could forestall the nosedive of the company’s stock price, from nearly $1,000 a share to under $400.
The $101 million in Title IV funds Kaplan collected in 2001 became, by 2010, a whopping $1.46 billion. The subsidiary had eclipsed the flagship. In 2006 the Post Company employed three times as many people at Kaplan as it did at the newspaper, propelling Graham to change the moniker of the company to lead with education the next year.
Bob Woodward, was the Post’s most visible spokesman on the WMD issue. On the eve of the war, Woodward went on CNN’s Larry King Live, where a viewer called in with a question for him: What happens if we go to war against Iraq, knock them out, and then find they had no weapons of mass destruction in the first place? Woodward’s response would haunt him for years: “I think the chance of that happening is about zero.”
Critics on the left continued loudly to condemn the establishment press for becoming a mouthpiece for the Bush administration. McClatchy’s Washington bureau, lesser known and read, got the story right, while the New York Times and Washington Post, the pillars of the establishment, fumbled it.
The tone and scope of BuzzFeed’s content aimed unsubtly to incite its readers’ outrage, elicit their laughter, or engender a sort of sanguine conviction in the essential goodness of the human spirit. It aimed to provoke. Peretti had discovered the potency of provocation when his Nike email chain had gone viral. He knew that in order to be successful, content had to resonate with readers enough that they felt compelled to share the item with their friends. Getting them to share was the central challenge for publishers who catered to social media users.
To Peretti, it was obvious where the rest of the industry was going wrong, and he showed no bashfulness in calling this to their attention. He told a Gainesville, Florida, audience at an explanatory presentation that the biggest misconception among publishers was that “quality is all that matters.”
After nearly a decade on the job, Stopera had an intimate familiarity with the archetypal reader. He dubbed it “the default human being,” whose interests include “pizza, Netflix, and Beyoncé.”
Lol
BuzzFeed’s tireless aspirations had the effect of disincentivizing originality. Faced with an unbudging bottom line—go viral or get out—the staff reverted to ground they knew was lower risk: topics with track records of going mega-vi and familiar formats that followed established templates.
When Peretti got flak for relying so heavily on this dumbed-down form of publishing, he zealously defended the practice. “Lists are an amazing way to consume media,” he wrote in a public memo. “They work for content as varied as the 10 Commandments [and] the Bill of Rights.” Another BuzzFeed editor claimed that lists worked for Homer. “You could call that [book, The Odyssey,] 24 Chapters about Odysseus. That’s, like, a really great list. Really top notch. Really, really viral. Super viral.”
What a gross statement lol
The Onion, a satirical newspaper, launched an entire website to parody the BuzzFeed form. Called ClickHole.com, its slogan was “Because all content deserves to go viral.”
He thrived on the speedy, digital-first pace at Politico and he took pride in winning the daily sprint races. He and his colleagues saw themselves as scrappy upstarts who stood out from the rest of the press pack covering the 2008 presidential race, he later recalled. “I could sit at a press conference, type what a politician said in my blog, and it’d be online 20 minutes before anyone else because they had editorial processes that weren’t fast enough for the Internet.”
Most of BuzzFeed’s output, however, was well short of book-length. The challenge Smith issued to his newsroom was to distill their stories down to the snappiest possible kernel. They would avoid doing hackneyed, straight-ahead news. Their election coverage was run-and-gun, anything goes. Just like BuzzFeed itself, the new unit’s reportage evinced the dangerous mentality, often associated with start-up culture, of being willing to try anything once.
Even in 2011 the digital operations at most of the major news outlets amounted to a website that was only marginally sleeker than it had been more than a decade prior. News websites were still designed to be digital twins of newspapers. For Smith, this presented an enormous business opportunity. “I feel in general the 800–1,200 word form of the news article is broken,” he said in a Nieman Lab interview. The basis for that conclusion: “You don’t see people sharing those kinds of stories.”
BuzzFeed had silently and slyly deleted more than 4,000 posts from its website. It was a redaction of unprecedented scale, pulled off without a peep from the site’s editors. They had done it to erase some of the awkward and unseemly traces of the early days, but that was just one reason. The more damning motive behind the monumental disappearing act was that editors knew the site contained hundreds if not thousands of plagiarized posts—including, it appeared, by the Stopera brothers, Peggy Wang, and Jack Shepherd—and they were eager to sweep that under the rug. “It’s stuff made at a time when
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BuzzFeed’s sacred guideline was not to strictly separate news from advertising, the cardinal rule of old, but to create shareable (as distinct from merely likable) content. Smith’s news operation helped BuzzFeed distinguish itself from the shameless traffic factories that made money from eyeballs lured by clickbait. If your only goal was to play to people’s desires, Smith suggested to the New Republic, “why would you do politics? Why not do porn? I mean, seriously?”
Politico reported in 2015 that while nearly half of BuzzFeed’s 300 editorial staffers belonged to the news division, its output accounted for a much smaller part of its traffic.
“I fucking hated those kids in the journalism school,” he told one interviewer. “Nobody had a sense of humor at all.” The atmosphere was too preprofessional, the other students too primped and polished. “The broadcast kids were worse than anything,” he added, likening them to wannabe Anderson Coopers who lacked mental firepower. Those kids were missing the story. They were crippled by their fluency in journalese, too caught up in their ascent to power, speaking as if from a teleprompter. They mistook 10-dollar words for intellect, sobriety for seriousness. When it came to cool, they were
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McInnes, who saw fit to entrust Baby Balls with his beloved invention from Vice’s Montreal days, the Gross Jar. Over the course of nearly a decade, the glass receptacle had been stuffed with a monthly addition of the most repulsive ingredients he could get his hands on: used tampons, chicken blood, urine, and so on. When Morton was awarded custody of the Jar, he dialed up the grossness. In went a dead rat, a mouthful of spit from a colleague who’d come down with the flu, five scabs picked from the face of an editor who’d blacked out drinking, and the droppings of his cat, which the
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Cable news, Fox, CNN, and MSNBC weren’t attracting many young viewers either. The median age of the Fox audience was nearly 70.
advantage. Of his subjects he said, “A lot of them are a lot more comfortable with us than a dude with anchor hair and a microphone and a tie. It’s much easier for them to relate.” It was clear to the folks at Vice that this new strategy was working. “Video was as much of a cash cow as we could have hoped for,” Morton said. “And it was the saving grace of the magazine, because the landscape at the time was pretty fucked for print.”
Since Vice didn’t strictly define itself as a news provider, no one there worried about church-state issues, such as when advertisers influenced the content of stories. Vice would bring the relationship even closer, asking advertisers to work with them on shaping and sponsoring programming, something that was verboten at most news companies until they, too, under financial pressure began wooing sponsors.
When as managing editor of the Times I asked our digital ad director about native advertising, she recoiled, saying, “The Times would never do that. It’s so sleazy.”
Vice wanted to have it both ways, seeming to give the middle finger to the whole sold-out corporate media, while elsewhere in the building incubating a sponsored project that promised to abandon the “cynicism and negativity” that supposedly plagued mainstream news reportage in favor of a more sanguine, sunny-side approach.
Imitating broadcast television, the newspapers built expensive studios and assigned their print journalists to start doubling as anchors and talking heads. But replicating a genre that was also in decline got them nowhere. Mainly their video news reports were dreadful and only cost money. In the space of a few years, the Times hired and dispensed with a half-dozen video directors. The ad department kept complaining that the newsroom was leaving revenue on the table by not producing more video inventory. But when Sulzberger let the digital ad director help choose the next head of video in the
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But as we expanded internationally, we started to see a lot more of what was happening in the world. I started to get really pissed off about politics and economic disparity and the environment. I said, ‘There’s all this shit going on, and we aren’t doing anything about it—although we have the ability to do so.’ ” To the Guardian he said, “There was a time in the Nineties when it was all about cocaine and asymmetrical zippers. We did a lot of drugs and went to a lot of parties and had sex with a lot of supermodels. But you realise there’s a whole world out there.” But in making the rather
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Vice was generally not prepared to help when their reporters got in trouble, such as when one was imprisoned in Turkey. Because so many of the correspondents were freelancers, if they fell in harm’s way Vice had no legal obligation to help them.
Even CNN was cutting back on stories from the field because it was so much cheaper to have so-called experts and partisan officials come into its studios to expound. At the beginning of the Iraq War, hundreds of American journalists flooded into Baghdad, but after two years, as the war raged on, the only news organizations that were left full time were the wire services, CNN, the BBC, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and, of course, the New York Times, which spent several million dollars a year to keep a bureau compound secure and fully staffed. It did not cut its foreign desk, but
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Any narrative, even one that is scrupulously factual and deserving of the omniscient third-person voice of the journalist-historian, is subjective by nature. The lens through which events are seen inevitably colors how they are interpreted and presented. The story I have presented is an attempt to be factual and historical, to be guided by reporting and the testimony of key participants. Because I am inextricably connected to the New York Times, and during this time was managing editor, the second in command of the newsroom, the events that follow involved me in such a direct and personal way
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