BuzzFeed’s founder promises not to waste money on journalism again

Jonah Peretti. Photo (cc) 2019 by nrkbeta.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, offers a confession: news just isn’t as gosh-darn profitable as he had hoped it would be. Peretti has taken an axe to his respected news division, BuzzFeed News, and promises not to do it again.

“I feel like I learned from that mistake … you need to have more financial discipline in the short term to make sure you’re growing in a sustainable way,” he tells reporter Anna Nicolaou.

But as Josh Marshall, the publisher of Talking Points Memo, noted several months ago, there’s never going to be enough money in journalism if you’re relying on venture capital, as Peretti did, or on going public, as he’s doing now. The solution is a slow expansion, most likely built on reader revenue. That’s never been Peretti’s style.

Unfortunately, what Peretti doesn’t say in his FT interview is that he could use revenue from BuzzFeed, the viral site best known for cat videos and listicles, in order to subsidize a first-class news operation. Because for people like Peretti, it’s all about the bottom line — as he showed in April, when he acquired HuffPost and started gutting it.