Yesterday morning, BuzzFeed announced that it was shuttering BuzzFeed News, its journalistic arm. Whatever employees of the news division remain after layoffs will be resorbed into the otherwise clickbait-driven site (presumably to be later replaced by an improved ChatGPT algorithm). This was an occasion for wistful reflection on the left and among mainstream-media journalists/academics (but, as the old joke goes, I repeat myself), indifference among the masses (“What, the cat-meme listicle site? They had a news division?”), and grimly smug amusement on the right, whose denizens have long regarded BuzzFeed as the original bad actor in what became “Russiagate.”
