News Site Behind Publication of Steele Dossier Shutting Down After Major Turn of Events
BuzzFeed News, which unapologetically published the discredited Steele dossier that targeted former President Donald Trump, is going belly-up.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced that his company’s news division is finished in an email to staffers on Thursday, according to CNN.
Peretti said the company will slash 15 percent of its workforce in addition to shuttering BuzzFeed News.
“While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization,” Peretti told his employees in the memo.
Here’s the full memo to BuzzFeed staffers from @peretti. pic.twitter.com/nA0QAs1NhY
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) April 20, 2023
BuzzFeed will now rely on the far-left blog HuffPost, which it acquired in 2020, to disseminate its brand of news.
Peretti blamed the closure of BuzzFeed News, which he said should have come sooner, on everything from the COVID pandemic to a “tough economy” and digital ad revenue rates.
He said he was slow to recognize its inability to become profitable because of his love for the brand.
“I made the decision to overinvest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much,” Peretti said.
“This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media.”
Peretti concluded his company needed a “stronger business to protect and sustain” its “important work.”
Some affected employees will have the opportunity to stay on by taking other roles in the company and with HuffPost.
BuzzFeed News published the Steele dossier in its entirety in 2017.
The unverified and debunked document contained what purported to be dirt on Trump.
The dossier claimed there was evidence that Trump had been compromised by Russia before the 2016 election. It was written by British counterintelligence specialist Christopher Steele and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
In November 2021, former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief Ben Smith expressed no regrets about publishing the dossier after he had left the company, according to Axios.
Smith said that in spite of the document’s inauthenticity, it was “newsworthy,” the outlet reported.
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