This exclusive reporting appears in Confider, The Daily Beast’s free media newsletter. For more media scoops and exclusives, sign up here.
BuzzFeed News officially shut down in early May, but one wouldn’t necessarily know that from its homepage, which has featured a steady stream of newly published celebrity content since late June. The move seemingly contradicts a note—obtained by Confider—that was sent to BuzzFeed News staffers following the outlet’s shutdown announcement and said the homepage “will become static,” with section links remaining on a sidebar. The fresh celebrity content is the work of a U.K.-based team—all of whom were once BuzzFeed News staffers—that has been cross-publishing its work on both sites. This zombie-like revival of the homepage has rankled several former staffers who spoke to Confider, with some taking with the website publishing a story earlier this month declaring internet star Lil Tay dead based solely on an Instagram post—all while former BuzzFeed News reporters, now at sister publication HuffPost, worked to confirm the news themselves. When a HuffPost editor asked in an open Slack channel about the decision to publish the story, BuzzFeed’s publisher Dao Nguyen replied that it was a summer “experiment to test our continued platform authority” on social platforms, according to screenshots of the exchange obtained by Confider. The editor responded by acknowledging the U.K. team’s experience but wrote that the story wouldn’t have run under “the buzzfeed news editorial standards that came from editors like me.” A BuzzFeed spokesperson wrote that the U.K. team is merely continuing the work they did while under the BuzzFeed News banner and that their stories “consistently had high referrals from multiple sources.” Additionally, the spox wrote, “It’s too soon to say where we’re going to land on this experiment, and it’s worth emphasizing we have a long history and culture of experimentation both in our content and in our distribution strategies.”
