When I was working at my first journalism job in 2011, there was nothing more exciting to me than a blog.
I loved blogs and the mostly women who wrote them. Food blogs, healthy living blogs, running blogs, and fashion blogs. Inexplicably for a 23-year-old, I loved mommy blogs. I loved reading about #OOTDs, meal prep, overnight oats, and birth stories. I worked overnights, mostly alone, spending long stretches of the night hours with only my thoughts and the blinking of iNews to keep me company. But it was okay, because I had my blogs to read.
I have been thinking a lot about blogs since I found out yesterday that the place where I spent the most formative years of my professional life, BuzzFeed News, will be closing down. I’ve been pondering the early years of my career, where I read blogs and worked at BuzzFeed, and thought that I was on the precipice of something that could truly be great. And how now, that era feels over.
Blogs and BuzzFeed News will always be intertwined for me. I had been an introspective, verbose child and teen who had always retreated to the internet to explore my passions for writing and reading in secret, first with fanfiction and online forums, then with social media and websites. Blogging and influencers seemed to be a natural marriage of my interests, and I couldn’t get enough of the worlds they were painting for me.
These were women living out loud, fearlessly, sharing their lives and their tips and tricks for us all to consume, expressing their creativity unbridled, without any corporate overlord or profitability machine to satisfy. In many ways, blogs were a celebration of writing and content creation in its purest form. Bloggers weren’t trying to go viral and they weren’t trying to get you to swipe up or click their affiliate links. Yet the money and the viewers came anyway. They came for the writing. They came for the content.
Reading blogs also made clear something for me. The internet was the future, and in 2014, there was only one place that seemed to understand that future: BuzzFeed News. I had such a clear vision that if I wanted to become the writer and the journalist I thought I could be, I had to work there. To me, it seemed the reporters for BuzzFeed News had the same airy lightness that the bloggers had. They were journalists who were creating for the art of the story, to go viral, to make something that people wanted to share, a concept that sounds cliche now but is stunningly powerful in its simplicity. I wanted in.
When, after two rejections for jobs I definitely wasn’t qualified for, I finally got an interview for a reporter role at BuzzFeed News, I printed out every byline I had and brought them stacked in a folder I had gotten from my college during graduation. My embarrassingly eager showing at the interview and hunger to be chosen still makes me cringe. When I left the interview, I was so excited I practically skipped, paying so little attention to where I was going I tripped on a subway grate, skinning my knees and ripping my interview-approved tights. The throbbing in my leg, though, couldn’t quell the thrill in my bones.
I got the job, and now I have a career I could have only dreamed of. I wrote a book about influencers and bloggers, taking what was once a secret passion and turning it into a pinnacle of my professional life. I have gotten to travel all over the country, start a newsletter, host a talk show, interview celebrities, and produced a documentary based on my work. I have so much to thank BuzzFeed News for, but now it won’t be there to thank anymore.
I really resonated with the words my former colleague Charlie Warzel wrote for The Atlantic yesterday about what it was like to write for BuzzFeed News.
He said:
“Despite the site’s constant bad reputation as a click farm, I was never once told to chase traffic. No editor ever discussed referrals or clicks. The emphasis was on doing the old-fashioned thing: finding an original story that told people something new, held people to account, or simply delighted. The traffic would come…The place was obsessed with story, not prestige, and its ambition was nearly boundless. It wasn’t afraid of devoting considerable resources to being silly as long as the narrative was good.”
For a few, glorious years, I was able to write what I wanted, about influencers, weird Facebook groups, and online dramas, without anyone trying to squeeze it for profit. I got hundreds of millions of pageviews a year, and I was able to find professional success. The problem is, in our capitalistic society, no art can exist for art’s sake. And someone was making money off my content, it just wasn’t me, and it wasn’t BuzzFeed News, either.
It seems cliche to blame Facebook, Google, and Instagram for what happened, and I don’t want to get into all the mistakes that were made. I certainly don’t have all the answers. But I see a clear through-line with what happened to BuzzFeed News, and what happened to bloggers. Because soon after I started at BuzzFeed News, corporations were able to convince bloggers to devote a large portion of their time and energies not to their own websites, which they controlled, but to platforms like Instagram and TikTok. I chart this evolution in (again, shameless plug!) my book, and the devastating consequences it has had for these female entrepreneurs, many of whom lost something crucial when the industry moved to platforms they had no control over.
Now, what do we have? BuzzFeed News is gone. Many other early entrepreneurial ventures of the digital web have been sold for parts, or become content farms. And many bloggers are now trying to reclaim their businesses from Instagram and other social platforms, after realizing how much autonomy they’ve given up. Capitalism has reduced what was once a brilliant and teeming ecosystem of blogs, essays, and words, squeezed every ounce of profitability out of it, and sold it for parts. What a loss for words, for creativity, and for us.
I just keep thinking it didn’t have to happen this way. I’m lucky that I have benefitted from the existence of both bloggers and BuzzFeed News, but I wish things were different. I wish we could go back, to an era where so much beautiful writing was coming on the internet every day, flowing around us without concern for profit or virility. Because the big secret of the internet is, as Charlie wrote, people want to read good stories! This doesn’t have to be so hard. There is a way to do this right.
“So what are you gonna say at my funeral, now that you've killed me?” says BuzzFeed News to Facebook. I remain hopeful that we can learn something from this era. That people want to read good stories, that the money will come, and that a different way of compensating those who create this art is possible. And that would be truly OMG, a true WIN for all of us.