With Buzzfeed layoffs, writers strike, digital revolution stalls

By Mary McNamaraCulture Columnist and Critic

April 20, 2023 5:59 PM PT

The time has come for us to stop using the term “digital revolution” in such a catchphrase-cute way, with the inevitable emphasis on “digital” and little thought for the meaning, and historical realities, of “revolution.”

When BuzzFeed Chief Executive Jonah Peretti announced Thursday that BuzzFeed News was being shuttered, my first thought was, “Well, there goes Robespierre.”

Maximilien Robespierre being one of the architects of the French Revolution, whose desire to create a perfect republic ultimately led him to the excesses of the Great Terror, and in turn to the same guillotine where he had helped send so many others.

I did not think it in a mean way. Though Robespierre remains a controversial figure, no one can deny that his original vision for France — including an end to the monarchy, universal male suffrage, legal equality and an end to French participation in the slave trade — was righteous. It was his lack of foresight about the practical challenges of remaking society, not the ideals themselves, that soon contributed to the deaths of thousands.

Just as digital media’s original desires were righteous, even though they led to the shuttering of local newspapers, magazines and movie theaters across the country.

Robespierre’s execution kicked off the Thermidorian Reaction, in which France returned to more conservative policies.

With Peretti giving BuzzFeed News the ax and returning his news focus, and some BuzzFeed News staff, to old-timer HuffPost (which he also owns), it would seem the digital landscape is trending Thermidorian as well.

Having upended, and in some cases destroyed, legacy platforms, many of the great disruptors are finding themselves, well, disrupted. Streaming services, social media companies and online journalism outlets alike are struggling, like old media before it, to find a sustainable way to make money in the current content multiverse.

Rejecting stuffy business models in favor of a more “revolutionary” approach was no doubt a lot of fun — I know: We’ll invent influencers! — but despite a lot of wishful-bordering-on-magical thinking, a number of these digital generals are discovering that revolution is a bloody business and many do not survive.

If you are going to shatter an old system, you should probably give a little thought to ensuring that the new one will be sustainable, especially for the people working in it.

Unlike Robespierre, CEOs are rarely laid off to offset losses; indeed, even when their ventures fail they tend to walk away from the tumbrels with golden handshakes while their employees are left to face the blade. Metaphorically speaking.

A few media organizations have managed to transition successfully to the digital space, but it is a continual struggle. Cord-cutting was a great tagline, but the financial reality of subscribing to a bunch of streamers with ever-changing libraries has been less than liberating; even Disney has found it difficult to make its streaming platform profitable.

Netflix may have recovered from last year’s subscriber and stock price drop, but only after it laid off 300 workers last June. Meanwhile, streaming, the business Netflix founded, faces the very real possibility of a writers strike that would revolve almost entirely around its devaluation of writers’ wages.

Even before the threat of the strike, virtually all of the streamers had begun scuttling back to the old business model, adding tiers that include advertising, having learned what any legacy media company could have told them: One cannot live by subscriptions alone.

Though subscriptions certainly help. Finding your news on Twitter or Facebook is great, as long as you’re sure it’s not being generated by Russian bots, but increasingly those links to trusted sources lead users to paywalls, because newsgathering doesn’t pay for itself.

The fact that many people are genuinely irritated to discover that they cannot read or see anything they want for free only proves how dismally the digital revolution failed — a business model that begins by giving away stuff for free or a nominal fee only works if that stuff is physically addictive and probably illegal.

As Peretti discovered with BuzzFeed News, eschewing a paywall in the hopes of finding readers through social media doesn’t work for many reasons, including the fact that social media platforms have their own problems.

After being purchased by Elon Musk, who then laid off thousands of workers, Twitter is a shell of its former self; Facebook’s parent company Meta recently agreed to pay out $725 million in damages for its part in the Cambridge Analytica user-information breach. (If you had an active account between 2007 and 2022, you can apply for a portion of those millions!)

Not surprisingly, all manner of digital media have been experiencing their own Great Terror — mass layoffs from media companies as varied as Google and Yahoo, Vice and Vox echo the ongoing layoffs and closures of print publications across the country, the culmination of a cycle begun more than a decade ago.

People who began media careers with the promise of a limitless digital growth instead face a fractured and pitted landscape in which cities have been razed and too many of the buildings that would replace them stand half-finished because the money ran out. (People who began media careers when broadcast and print reigned have either left or resigned themselves to the fact that despite their best efforts to avoid math, they are now supplicants to page views and completion rates.)

What do we do? Hell if I know. I’m writing this for a legacy media company that was saved at literally the 11th hour by a billionaire who believes journalism matters; in the years since then, every member of this staff has done their level best to make him not regret it. I hope it is working.

The digital media revolution has always raised the question: How many digital media ventures, particularly new ones, can become sustainably profitable? That may no longer be the right question. Perhaps it’s time for digital media, whether the product is news, entertainment or social engagement, to follow legacy media’s lead and start thinking in nonbinary terms. Everything else has gone hybrid — cars, jobs, Labradoodles. Why not digital media?

If streamers can make people pay for TV with commercials, perhaps digital platforms should begin offering some sort of print product as well.

Wouldn’t it be hilarious if websites brought newspapers back into vogue? Hilarious and very unlikely. Then again, not so long ago the entertainment industry thought scripted TVwas dead and superheroes had no audience beyond kids and comic book geeks.

As with karma, revolutionary payback arrives in ways you least expect.