What went wrong for BuzzFeed?

Analysis: Once hailed as the future of digital news, its UK operation broke new ground but ultimately couldn’t make its strategy pay, writes Jasper Jackson

Janine Gibson resigned as UK editor-in-chief at the start of 2019 (Getty/The Business of Fashion)

When BuzzFeed first landed on UK shores in 2013, it was treated by most of the great and good in Fleet Street as a joke. “It’s just cats and lists, right?”, summed up the response for a fair chunk of hard-bitten hacks, many of whom still saw print as king, the internet as a fad and social media as irrelevant.

Seven years later, BuzzFeed’s UK news operation, along with its Australian counterpart, is all but closing, withdrawing entirely from what its US parent calls “local news” in both countries. But while not everyone will be sad to see it go, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone dismissing the impact it has had on journalism in the UK.

Roughly a dozen journalists have been put on furlough and are unlikely to return, including a Westminster team that has matched the rest of the political lobby story for story, and a swathe of young journalists who have brought in scoops and long-running series on everything from our the faltering Brexit trade talks to our malfunctioning court system to fake news networks from eastern Europe. An investigations team and a handful of staff focused on stories that will do well in America will remain.