Axel Springer has acquired 88 percent of Business Insider at a cost of $343 million. This means the German media conglomerate, which…
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In the age of niche media, everyone still really wants to be mass
As doctoral student Frederik De Boer pointed out in a recent blog post on some of the new-media sites like BuzzFeed and Fusion, if you don't focus on a specific market or target a specific kind of reader, you run the risk of blending in with everyone else…
Read MoreIt’s not about quizzes and listicles — it’s about experimentation
As Columbia Journalism School researcher Maxwell Foxman points out in a research paper, media companies could learn a lot from the game-playing approach that sites like BuzzFeed take towards their content…
Read MoreTech and media firms join Twitter in key test of FBI gag orders
A bitter fight between the Justice Department and Silicon Valley is expanding as a diverse group of companies have lined up behind Twitter in a…
Read MoreCourt backs NSA on internet spying as Obama ducks call for reform
It’s been a lousy week so far for opponents of U.S. spy tactics: a federal judge shut down a long-running challenge to the NSA’s mass collection…
Read MoreBuzzFeed gets serious with editorial standards and ethics guide
In an attempt to hold what was once an experimental viral-content lab to higher standards of conduct, BuzzFeed has published a new comprehensive standards and ethical guidelines document that tells staff what they should and shouldn't do…
Read MoreThis is the year we find out whether new media can scale or not
Investment funds and traditional media entities have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into new-media entities like Vice, BuzzFeed, Vox and Business Insider over the past six months, but will these risky bets on the future of media pay off?…
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How much work the NYT has to do on social sharing, in one chart
About half of all BuzzFeed articles that were shared on social networks were shared 1,000 times or more, compared with just 11 shares for half of the articles that the New York Times saw posted to services like Twitter and Facebook…
Read MoreNews flash for the NYT: You and BuzzFeed aren’t that different
In the process of talking about what her job entails, the audience development editor for the New York Times underestimates BuzzFeed and how much competition it is -- and how it got there…
Read MoreNick Denton says the traffic game is over, and BuzzFeed has won
In a memo to staff, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton says the site will no longer judge the value of posts purely on how much traffic they generate, and that when it comes to the readership wars, BuzzFeed has won…
Read MoreWhen is a media company also a tech company? It’s complicated
When is a media company also a technology company? When the use of technology -- not just for publishing, but for understanding how content flows and is discovered online -- is at the core of what that company does…
Read MoreWhen content becomes a virus, the viral scientists ultimately win
Emerson Spartz started creating viral content websites when he was 12, and now he runs a company that specializes in understanding how content spreads, and why -- something more media companies should pay attention to…
Read MoreThe year in media: 12 reasons why we should be optimistic
It's easy to focus on the negatives in media -- the mistakes, the downsizing at traditional journalistic outlets, etc. -- but there were plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the media landscape this year, and here are just a few of them…
Read MoreThere’s never been a better time to run a niche media business
Turning a media site into a massive, multibillion-dollar property reaching hundreds of millions of readers isn't the only route to success any more -- starting and running a niche or targeted site has never been easier…
Read MoreNick Denton unveils “the great unclenching” at Gawker Media
Gawker founder Nick Denton unveiled a management shakeup he referred to as "the great unclenching," in which he will share power over the blog network with a management committee of seven, a change he hopes will help Gawker compete with BuzzFeed and Vox…
Read MoreYes, newsrooms are shrinking — but journalism is growing
Layoffs at newspapers like the New York Times are no longer a surprise. But we should be careful not to assume that just because some papers are downsizing, journalism as a whole is in decline -- because it's growing faster than ever…
Read MoreMoney is pouring into media, but will it find the value it seeks?
Vox Media has closed a financing round that values the company at almost $400 million, and BuzzFeed is valued at twice that level -- but will the funds that made these bets see enough of a return to justify those numbers?…
Read MoreBuzzFeed says social rules and it is bigger than most TV networks
According to a recent presentation, BuzzFeed reaches more millennial video viewers than most of the major U.S. television networks, and it gets five times as much traffic from social as it does from search…
Read MoreUber: For better or worse, this is the way the media works now
The way the story around Uber's behavior has emerged is another example of how much the media landscape has changed over the past couple of years, with CEOs and VCs tweeting and blogging and new-media entities like BuzzFeed driving the agenda…
Read MoreGoogle’s ad server suffers global failure, causing millions of ads to disappear from web
An unusual glitch struck Google's ad serving tool on Wednesday morning, causing blanks spaces to appear in place of advertisements on websites like BuzzFeed, Time, Forbes and VentureBeat. The outage means a loss of revenue for hundreds of publishers, and represents the rare failure of a key piece of internet plumbing.…
Read MoreBuzzFeed’s deal with Facebook to measure political sentiment has one major flaw
BuzzFeed has formed a partnership with Facebook that gives it access to the social network's "sentiment analysis" data on millions of users -- but Facebook's algorithm is going to influence the thing that BuzzFeed is trying to measure in ways it can't possibly know…
Read MoreDoes BuzzFeed engage in clickbait? That depends on your definition
BuzzFeed strenuously denies that it engages in what some call "clickbait," which the site defines as not following through on the promise of a headline -- but that's not the only definition for clickbait, and probably not even the most common one…
Read MoreBuzzFeed expands its data team by acquiring company run by the co-founder of Bitly
BuzzFeed has already built a data-science team and named one of its chief scientists as publisher, and now it has acquired Torando Labs and made the founder -- the co-founder and former CTO of Bitly -- its VP of data engineering…
Read MoreTrust is a crucial aspect of journalism, but it’s a slippery concept and hard to measure
An essay by the head of Google News about the value of trust in journalism sparked a debate on Twitter about whether trust is a good way to think about how journalistic value is created, and if so how trust should be defined…
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