Buzzfeed released an internal memo last Thursday informing their staff that they could be fired for releasing internal company information, Gawker reported.
Buzzfeed, which originated as one infinite list of cute animal pictures, is trying its best to become a legitimate news organization. And it sounds like it’s confusing journalism business with ?corporate commonsense.
A lot — if not most — of news that gets published probably started out as a leak of some kind at one point or another, Gawker columnist Hamilton Nolan attests. Information a company releases itself is a press release or just trivial; information that it doesn’t want to release is news.
As the anonymously apocryphal saying goes, “News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is ?advertising.”
Firing employees for leaking news is a relatively routine policy, and many employed journalists don’t have an issue with the practice. Some would consider columns like this or the Gawker article I’m referencing to be ?unremarkable by nature.
But I side with Nolan — that these journalists conflate what is standard with what is right.
It sounds like Buzzfeed wants to collaborate with “76 of the top 100 companies,” as reported by the CEO, Jonah Peretti, to Bloomberg TV, but still wants to be seen as a ?legitimate news outlet.
Buzzfeed wants to be both keeper of the key and advocate for the just. They want to be taken seriously as a journalism business and yet fail to see how they mar the face of journalism with such double-talk.
You can’t write a newsworthy story on all the king’s men when all the king’s men’s trust you with all the awful things they’ve done for the king (keyword: newsworthy).
But Nolan poses an intriguing question: if your journalism business is more business than journalism, where do lines begin to blur when it comes to keeping the public informed and keeping ?business relations in line?
Everyone in the news industry will tell you that everyone’s got advertisers, and most journalistic writers have a rich owner somewhere. Despite essentially all news organizations being businesses, there is a critical distinction: some news businesses believe first and foremost in news, and some believe first and foremost in business.
Nolan argues that these two models behave similarly, “But the time in which there is a difference is the time when the news is hard to publish, because it poses some challenge to or requires some sacrifice from the business side of the operation.”
Indeed, it makes one wonder: If there’s anything worth leaking, is it not the information that companies and corporations don’t want to be leaked?
Buzzfeed represents the new wave of impostor journalism — websites with lists of GIFs for how to overcome winter when you’re Zooey Deschanel, or something less practical, and they want you to see them as a news ?institution.
Hypocrisy of this caliber could only come from an agency that believes they can play corporate bro and ?activist punk simultaneously.
As not-so-anonymous journalist John Pilger put it, “Journalists are never real journalists if they are the agents of power. No matter how they disguise that role. Real journalists are agents of people.”
michoman@umail.iu.edu
