Prestige newsroom BuzzFeed, we hardly knew ye.
In a better world, ChatGPT’s pleasant, authoritative, inaccurate and plagiarised consultantspeak would simply replace McKinsey. But here on earth, media executives continue to do what media executives* are wont to do: diving headfirst into every new business idea that doesn’t involve hiring and/or training reporters for beats.
In a memo to staff sent Thursday morning, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Chief Executive Jonah Peretti said he intends for AI to play a larger role in the company’s editorial and business operations this year . . .
BuzzFeed, which went public in late 2021 through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, last year moved to shrink its news division as it sought to make the business profitable, and said it would be doubling its creator network.
The “creator network” here is made up of influencers who will get paid to post on Instagram and Facebook, according to another WSJ piece.
In any event, BuzzFeed “remains focused on human-generated journalism in its newsroom, a spokeswoman said Thursday.”
The share price more than doubled on the AI and Meta news, so BuzzFeed no longer qualifies as a penny stock. Congrats.
*To any of our bosses who may be reading this, we either 1) don’t include you in this group or 2) welcome our new tech overlords! 🙂
Elsewhere on Friday . . .
— A lengthy two-part history of Gorkamorka, “probably the most short lived of what would become the ‘Specialist Games’.” (Goonhammer)
— Militarised adaptation: trade, energy and war ecology (Phenomenal World)
— Bit late to this, but Tim Barker FOIA’ed and published a rather interesting 1996 memo from Janet Yellen. (Substack)
— Unmaking orthodoxies, and debunking the “scramble for Africa” (PW)
— More pressure on Zahawi, this time over “£30mn of unsecured loans made to his wife’s UK property company”. (Guardian)
— Harley Bassman analyses the marriage of convexity and leverage in two of his ETF strategies. (Convexity Maven)
— Don’t blame institutional investors for the US’s housing affordability crisis (The Atlantic $)
— Adani’s selling shares [eyes emoji] (FT)
