Writing is Hard and Expensive And Lots of People Will Do It For Free
Buzzfeed News, FiveThirtyEight and the continued inability to subsidize hard news for digital publications.
Two prestige 2010s-era news brands have effectively gone kaput in the last two weeks. Buzzfeed News, launched in 2011 by the growing online viral website Buzzfeed with Ben Smith as its first Editor in Chief, announced it would be winding down operations. And FiveThirtyEight, the data journalism brand launched by Nate Silver and acquired by ABC in 2013, is halving its staff and letting its founder leave at the end of his contract. Both of these media operations have done excellent, award-winning work in their lifespans; while not privy to financial information, it's also likely that both of these news organizations were losing money for their parent companies.1
Good writing - and good journalism - is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Writing is also a vocation that many people can and will do for free. It's no secret that the internet has cut down profit margins for media organizations slimmer and slimmer (many people smarter than me will tell you that), and the internet has also made the cost of entry to writing effectively zero. I'm writing this for you, dear reader, for fun and for free.
That's not entirely true; people write because they are compensated in more ways than just money. I'll take your eyeballs and attention and plaudits (please share this on Twitter, or re-stack this on Substack Notes. Thanks!). It is very rare that people will write, or report, or create content for zero eyeballs. Attention is the compensation in the internet writing (and content) economy. I may not be doing journalism in the expensive, time-consuming way, but I am writing - and I'm writing in a form that could be pitched and published by most major newspapers around the country. For free.
There's a certain ideological strain of writer who will advise other writers not to write for free. It's bad advice that can only come from a place of status in which a writer is secure enough not to need additional attention or prestige that would come from writing for free. If the New York Times will publish you but not pay you, you should absolutely do that. (And I, personally, have had my writing published by the New York Times without being paid. Live your advice!) There are also some organizations that will pay a stipend for your writing that probably doesn't even work out to minimum wage. (I've been paid $50 for a 1000 word piece before; definitely not minimum wage for the time spent on it.) This isn't even considering the writing done on user-generated or social media websites. What might have been a listicle for Buzzfeed in 2010 is now a Twitter thread. People can and will write for free. If you don't, someone else will.
Individual writers still can and do make careers out of writing, though. Ben Smith and Nate Sliver are good examples of people who are wildly successful (and, I presume, wealthy) because of their writing. They are also good examples of people who at various points in their careers have written for free. Smith got his start in local and international news before finding a lot of success founding and writing for unprofitable New York blogs; Silver started FiveThirtyEight writing pseudonymously and for free as a blogger for DailyKos. Both of them built audiences and parlayed those into their own web ventures - but the strength of those audiences could not sustain those ventures on their own.2
Prestige journalism is exorbitantly expensive - particularly world news. The cost of reporting in Kyiv or Kabul or Khartoum is extremely high. The cost of White House or City Hall reporting is less expensive but still requires a lot of time and effort for what aren't always exciting or sexy stories. These things can of course go alongside lower-cost but high-return journalism like what's produced on the op-ed pages or in the style or food sections, but it's similar to movie studios producing Oscar bait (Oscar bait rarely makes money) alongside popcorn blockbusters designed to wring money out of the pop-loving crowd.
The value proposition for a news organization used to be that subscriptions could be cross-subsidized by ad revenue to make money. The margins for advertising have evaporated in the internet age and the subscription model has found limited success outside of the biggest East Coast brands. People will consume news on Twitter, or Facebook, or TikTok, or Substack, or their local TV news. The supply of good writing and good journalism far outstrips the demand, and the business model simply has to change.
Buzzfeed News was a prestige play by a viral web property built on traffic for social media. I can't imagine that Buzzfeed ever envisioned BN as anything other than something that could at best break even and use as an entre to take investors to fancy prestige galas - something that viral cat listicles could never achieve. BN had good journalists, did good journalism, and won a bunch of awards. But Buzzfeed as a company went (disastrously) public in an SPAC merger as its revenue projections cratered due to the collapse of the social media link economy, and cross-subsidizing a prestige news organization became a less attractive value proposition. (Ben Smith said as much on The Fifth Column podcast: BN spent more money than it took in and social media changes meant Buzzfeed wasn't making as much money any more. That's basically it.)
FiveThirtyEight as a legitimate news operation began when Silver brought the brand from a DailyKos user blog to a New York Times vertical. By Silver's telling, two people (including him) operated the brand at the New York Times. It would be difficult to imagine the NYT losing money on the FiveThirtyEight operation at that size. It was Nate Silver and an assistant operating a polling aggregator and forecasting model. There's money to be made there. But the ESPN/ABC/Disney acquisition of the brand promised a data journalism organization with dozens of people producing elections and sports forecasts and analysis, as well as in-depth feature reporting. Moving beyond Silver's models and paying for investigative reporters drastically reduced the ROI of the FiveThirtyEight project. Either the parent company or Silver did not want to intensively scale back the project to its bare bones of what it was when it was run by the New York Times, and so Silver is leaving (and reportedly taking his models with him) and the rest of the operation is going to continue operating in a much slimmed-down fashion.3
Superstar writers like Ben Smith and Nate Silver can be extraordinarily financially successful alone; check the top ten of Substack. But it's sometimes grueling, extremely difficult work to build and maintain an audience. Superstars trade hustle and financial upside for stability working for a major brand. But major brands also spend more money to make superstar writers comport to their house style: they have copyeditors and proofreaders and factcheckers, it takes more time and money to produce the writing that an individual does. And when that individual (or, in the case of Buzzfeed, an entire viral content site) is also supposed to be subsidizing a larger prestige staff that does not have the same ROI as the single star, the enterprise can become financially unviable very quickly.
The loss of Buzzfeed News and 538 is a loss for the news industry - both of those sites did good work and produced award-winning journalism. There will be good journalists out of good jobs, possibly for a long time. But Ben Smith and Nate Silver - superstars who have at various points in their career written for free - will be fine. Smith left Buzzfeed in 2020 for what may have been a lower-compensation but lower-hustle perch at the New York Times before returning to hustling in launching new media venture Semafor. It's unclear what Silver will do, but that he owns his models will continue to make him a financially attractive free agent. (And even if he didn't still own his models, he'd be fine. He created a baseball statistical forecasting model and sold it before his political modeling career. He could make more models.)
Younger aspiring superstar writers will, like Silver and Smith, write for free. The pressures of the digital media environment will persist. The margins will, if they have not reached their nadir, continue to shrink. Hard news and award-winning journalism has always been cross-subsidized by something, be it classified ads or viral listicles or forecasting models or podcast ad revenue. Buzzfeed and FiveThirtyEight as we know them are gone, and the search for a way to subsidize hard news will continue.
Here is where I say that please do not think I take delight in the evaporating news industry. I worked for two years for a nonprofit news venture largely funded by foundation grants and individual donors. The organization did not make money but did do good journalism. Some of the money dried up and more than twenty journalists lost their jobs, including me. It sucked a lot and it sucks to lose your job. But I was also clear eyed about the fact that the organization needed the money from those grants and donations, because the good journalism was not going to make money on its own.
I think this history is correct, but because I’m writing for fun and for free and am not doing “real journalism,” I have no fact-checkers to confirm this rough outline.
And, I would hazard a guess, will either continue to be pared back until merged into ABC News or just shuttered entirely.