Ben’s instructions to us were basically: Don’t waste time doing the same stories everyone is doing. McKay Coppins, former politics reporter: In the beginning, “BuzzFeed News” was basically Ben Smith, Rosie Gray, Zeke Miller, Andrew Kaczynski, and me covering the 2012 Republican presidential primaries. “Tell people you’re with BuzzFeed the same way you would tell them you’re with the New York Times.” If you watched our shows, listened to our podcasts, clicked on our push alerts and tweets, or scrolled past our headlines on your phone, we want to sincerely thank you for supporting us, sharing our work, and helping us survive (and even thrive!) in a chaotic media landscape as long as we did. If you’re reading this, or have read our stories before, thank you. If your interest is an analysis of the business forces that led to this moment, there are plenty of thorough and smart assessments (our former editor-in-chief just wrote a whole book, awkwardly released the same week we were told we needed to close, about how digital media was doomed.) We wanted to make this oral history so that the final word on BuzzFeed News (literally, the last thing to be published on our site) would come from the people who worked here. (Testimonials have been edited for length and clarity.) There are so many stories and people missing, either because it got too long, we ran out of time, or we had to delete some of the really juicy stuff. Hundreds of people worked here over the years and made this place what it was - this oral history is an incomplete account of what made this place both extraordinary and exasperating. Then it shuttered international offices, laid people off, and on Friday, May 5, shut down for good and archived its website. ![]() It hired a ton of people, opened international offices, produced podcasts and shows, formed a union, won a Pulitzer Prize. ![]() BuzzFeed launched a news section in 2012.
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