A fine article and then you get to the last sentence of the fifth paragraph and you can't help but to ask was that necessary?
"The BuzzFeed "pivot" away from podcasts makes sense when you remember that BuzzFeed lives and dies as a business on detailed analytics. Web content has them. Video has them. Podcasts still don't."
In my opionion this is exactly what BuzzFeed lacks and what a lot of podcasts allow.
But, yeah, why the author decided to relate that statement to race, I can only guess. What did that add, journalistically, to the overall piece, which wasn't really about race?