A few days ago, an independent journalist I like cited Buzzfeed News as an organization with some good journalists in it. I was very surprised, because BuzzFeed strikes me as a garbage site that doesn't care if it's destroying the public discourse with outrage bait.
From my perspective, BuzzFeed clearly did massive damage to the reputation of BuzzFeed News.
that's a load of bull crap. Being "Pulitzer nominated" does not make you good. As someone pointed out in the same thread, Dar Speigel journalist faked everything and got a ton of awards for his reporting. Do you think he works for next, would mention that he is fake news and not the awards - i bet it would be the opposite.
One of Buzzfeed biggest blunders about the Muller Investigation made every news source that cited it look like "fake news" this month. All done for sensationalizing and made the article more clickbaity.
Let’s try a few examples to see how understandable it is: “Cracked News”, “Walmart Luxury”, “College Humor University”.
Trump University.
Sample size of only 1 here, but the effect of a 2nd word added to increase legitimacy seems to have a negligible effect on the preceding word. If anything, the compound name seems to have less legitimacy. (This is probably a data outlier.)
I have a different evaluation of BuzzFeed's output, though I only become aware of the worst things that get some outrage. There is an undercurrent of identity politics. One shouldn't criticize and vilify entire groups on the basis of indelible characteristics. One shouldn't forward a narrative of certain groups, defined by indelible characteristics, inherently having bad behaviors. BuzzFeed has done this.
That’s because the person in question was a) speaking through a tribalistic ideological lense, not some sober view of the quality of their work and the complete picture of their output (is not a few talented ones who pop up once in a while in a sea replete with endless garbage and questionable editorial ethics) or b) doesn’t really follow Buzzfeed very closely and may only come across the occasional good thing that comes out in the minority of cases (and there no doubt are some good stuff that comes out of it)