Investors don't have to shoulder costs for a service that no one cares about. You want a "what flavour of jelly bean are you" quiz you go to Buzzfeed. You want serious news you read one of the countless other site that covers world news. Yes it's cynical, but if I had money in Buzzfeed I would have pressured the CEO too.
That being said, their reputation as "Buzzfeed" is bad, if you repeat a piece of information to someone and say that you "read it on Buzzfeed", there will be an inherent bias that the source is bad, because most people associate them with terrible pop-culture articles on Facebook and don't even know that they won a pullitzer prize.
In that context, their reputation is permanently damaged for most people. If Buzzfeed really want to create "serious" news branch they'd have to call it something else at the very least.
I rank BuzzFeed on the same level as the Huffington Post. You want real news? Go to the Associated Press directly, or Reuters.
NYT can be ok, but their monetization tactics are kind of weird