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You know you shouldn’t, but you do it anyway.
Another ”Top ten reasons why” brought to you by none other than the most infamous journalism site today...Buzzfeed.
Buzzfeed is a journalism site that covers many topics from opinion, to cooking, to “feel good” news, and the occasional real reporting.
Compared to many news stations and papers which cover: current events, old ones, sports games, and restaurant reviews, Buzzfeed is the
According to Expandedramblings about one half of Buzzfeed’s traffic is from teens and young adults. It has over 6 billion views on its content each month, half of which are on its YouTube channel. Buzzfeed’s infamy has come from its quick rise to fame, and the malpractices they continue to commit.
As a business Buzzfeed has been very successful especially given its recent creation, however as a journalism firm it falls flat on ethics and practices.
Buzzfeed is chock-full of bias. Journalism in theory should be free of bias leaning toward a specific individual, ideal, or group. According to Journalism.org, Buzzfeed was the least trusted source of news, ranking just below The Rush Limbaugh Show. Buzzfeed was the most distrusted news among all political parties: liberals, conservatives, and centrists.
“It is a site I would not use to get daily news,” said English teacher Cynthia Artiga-Faupusa. “A lot of the writers do not present themselves as vetted journalists. Their articles do have some bias to them. I would definitely go to another, more credible news source for a better representation of current events.”
One big difference between real journalism and Buzzfeed are the articles published. While Buzzfeed does post some intriguing feature topics, its most popular area is its entertainment news. On Twitter.com @BuzzFeedEnt has the most follows aside from the main Buzzfeed profile. @BuzzFeedEnt, has 76,800 followers and over 22,000 posts.
“I feel the celebrity news they post is really not useful,” said sophomore Kalea Pasion. “If anything it’s pretty similar to Extra or Hollywood Life in the sense of discussing celebrities, in areas such as gossip or personal life. It’s more along the lines of a gossip blog. Despite that, I will spend countless amounts of time reading their posts. It’s meant to be fun to read, not making you want to change the world.”
Now while these may be entertaining, it is not relevant news, but rather something to make you smile. Journalism covers the current events; the ones you need to know, and ones that others don’t. For example, Antonio Jose Vargas wrote an entire feature story about why he has not been deported as the cover story for TIME magazine.
Real journalism is addressing problems and happenings that are important enough to inform the public about.
Another issue that makes Buzzfeed less reliable, is their use of native advertising. Native advertising is an advertisement is disguised as an article.
This is a very deceptive way to make money, as a majority viewers cannot distinguish a native ad from a bonafide article.
In a study done by Contently.com on 509 male and female consumers, few were able to distinguish a native ad from a real article. Contently.com reported that “Consumers who read native ads that they identified as high quality [journalism] reported a significantly higher level of trust for the sponsoring brand.”
Contently also stated that in 2015 Buzzfeed spent about $150,000 on a native advertising campaign.
Another journalistic sin that Buzzfeed commits is not sourcing outside photos or writing that they use. Many of their articles, such as their top ten lists have pictures lifted from Google or other websites and Buzzfeed does not source the creator or photographer.
This blatant fault is hard to find in other journalism establishments, such as The Wall Street Journal. According to Slate by 2014 one Buzzfeed writer was fired for plagiarism, and about 4,000 posts were deleted because of shoddy sourcing..
“As a photographer for yearbook it would really annoy me if someone took my photos and didn’t credit my work,” said sophomore Theodore Lee. “It’s like denying that the creator even made it, which is wrong. If it happened to me I would tell whoever took it to take it down.
In one instance Buzzfeed was forced to remove pictures acquired from Reddit that they did not source.They later replaced them with pictures under a free use license. All which could have been avoided had Buzzfeed, decided to source pictures.
Despite claims on their site of being “[a] global network of news” it falls flat because of the lack of journalistic ethics.
