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Facebook Product Guy Slams Buzzfeed And Vox In Rant About The State Of News

This article is more than 9 years old.

News publishers regard Facebook much the same way ancient peoples perceived their gods: Powerful but mysterious, it can send monsoons that make the crops grow or a parching drought that brings famine, and it never has to explain why. Just as the ancients looked to animal bones and cloud shapes for clues to the gods' intentions, news executives and the journalists who work for them parse every utterance out of Menlo Park for insight into the company's thinking.

So when a high-ranking product manager takes to his Facebook page to condemn the efforts of the most successful digital publishers, you better believe they're going to pay attention.

"Rant" was the word Mike Hudack, director of product management, used to describe his post about the state of the media. Hudack started with a survey of traditional mainstream news outlets. He did not find much to like:

It's well known that CNN has gone from the network of Bernie Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett reporting live from Baghdad in 1991 to the network of kidnapped white girls. Our nation's newspapers have, with the exception of The New York Times, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal been almost entirely hollowed out. They are ghosts in a shell.

Evening newscasts are jokes, and copycat television newsmagazines have turned into tabloids -- "OK" rather than Time. 60 Minutes lives on, suffering only the occasional scandal. More young Americans get their news from The Daily Show than from Brokaw's replacement. Can you even name Brokaw's replacement? I don't think I can.

Meet the Press has become a joke since David Gregory took over. We'll probably never get another Tim Russert. And of course Fox News and msnbc care more about telling their viewers what they want to hear than informing the national conversation in any meaningful way.

(Tom Brokaw's replacement is Brian Williams, by the way. Everyone who gets their news from "The Daily Show" knows that.)

Of course, ragging on CNN is like talking smack about Mondays. You're not going to get a lot of arguments. But Hudack didn't stop there.

And so we turn to the Internet for our salvation. We could have gotten it in The Huffington Post but we didn't. We could have gotten it in BuzzFeed, but it turns out that BuzzFeed's homepage is like CNN's but only more so. Listicles of the "28 young couples you know" replace the kidnapped white girl. Same thing, different demographics.

Nor is he an admirer of Ezra Klein and Vox, his new explainer-journalism site.

Personally I hoped that we would find a new home for serious journalism in a format that felt Internet-native and natural to people who grew up interacting with screens instead of just watching them from couches with bags of popcorn and a beer to keep their hands busy.

And instead they write stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them.

The only digital news company Hudack has anything nice to say about it Vice. "In between the salacious articles about Atlanta strip clubs we get the occasional real reporting from North Korea or Donetsk. We celebrate these acts of journalistic bravery specifically because they are today so rare."

Buzzfeed's Jonah Peretti (Photo credit: TechCrunch)

Now for the context: Hudack, who joined Facebook two years ago after co-founding the video site Blip.tv, works on advertising and pages. He doesn't work on Newsfeed, the product that connects news companies with mass audiences on Facebook.

But his riff, which drew "Likes" from at least a dozen of his Facebook colleagues, chimes with Facebook's push over the last few months to promote "quality articles" in Newsfeed and cut down on the clutter of viral junk. All Things D reported in December that Facebook's head of product, Chris Cox, had ordered the algorithm update out of concern that Buzzfeed and its imitators were crowding out everything else.

If Cox really was taking aim at Buzzfeed, he must've been shooting blanks: The site's traffic across web and mobile topped 71 million unique visitors in March, according to comScore, tripling its level of a year earlier. Buzzfeed's founder, Jonah Peretti, took to Twitter with his oblique response to Hudack.

For people who don't like entertainment and just want news, they can read this version of BuzzFeed http://t.co/E2hK7Q7bnM

— Jonah Peretti (@peretti) May 22, 2014

Klein also responded, in a comment on Hudack's original post:

It's funny: last night, we were having a conversation around the mix of content on Vox. And we were saying that if you just looked at what worked well on FB it was a lot lighter than if you looked at what was on the site. We actually try pretty hard not to be swallowed up by those incentives. But it's a bit baffling to read a post by Facebook's product director that just ignores the fact that those incentives exist.