17/04/2024
This month is the anniversary of a campaign that began 10 years ago in New York, when Buzzfeed began plotting to force my news wire agency to close.
I think it's fitting that now, a decade later, I publish my story about the intervening years, which shows how my agency survived long after my accusers at BuzzFeed News were forced to close.
It has been a David and Goliath battle, trying to stay in business and at the same time get the journalistic basics of who what where when why how the f**k it happened.
A legal case against them revealed BuzzFeed had begun discussing my business at the start of 2014 when they signed up to buy my news but never paid for it. They then decided to destroy me when they realized how much of our work was being published by their rivals. Their head of news, Ben Smith, gave his team a headline—the King Of Bullsh*t News—and told them to prove I was just that.
Their epic 7,000-word story contained more intrigue than a Tom Clancy novel and fewer facts, too. But while facts were not a priority, they spent a lot of effort trying to connect my news with rivals.
They argued in court that cutting and pasting rumours and allegations from the internet to prove a negative headline about a rival was true was 'responsible journalism' - the fact it benefitted BuzzFeed in its UK expansion plans was mere coincidence.
At the time I took them to court in 2016, BuzzFeed was valued at $ 1.7 billion, about the same as the New York Times market capitalization. It didn't get that money from good journalism, it was because of its strategy known as native content, which involved printing whatever it was paid to and pretending it was news.
After the first story was published, the BuzzFeed assault continued unabashed. They bombarded media watchdogs and my clients, demanding to know why we were being allowed to stay in business.
What happened to me was appalling; what they did to the rest of journalism was a horror show.
I could only watch as the cancer of activism disguised as journalism spread from Jonah Peretti’s Huffington Post and BuzzFeed to other media.
And that was just the start.
I have documented it all in my new book, The King Of Bullsh*t News, now available on Amazon as both an audible, print and Kindle version, a fitting memorial after the closure last week of my agency CEN as I begin a new journey into journalism.
Watch this space. And please share this message.
