Well, that didn’t take long.

Last week, it was announced that wealthy entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who made a controversial yet ultimately failed bid to be the Republican nominee for president, had bought an 8.7% stake in BuzzFeed.

And, to the surprise of no one, Ramaswamy is already throwing his elbows around, clashing with BuzzFeed’s chief executive and suggesting significant changes.

Among them, drastically cutting staff, asking for three board seats and bringing in people such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Aaron Rodgers, Bill Maher and Charles Barkley as contributors. Naturally, much of what Ramaswamy wants is not going over well with Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s founder and chief executive.

Ramaswamy sent a letter to BuzzFeed’s board of directors that said, “BuzzFeed has lost its way. I own your stock because I believe BuzzFeed can still become a more valuable company than at its initial listing, but this requires a major shift in strategy.”

Ramaswamy went on to write, “There will be a temptation to reject what you are about to hear on partisan grounds because I was recently a Republican presidential candidate. It may not be a bad thing for you to hear from someone who shares views in common with >150 million Americans that you are largely missing today, but that’s beside the point.”

He then wrote about his business experience and suggested BuzzFeed go heavy on audio and video content.

In a letter to Ramaswamy, Peretti wrote, “Based on your letter, you have some fundamental misunderstandings about the drivers of our business, the values of our audience, and the mission of the company. I’m very skeptical it makes business sense to turn BuzzFeed into a creator platform for inflammatory political pundits. And we’re definitely not going to issue an apology for our Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism.”

However, Peretti also wrote, “I welcome outside perspectives from shareholders and am open to hearing more from you.”

He invited Ramaswamy to meet.

The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin reported, “Mr. Peretti owns a special class of voting stock that gives him an effective veto over any drastic remaking of the company or its board.”

Certainly, turning over the site to people such as Carlson, Owens and NFL quarterback and conspiracy theorist Rodgers seems on-brand for Ramaswamy, and probably not BuzzFeed’s best course of action. However, BuzzFeed’s financial situation cannot be ignored. It closed its news division last year to reduce staff. Aside from the BuzzFeed site, it also owns HuffPost, as well as the food-focused site First We Feast, which is known for its hit YouTube show “Hot Ones.”

Mullin wrote, “Mr. Ramaswamy’s letter comes as BuzzFeed is struggling with the punishing realities of the digital media industry, which have forced the company to take significant action to pay down its debt and preserve its status as a publicly traded company. BuzzFeed has suffered since it went public in December 2021, reflecting industrywide investor skepticism in digital media companies. The company’s value has plummeted since its Nasdaq debut, falling to $2.80 per share, a drop of 71 percent, as of Tuesday morning.”

Ramaswamy wrote in his letter that BuzzFeed needs to dramatically cut costs, writing, “Rather than cutting from the top, the company should start from zero and retain only the resources required to create and monetize BuzzFeed’s highest-value content. This will almost certainly require large-scale headcount reductions, dumping your legacy digitized print business model and divesting assets to repay debt.”

Ramaswamy also let his politics come through by writing that BuzzFeed needs to repair its reputation and brand name and can start by apologizing for various stories, including stories involving the Steele dossier and Hunter Biden. He suggested that such an apology could look like the following:

“We failed in our obligation to tell you the truth. By both omission and commission, we repeatedly lied on issues of national importance, and so did the rest of the media. We echoed easy, politically convenient narratives in pursuit of clicks. We failed to factcheck. We ceased being intellectually curious. We lost sight of fairness. We condemned half the country instead of seeking to understand their views and report them fairly.”

That’s what led Peretti to remark about not apologizing for its Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism. BuzzFeed won the 2021 Pulitzer in International Reporting for its story on the Chinese government’s detention of Muslims.

Beast buyouts

The news site, The Daily Beast, is asking for volunteer buyouts in hopes of cutting costs by $1.5 million.

The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson wrote, “The Daily Beast’s union told its members in a memo this week that workers would have until June 14 to apply for a buyout, after which the publication would accept applications ‘in reverse seniority order until they meet their $1.5 million threshold.’ Decisions on additional applications beyond that threshold would be up to the company, and there would be ‘a moratorium’ on further layoffs until the end of the year, according to the union’s memo. The cuts are not targeting any particular coverage area.”

The Times also reported that about 10 to 15 members of The Beast’s unionized editorial staff (or about a third) are expected to take a buyout. TheWrap’s Natalie Korach reported that as much as 40% of unionized staffers will be impacted.

A spokesperson for The Daily Beast told the Times that the buyouts were meant to put The Daily Beast into a “healthy and sustainable financial position.” The spokesperson added, “Everyone in digital media is facing tough choices. These buyouts are especially hard because we know some talented and valued colleagues will decide to leave next month.”

The Daily Beast is under new leadership. Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood joined the company in April in exchange for an equity stake in the business. Control of The Daily Beast is under a company owned by Barry Diller.

AP collaborations

For this item, I turn it over to Rick Edmonds, Poynter’s media business analyst.

The Associated Press is expanding a new content-sharing program with nonprofit news sites. A partnership with The Texas Tribune was announced in late March. On Monday, five more sites came on board — CalMatters, a large statewide political and investigative organization, and other operations in Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana and Hawaii.

The idea is that the AP can distribute partner content to paying clients around their home states and, if there is interest, nationally. In turn, the organizations will get access to the full range of the wire service’s election coverage, long a news and business pillar of the AP, and other stories that fit their needs.

AP, though a huge international business with several thousand journalists, is technically a cooperative, keeping profits it earns as reserves rather than distributing them to shareholders.

In a press release Monday, Josh Hoffner, U.S. news director, said, “As local coverage shrinks, content sharing agreements with other mission-driven news organizations across the U.S. are more important than ever. … These agreements are exciting opportunities for AP journalism to reach new audiences in an election year and simultaneously bolster the AP news report from states that can sometimes be overlooked.”

Neil Chase, CEO of CalMatters, emailed me that the new arrangement is a bit complicated to explain. The AP gets added stories for a more robust state wire offering. CalMatters already distributes content to 200-plus outlet partners, but with AP, that can be broader and more efficient.

“When they add a bunch of our stories — or maybe all of them — to the wire report, that’s a win for our distribution,” Chase wrote, “based on the idea that, as a nonprofit, it’s more important for us to get the news seen by as many people as possible than to insist that all the views happen on our site. It becomes easier for other publishers to pick up and use our stories because in so many cases the AP wire flows right into the content management system.”

Gannett and McClatchy announced in March that they were dropping AP membership. Monday’s announcement did not frame the partnerships as, in part, a response. But I don’t think that it would be a huge stretch to see this as a step along the path of AP’s moving away from its legacy newspaper roots, dating back to its founding in 1846.

I asked about that and received this email comment from senior vice president and executive editor Julie Pace, alluding to the widespread withering of newspaper staffing:

“We continue to deepen our commitment to local news and ensure we are able to focus on it, especially in parts of the U.S. where there are news deserts. At a time when the local news industry is under so much pressure, it’s our role as a news cooperative to do all we can to support local outlets with content and services that help them inform their audiences.”

The four other news partners are Honolulu Civil Beat, Montana Free Press, Nebraska Journalism Trust and South Dakota News Watch. All are in states only lightly covered by remaining commercial newspapers and their sites.

Complicating the situation for the AP is that its board is still controlled by newspaper members. But since the turn of the century, newspapers have been gradually supplanted in importance by much bigger broadcast and international operations. My bet would be on more and deeper partnerships with the nonprofit digital sector if this first cohort works out.

Representation in the news

Catching up on this from last week. Julie Pace, executive editor of The Associated Press, spoke at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Here’s a brief summary from the AP’s Nicole Meir.

I did, however, want to highlight this quote from Pace about the importance of representation in news coverage: “If we’re honest, part of the reason it’s easy for people to tune out the news is that they don’t see themselves represented in the coverage — often because they’re not represented among the people leading and executing on the coverage. That’s a reality we have to tackle across so many fronts — race, gender, class and socioeconomics, education levels, political persuasions.”

Pace added, “We have to make a conscious effort to ensure that our staff has a diversity of experiences — we have to recruit differently, we have to ask different questions in interviews. We have to be willing to take risks.”

Print It Black

A photo of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, from June 2022. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

The ABC News documentary “Print It Black” is now out on ABC Live, Hulu, and Disney+. The film goes inside The Uvalde Leader-News’ coverage of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Texas. Filmmaker Andrew Fredericks and producer Megan Hundahl Streete, who has Uvalde roots, embedded with the newspaper for a year following the shooting on May 24, 2022, in which 19 students and two teachers were killed.

Here’s a trailer for the film. Also, here’s a piece written earlier this month in the Leader-News by publisher Craig Garnett.

The democracy beat

Annie Aguiar, my now former Poynter colleague (Annie is off to be a reporting fellow at The New York Times) has a good Q&A with Kira Lerner, democracy editor at the Guardian US.

Lerner told Aguiar, “​​I’ve learned a lot about not playing up small errors and issues with elections, because they’re not always evidence of malfeasance or anything wrong with the election system. I think when I was new to the voting rights beat, there would be a polling place that had a four-hour line, and maybe it ran out of ballots. At that point in my career, I would maybe publish a story with an explosive headline about how horrible this is. But I’ve learned a lot since then, and I know that small mistakes and errors in elections that are people-run endeavors are not examples of corruption. Sometimes they are and that’s worth reporting, but not always.”

Lerner also said, “Everything on the democracy beat is really high stakes. I don’t want to be the one that’s getting people alarmed over things that are not necessarily worthy of alarm. We try not to write stories and frame headlines that play on people’s fears. We also do as much as we can to report on good news. There is good news on the democracy beat, too. This country is full of people that are doing what they can to protect democracy. 2022 could have been a catastrophic election for democracy if all of these elections deniers won and for the most part, they did not. And so we reported on that.”

Media tidbits

• Brian Stelter’s latest piece for Vanity Fair: “How Lisa Rubin Became MSNBC’s ‘Eyes and Ears’ at the Trump Trial.”
• The New York Times’ Tania Ganguli with “Its Future in Doubt, the Freewheeling ‘Inside the NBA’ Is on Edge Instead.”
• The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand with “Bill Walton was unique in media and life, with a message we all understood.”
• Also from The Athletic, Richard Deitsch with “‘Thank you for my life’: Bill Walton’s colleagues share their favorite memories.”
• And here’s another superb remembrance from The Washington Post’s John Feinstein: “Bill Walton, brilliant on the court, became basketball’s bard.”
• From The 19th, “The 19th receives multimillion-dollar grant from Melinda French Gates, Pivotal.”
• And here’s Melinda French Gates’ guest essay in The New York Times: “The Enemies of Progress Play Offense. I Want to Help Even the Match.”

Hot type

• For The New York Times Magazine, Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer with “The Untold Story of the Network That Took Down Roe v. Wade.”
• For the Los Angeles Times, Chris Vognar with “‘Seinfeld’ star Michael Richards is more than the worst thing that ever happened to him.”
• Major League Baseball umpire Ángel Hernández, who had the reputation of being the worst ump in the big leagues, is retiring effective immediately. The Washington Post’s Barry Svrluga with “Everyone knew Ángel Hernández’s name. That was the problem.”

More resources for journalists

• Got a story you’d like to write for Poynter? Email pitch@poynter.org with your idea, approximate timeline and word count.
• A webinar at the intersection of healthcare and journalism.
• Work-Life Chemistry six-week newsletter course: Ditch work-life balance for a more sustainable approach.
• Manage big responsibilities without direct reports? Try Lead With Influence.

Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at tjones@poynter.org.

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