July 14, 2014

Gawker

Some senior Buzzfeed employees were given the option to review their old articles, edit them or delete them in cases where they didn’t live up to the company’s standards, Poynter has learned.

This option, given to some of Buzzfeed’s early employees in the past few months, was part of an effort to make Buzzfeed’s experience more uniform and high-quality across the site and fix or prune some articles that were representative of Buzzfeed’s early origins as a content lab.

Related: Five ways news organizations respond to unpublishing requests

Gawker’s J.K. Trotter wrote about the missing posts Monday, providing links to three posts by senior editor Matt Stopera that had disappeared from Buzzfeed’s main site.

Buzzfeed told Gawker it reviewed posts in light of “our most updated policies and standards” and that “Certain items published no longer met our editorial standards and we want all content our readers see to meet our current policies and practices. We edited some posts, removed certain posts and left other posts as is.”

All three of the removed Buzzfeed articles cited by Gawker, which were published from 2010-2011, are listicles about pop culture. They are:

Support high-integrity, independent journalism that serves democracy. Make a gift to Poynter today. The Poynter Institute is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, and your gift helps us make good journalism better.
Donate
Benjamin Mullin was formerly the managing editor of Poynter.org. He also previously reported for Poynter as a staff writer, Google Journalism Fellow and Naughton Fellow,…
Benjamin Mullin

More News

Back to News

Comments

Comments are closed.