# BuzzFeed News **BuzzFeed News** (2011–2023) was the news division of [[BuzzFeed]], built under founding editor-in-chief Ben Smith inside a company known for quizzes and listicles. It grew into one of the strongest investigative desks of its era — a Pulitzer winner and the originating newsroom of the [[FinCEN Files]] — before its parent's finances closed it. For the KB it matters three ways: the [[Steele Dossier]] publication and the litigation that followed; the FinCEN Files as a map of bank-processed dirty money; and the shutdown as a data point on the collapse of digital-native investigative journalism. The company chronology lives at [[BuzzFeed Timeline]]; this page covers the newsroom. ## Key dates | Date | Event | |---|---| | Dec 2011 | Ben Smith hired from Politico as editor-in-chief | | Jan 10, 2017 | Publishes the 35-page unverified [[Steele Dossier]] nearly in full, after CNN had reported its existence without publishing it | | 2017–18 | Defamation suits from Aleksej Gubarev (Feb 2017), the [[Alfa Bank]] owners Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan (May 2017), and [[Michael Cohen]] (Jan 2018, dropped Apr 2018) | | Dec 19, 2018 | Judge Ursula Ungaro grants BuzzFeed summary judgment in the Gubarev suit | | 2020 | Smith leaves for The New York Times; Mark Schoofs named editor-in-chief in May | | Sept 2020 | [[FinCEN Files]] published with the [[ICIJ]] | | 2021 | Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting to Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek for the Xinjiang detention-camp investigation | | Apr 20, 2023 | [[Jonah Peretti]] announces the closure as part of cuts to about 15% of BuzzFeed's staff | | May 5, 2023 | Final day of publication; BuzzFeed's news brand consolidated into HuffPost | ## The dossier decision Publishing raw, unverified intelligence split the press: critics said it abandoned the basic verification job, while BuzzFeed argued that a document already circulating at the top of government should be seen by readers. The court ruling turned on that same circulation. Because the dossier had been in the hands of officials and the FBI, Judge Ungaro held that BuzzFeed's publication, without embellishment, was protected under New York's fair-report privilege. The legal win did not settle the journalistic argument, and the dossier became a durable right-wing talking point about media recklessness — tracked at [[Steele Dossier]]. ## FinCEN Files BuzzFeed reporters Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier obtained the cache — more than 2,100 Suspicious Activity Reports that banks filed with [[FinCEN]] between 1999 and 2017 — and after two years of work shared it with the [[ICIJ]] and more than 100 partner newsrooms. The project used the consortium model of the [[Panama Papers]] and [[Paradise Papers]], with BuzzFeed one tier upstream as the source newsroom rather than a partner. ## The shutdown BuzzFeed News closed while still winning prizes. The closure is the KB's clearest data point on the **business-model collapse of digital-native investigative journalism**: viral reach and a Pulitzer could not fund the newsroom. It parallels the [[Gawker Media]] collapse (2016) and Vice Media's 2023 bankruptcy, and the broader contraction of for-profit investigative reporting since 2020. ## See Also - [[BuzzFeed]] · [[BuzzFeed Timeline]] · [[Jonah Peretti]] · [[Steele Dossier]] · [[FinCEN Files]] · [[ICIJ]] · [[Fact-Checking]] · [[Fake News]]