The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 18 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Peretti: BuzzFeed made the right call publishing the Trump-Russia dossier
“I definitely think it was the right decision, and the reason we published it was because you had everyone in the senior levels of government and media talking about this document and referring to the document even in public communications.”
Peretti plans to resolve BuzzFeed's going-concern accounting notice
“So our plan and management's plan is to resolve that going concern. And really going, going back to founder mode of saying, hey we got to reinvent the company for this near future, and wanting investors to know there's risk to that, but also now we're getting …”
Peretti: BuzzFeed should not have done debt-laden SPAC deal to go public
“There's a million tactical things that if I had a time machine, I could, you know, like not, not do a SPAC acquisition where we take on a bunch of debt you know, before and go public without raising capital. That was, that I would tell my younger self not to d…”
Peretti: Why he rejected Disney's 2013 buyout offer for BuzzFeed
“I think that part of it is a gut thing or an emotional thing where you just didn't feel ready. I felt like there was a lot more we had to build. At the time we were really a website and our video business had just started. It was growing so much. And I knew th…”
Peretti: Long-term building requires a high valuation and large investment capital
“The valuation is set through investment, and the fact that people have invested in us has given us resources To build big things in the future, and to not think day to day, like, how are we doing this quarter, or how are we doing, you know, this week, and thin…”
Von Ahn: Translation is a bad business stuck in a race to the bottom
“Translations are, it's a pretty shitty business, translation. It's five cents a word, but then pretty soon, suddenly, you know, the people from BuzzFeed found somebody else that would do it for four cents a word, because, and then we're like, fine, we'll do it…”
Acevedo: Mainstream digital media platforms treated Latino verticals as mere afterthoughts
“It's always an afterthought. It's never the main focus. You know, even BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed had a really good vertical for a while, but it wasn't their main business. It wasn't their sole focus.”
Peretti: BuzzFeed Could Not Have Raised VC by Pitching Journalism Hires
“Cause we probably wouldn't have been able to even raise money if we had said, oh, our plan is to hire lots and lots of journalists and reporters.”
Peretti: Great content and teaching adapt in real time to audience feedback
“I think if you think about content from a, from at the time, print and broadcast, you think about making something that you push out to this giant audience, but if you're in a classroom teaching, you know, 25 kids that are in front of you real, you start, you …”
Peretti: The best internet businesses align core products with native advertising
“I looked at the best businesses on the internet, and they tended to use some form of native advertising. So Google had a search engine, and you enter a keyword in, and it would give you a bunch of related links, but it would also give you a bunch of related pa…”
Peretti: Election Run-Ups Are the Best Time to Launch News Organizations
“We learned from Huffington Post that building a news business in the run-up to election is a good time to do it”
Peretti: Social content succeeds as relational connective tissue, not raw information
“When we started BuzzFeed, everyone thought of content as information to get in people's head. This is the article. Are people going to read it and get the information in their head? We had this insight that content was on social was a way of connecting with so…”
Luis von Ahn: Duolingo landed translation contracts with CNN and BuzzFeed
“And we landed a contract with CNN and a contract with BuzzFeed that we were going to Translate all their news from English to Spanish.”
Raz: BuzzFeed Built a Larger Newsroom Than Most US News Outlets
“A company that just six years ago didn't even employ a single journalist, and today it has a bigger news team than most newsrooms in America.”
Peretti: John Johnson personally funded BuzzFeed's expenses at launch
“When we started, John just paid every month the expenses of BuzzFeed.”
Peretti: SoftBank funded BuzzFeed so he could stay at HuffPost
“Really the first time we were able to raise money, you know, was from SoftBank, which also was invested in HuffPost, and they, there was another firm that wanted to invest, but they told me I had to leave HuffPost.”
Peretti: BuzzFeed Doubled Audience Annually From Launch
“We basically doubled our audience every year from when we launched the site, and it started with something like 200,000 or 300,000 people a month.”
Peretti: BuzzFeed's branded HBO 'Game of Thrones' quiz hit 1M views
“When quizzes got really big, a month after that, we could have a branded quiz for HBO, which is, how will you die in Game of Thrones? And you answer questions, and it'll be like, you'll be trampled, or you'll be beheaded. And, like, it was, it got a million vi…”