Ben Smith on BuzzFeed’s Mass Deletion
‘Excuse, just evolving our mistakes into the memory hole….’
BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith has responded to criticism of the media company’s mass deletion of thousands of old posts, a move that Gawker and others have slammed as an ethical breach of the highest order: in an interview with the Poynter Institute’s “Regret The Error” columnist Craig Silverman, the BuzzFeed editor admitted that the way the articles were deleted was not handled well, but he said both the deletion and the criticism of it are a part of the site’s evolution.
Smith echoed the defense that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has provided since Gawker first detected early signs of the mass deletion, saying most of the articles were created when the site was seen as “an experimental lab” for media, rather than a journalistic organization. Many of the pieces that got deleted, he said, were jokes that no longer worked, or posts with Flash games embedded in them, or posts that no longer displayed properly because of all the changes to the site’s content-management system over the years.