Buzzfeed will be laying off 15% of its workers. The "News" unit will be scrapped completely.

Catch the code-learning fever!

On Thursday, Buzzfeed News announced that it would be shutting down, with CRO Edgar Hernandez and COO leaving the company and layoffs being announced.

In an email from Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, said, "we are reducing our workforce by approximately 15 percent today across our Business, Content, Tech, and Admin teams, and beginning the process of closing Buzzfeed News.

"Additionally, we are proposing headcount reductions in some international markets," the email added.

Peretti said that Hernandez and Baesler have left the company, with President Marcela Martin taking on "responsibility for all revenue functions effective immediately."

"While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we've determined that the company can no longer continue to fund Buzzfeed News..." Peretti wrote.

Jack Straw:

Not only did BuzzFeed go tits up today but Ben Smith took the opportunity to admit he knew there were "errors" in the dossier when he first published it.

And Paul Sperry is saying that Smith has revealed that David Brock was shopping the dossier in 2016.

I wonder why Ben feels the need to finally tell the truth now?

Posted by: JackStraw

Indeed.

Sperry reminds us that Jake Tapper was angry that BuzzFeed published the dossier, when the scheme that Tapper arranged with Comey and/or Clapper was to merely reference the dossier, so that his leftwing audience would imagine it was a professional intelligence product, full of deeply-researched and verified dirt on Trump.

When the world saw it was forty pages of bullshit about Prostitute Pee Parties, the political operation Jake Tapper concocted with Comey and/or Clapper collapsed.

And Jakey-Jake was peeved:

Paul Sperry
@paulsperry_

NEW: CNN's Jake Tapper angrily emailed then-Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith to complain he stole his thunder by publishing the Steele dossier:"He wished we had at least waited until morning to give his news the attention it deserved: 'Collegiality wise it was you stepping on my dick' "

Why do I say Fake Tapper was involved in the scheme? Because James Comey attempted to get CNN to publish the dossier, and was told there was "no news hook" which would justify publishing unverified dirt from a foreigner citing anonymous (and, it turns out, fake) sources.

But then either Comey and/or Clapper, or both, got the idea that they could attach the dossier with a paperclip to the daily intelligence briefing, which would then create "the news hook" to publish information about the dossier: the information would still be unverified nonsense, but the very fact that Comey and/or Clapper had paperclipped it to an official, serious intelligence report instantly made it a story. No, the dossier still wasn't a story, but the story that it had been briefed to the president was a story.

By the way, Comey has stated that his efforts to get media to report on the dossier were rebuffed by objections to it not having a "news hook" in interviews. Of course, no media "reporter" ever bothered to ask, "So did you paperclip the dossier to the intelligence briefing just to transmute it into newsworthiness...?"

"Reporters" never ask their Democrat allies and sex-partners the questions that could uncover actual Democrat corruption and malice.

After having paperclipped the dossier to the briefing, of course, Comey and/or Clapper leaked the information to Tapper (or Evan Perez, or Jim Sciutto, or Carl Bernstein -- the four liars who reported this hoax) -- that the dossier had been attached to the intelligence briefing, delivering to CNN the very "news hook" that they had told him they would need to report on the dossier.

Now, did Jake Tapper know he was being used? Did he suggest paperclipping the dossier to the briefing, just to contrive a "newsworthiness" the dossier did not possess on his own? I cannot tell you his exact level of knowledge or involvement in the hoax, but I find it impossible to believe that he didn't at least suspect that he was being fed a story by obvious bitter partisans who had contrived a "news hook" for an unverified pile of slander.

And frankly, when Jake Tapper angrily DM'd me to tell me that the Four Horsemen of the Pee-Pee Party Dossier had not just been passive recipients of a leak, but had done lots of "work" to "report it out" -- which he did do, he did foot-stompingly insist that he was instrumental in bringing this story to the public -- that alerted me to the possibility that Tapper or one of the others had conspired with Comey and/or Clapper to invest the dossier with a "news hook" that it did not otherwise have.

What work did you do to make this reportable, Fake Jake? You were obviously leaked the main story, that they paperclipped a pack of drunkard-partisan lies to a briefing; everyone in the media has been passed the dossier by David Brock.

So what work could you have done, except to invent the contrivance by which the dossier would become reportable?

Does not a single Republican congressman or investigator ever notice how fortuitous, how serendipitous, it was that CNN told Comey they could not report on the dossier without a "news hook" and then poof!, like magic, a "news hook" is suddenly conjured by Comey and/or Clapper, and this hook is immediately leaked to CNN?

Seriously? No one else sees a connection here but me?

Ben Smith knew the dossier contained "clear errors" which could be proven, and then a series of claims with no proof at all to them.

He published it anyway, and didn't alert the public of its dodgy nature.

Paul Sperry
@paulsperry_

BREAKING: Ex-Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith now admits he knew at the time he published, in full, the fake Russia dossier that it contained "clear errors" -- in fact, one of his editors, Miriam Elder, warned "It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors." He publ'd anyway

Mollie Hemingway always says that Ben Smith did us all a great service here, as the scheme concocted by the dossier conspirators was to speak vaguely about the allegations in the dossier so that the public would assume the worst, and also assume all the evidence backing these allegations up. Ben Smith ruined that scheme by publishing this obvious piece-of-shit and letting the world know how absolutely meritless it was.

Paul Sperry
@paulsperry_

BREAKING: Buzzfeed founder Ben Smith has revealed that Hillary henchman David Brock shopped the fake Trump-Russia dossier to him in Brooklyn in 2016: "He wanted to spread the word about a dossier of allegations involving Trumps ties to Russia"

David Brock, as you probably know, was a "right-wing" hatchetman/grifter who wrote a biography of Hillary Clinton, which, rather than delivering negative information about her as his usual audience expected, praised her effusively. I believe the book was subtitled Yasss Kween Slay!

Apparently this deeply, hauntingly gay man fell in love with Lovely Hillary, somehow. If you can fall in love with a dogfaced Weeble-bottomed toad like Hillary Clinton, I seriously question your gay credentials. I've taken down some real hogs but I just can't see myself wanting anything from Hillary Clinton, even with my Jason Statham-levels of unbridled heterosexuality.

When people on the right rejected his hagiography of Hillary Clinton, he suffered the first medially documented case of Fourth Degree Butthurt, and within a year or two, became a grifter for the hard left and, obviously, a staunch champion of Lovely Hillary.

So it makes perfect sense that Hillary Clinton would pass the dossier to Brock and give the lovelorn and confused gay man orders to defend His Lady-Fair.