Forget politics: Vivek Ramaswamy floats “fun” BuzzFeed

The Republican politician and activist investor Vivek Ramaswamy held a long discussion with BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti last Thursday, and emerged speaking, at least to some degree, BuzzFeed’s language.

Ramaswamy now owns nearly 9% of the media company, where I created and ran a news division from 2012 to 2020. He initially suggested BuzzFeed to transform itself to a video platform for a cross-partisan range of video creators from Tucker Carlson to (he later said) Mehdi Hasan, and has proposed three conservative media figures join its board.

But Ramaswamy told me on his podcast (“Truth.”) that he wanted to understand the thinking of the company’s management, and said he’d like to believe his conversation with Peretti “was a positive exchange where people left with a different impression than some of the initial impressions of my activism were all about.”

In particular, he said, his focus is on clarifying BuzzFeed’s brand and “unambiguous, worthy purpose” — but that he’s open to alternative directions than his, which is largely framed in terms of the political media he lives in and consumes.

“If there was a clearly articulated alternative thesis, such as ’The internet deserves a sanctuary, a place where people feel joy, rather than toxicity, and have fun in an unconstrained and unifying way,’ — and that we own that, that anyone knows when they come to a BuzzFeed property, that’s what they get — that would be a coherent brand,” he said.

Peretti recently told me he has “made BuzzFeed into an entertainment outlet that is becoming more like Snap, Pinterest, Reddit.”

I remarked to Ramaswamy that his alternative framing sounded a lot like things I’d heard from Peretti over the years. The most exciting, and the hardest, part of building BuzzFeed news was operating under a brand whose unofficial slogan was “no haters.”

We tried to interpret that to reflect the news values of fairness, and of keeping an open mind — an alternative to the snark of the 2012 internet. And we sought to build, at its best, a news organization that projected a sense that it was fighting for the same audience that was delighted by the entertainment on the web and on YouTube that always accounted for the majority of BuzzFeed’s audience.

BuzzFeed shut down BuzzFeed News in 2023, a painful moment for everyone who loved the place. But it was, to my mind, hard to interpret through any particular political lens. We’d bet heavily on distributed media and social distribution, a strategy that may have been a reasonable bet in 2012 but — for reasons I lay out in my book, Traffic (books are the ultimate paywall, sorry!) — collapsed as the digital environment shifted.

Ramaswamy likes to say that the role of an activist investor is in part to try on the clothes of management, and see how they fit — that is, to understand a company’s point of view before trying to change it. I asked him if he’d tried on The Dress, a legendary BuzzFeed post, and if so whether it was white and gold or blue and black. I’m not sure he picked up the reference; if I had to guess, he was reading Reddit, not BuzzFeed, in his dorm room. But he said he thought there was “some room for tailoring the fit.”

Ramaswamy’s original, hyper-political pitch for BuzzFeed makes little business sense. It’s hard to see why its left-leaning, mostly a-political audience would want to be fed a stream of political voices of any particular sort, much less from the right. And I’d interpreted his initial pitch as what Mixed Signals co-host Nayeema Raza described as a smaller version of Elon Musk’s move: Just forcing media to bend to his politics through the force of money.

But Ramaswamy doesn’t have control of BuzzFeed, and doesn’t have Musk’s money to burn. An investor in a previous Ramaswamy venture told me he expects the former presidential candidate to find a way toward a successful exit of his BuzzFeed investment.

And perhaps there’s a path to successful activism and a bit of political satisfaction on the side. Ramaswamy is also pushing cost cuts. BuzzFeed’s news division is the progressive news site HuffPost, which Peretti co-founded in 2005 and which has drawn strength from a migration away from social media and back to homepages. The site regularly breaks news on — for instance — divisions inside the Biden Administration on Gaza.

HuffPost fits comfortably inside any version of BuzzFeed as a company doing political journalism, but is harder to see inside a company whose brand is fun.

• You can find my full conversation with Ramaswamy on X.
• Listen to Nayeema’s and my conversation with him wherever you get your podcasts.
• “For elite audiences especially, adding news sharpens a brand and increases relevance,” Peretti told me. “Unfortunately News is an expensive way to gain relevance and probably not the best way to build value.”
• “We appreciate Vivek Ramaswamy’s recommendations, and they will be sent to governance as per the formal process that he is no doubt aware of,” a BuzzFeed spokesperson told Axios.