BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti on why he bought HuffPost and why the New York Times can’t be "the paper of record"

That meant there were three strategies available to media companies looking to survive on the Internet. First, cater to Google. This meant a heavy emphasis on both speed and SEO, and an investment in anticipating and creating content to answer consumer questions. Or you could cater to Facebook, which meant a heavy emphasis on click-bait and human i... See more

In its early days, Substack primarily catered to a certain set of internet-savvy writers and journalists, lured by the promise of monetizing a direct relationship with their readers. But as it morphs from a niche publishing concern into a heavyweight start-up mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook, its user base is proliferating accor... See more

The New York Times will triumph financially, dramatically so, and utterly fail as an intellectual institution, at least by its former standards. The editorial branding will be august pronouncements about ‘the paper of record’, but the business model is pure Netflix: All The News Fit To Binge.

At the core of this is a debate on whether The New York Times, The Washington Post and others are failing the American people by pushing more content behind the paywall.