Good evening, and welcome back to In The Room. Tonight, a post-mortem on BuzzFeed News, and the end of an era in digital media.

I had come to Politico—and moved to cosmopolitan Washington of all places—in large part because I wanted to work with Ben, a trailblazer who had presciently recognized that so-called blogging—i.e., writing conversationally and intelligently, in a format readers actually enjoyed, and on the social web—was a gateway to a new frontier of connectivity, media entities, and further format innovation. Ben also recognized that news was the currency of the Internet, and that it needed to be packaged in tweet-sized nuggets, or “snackable content,” as the beancounters would eventually coin it.

Lastly, without giving the guy too much credit, he also recognized that there was nothing wrong with actually giving news consumers what they wanted: stories that were shorter, pithier, more fun, accessible, and temporal. It sure beat whatever throat-clearing Mount Olympus garbage that some Howard Fineman-type was recycling in Newsweek or the echo chamber of The Washington Post editorial rubber room. Anyway, it’s a free country, and the guy was entitled to take whatever job he wanted. But I did think he was making a mistake. (Whatever hard feelings I had toward Ben quickly abated when he informed me that, upon his departure, I would be getting my own blog focused on the media, with a coveted Matt Wuerker caricature to boot. Flattery does work, doesn’t it?)

Needless to say, I was naive. Peretti and Steinberg saw that social media was redefining the internet and creating an entirely new, always-online culture with voracious appetites for the dopamine hit of constant content, and that this could be harnessed into a powerful ad-supported business. They also recognized, also presciently, that this movement was emerging from a new generation of Internet natives who would never hold a physical newspaper or magazine in their lives. Sure, the earliest iterations might be silly and meme-ish, but the social web would eventually come for news. And there was no better way to prove this out, they reckoned, than by starting their own news division.

All of BuzzFeed’s content at the time—the frivolous OMG moments and cat videos and asinine listicles—was, as Ben writes in Traffic, his memoir of the age, “a bankshot off the culture, a running joke or a joke on a joke. It feeds off and drives the Internet’s undercurrents, but it doesn’t ripple on the surface.” In order to go mainstream, BuzzFeed would need to break into news, and the upcoming election was the ideal whitespace to ratify its thesis. “The biggest story of 2012 will be the presidential campaign,” Ben wrote in a memo to Jonah, “and it provides a perfect opportunity to elbow oneself into the main narrative.” At least that was the plan.

Newseeek and Businessweek had been sold off for pocket change to buyers who could manage their debt load and opex. The once venerable Time Inc. was embarking on a procession of hiring a new Hail Mary C.E.O. every year. The Times, to give but one more example, was in its Dark Ages, helmed by the anachronistic leadership of Janet Robinson and Jill Abramson, the latter of whom (despite profound talents as a journalist) seemed deeply unwilling to make concessions to the new realities of the digital landscape. Despite its extraordinary investment in its newsroom, the Times had lost its mighty and potent classified ads business to Craigslist and saw The Huffington Post surpass its traffic by essentially plagiarizing its articles, or at least letting 20-somethings straight out of Oberlin “aggregate” them. It was a good moment to be disruptive.

No matter how veteran journalists felt about the whole phenomenon—BuzzFeed News was the butt of a lot of jokes in the corner offices at Politico, a five-year-old startup that, thanks to Ben, all of a sudden felt like yesterday’s disruptor—it was impossible not to pay attention. And then Ben started building up a staff of journalists from the Times, The Guardian, ProPublica, etcetera, established overseas bureaus, and created a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism team. It became impossible not to take them seriously. By the time the next election cycle came around, after two $200 million investments from NBCUniversal, among others, BuzzFeed was valued at $1.7 billion.

Peretti, a geeky guy of the MIT Media Lab set, was neither an operator nor talent nor sales executive nor salesperson, but rather that rare bird: a philosopher C.E.O. BuzzFeed News, in particular, provided him the credibility and mainstream appeal he had long coveted. What it didn’t do was make him any money. In fact, the creation of the enterprise actually proved to be un-innovative. BuzzFeed was filled with audience experts, but the news division, well, looked like a news division, albeit in a swell Gramercy office: lots of overhead, fixed costs, and a profound reliance on a finicky ad market and social platforms that had let the industry down before, as recently as 2008-9.

And within a matter of years, this became a strain on the company. In 2016, the Financial Times reported that BuzzFeed had fallen $80 million short of projected revenues the previous year and been forced to slash current year projections in half. (Peretti disputed these numbers at the time, but they were at least directionally right.) Meanwhile, BuzzFeed was increasingly turning its attention to video, the fastest growing segment of its business, and particularly entertainment video. In August of that year, he split the business into two units: BuzzFeed Entertainment Group, the revenue driver, and BuzzFeed News, a money-losing enterprise that Peretti nevertheless promised to sustain. “News is the heart and soul of any great media company,” Peretti wrote in a memo to employees at the time.

Journalism was essential to maintaining the brand’s credibility and prestige, he said, including with advertisers. Privately, Peretti also conceded that he simply liked journalism and was willing to foot the bill. But by that time, it was already clear that the news business had become a heavy burden. Steinberg had departed to found Cheddar, his CNBC mini-disruptor that he sold at the perfect moment, and BuzzFeed had unwisely rebuffed suitors (including Disney, back in 2013) who might have provided some financial discipline at scale. The news business was moving to subscription as brands wanted to retreat from the increasingly intolerant divisiveness of American politics. Regardless of Peretti’s rhetoric, separating the division was the first, unspoken concession that it might need to be set to sea.

The division subsequently cycled through leaders—Mark Schoofs, Sam Henig, etcetera—and the big exclusives stopped seeming so big. Peretti had ambitions to use the I.P.O. to form a house of brands, including Complex, that he could leverage to achieve the scale he believed was required to finally break free of the Facebook gravity well and negotiate with advertisers on his own terms. But Buzzfeed’s reach was already diminished, perhaps an inevitable consequence of never truly owning its platform-agnostic, terminally disintermediated audience. By that time, after all, the Times and The Washington Post (and FT and WSJ) had all absorbed its lessons. Ted Sarandos once said that Netflix was trying to be HBO before HBO could be Netflix. In the end, the Times became BuzzFeed News before the other way around, a reality that was perfected when Ben joined the company, and finally came to fruition when the division was closed this week.

But that outcome, sad as it may be, isn’t necessarily bad news for anyone outside BuzzFeed’s private investors, its new public markets investors, and the people who lost their jobs. BZFD, once worth the aforementioned $1.7 billion, now trades at a market cap of around $100 million, some 24 percent of its annual revenue. Peretti didn’t have a choice here. He had to sever the business. Notably, the Times Company stock has tripled since 2016 to achieve a current market cap of $6.5 billion under Meredith Kopit Levien. So maybe that money went somewhere after all.

On Thursday, in a memo announcing BuzzFeed News’s shuttering, Peretti told his employees that he regretted his failure to impose “higher standards for profitability.” It was, he said, “clearly a massive failure on my part, and I am deeply sorry for it.” I later asked Ben if he and Jonah had discussed potential paths toward profitability that didn’t rely on the whims of social media networks. “Yes, constantly,” he said. “This dependency was a huge challenge from the start—it wasn’t a secret. But it’s also hard to play away from your strength.”