BuzzFeed’s latest activist investor, the previous Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, needs the corporate to contemplate strikes like hiring the previous Fox Information host Tucker Carlson and the N.B.A. commentator Charles Barkley.
Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s founder and chief govt, has already rejected a few of Mr. Ramaswamy’s requests out of hand, organising a conflict between the 2 males.
Mr. Ramaswamy, an investor who has amassed an 8.3 p.c stake in BuzzFeed, despatched a letter to the corporate’s board of administrators Monday criticizing its enterprise practices and journalistic efforts. Although he has been steadily shopping for up inventory for months, his intentions for the corporate didn’t grow to be clear till this week.
Earlier than his transient run for president, Mr. Ramaswamy made a fortune within the pharmaceutical enterprise, promoting his firm’s stake in promising corporations to the Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo.
Mr. Ramaswamy is pushing BuzzFeed so as to add three new members to its board of administrators, to hone its give attention to audio and video content material and to embrace “larger range of thought,” based on a replica of his letter shared with The New York Instances.
He additionally really useful that BuzzFeed minimize its workers considerably or threat being pressured out of business by its long-term debt obligations.
“Reducing across the edges won’t work,” Mr. Ramaswamy wrote. “You require a whole, ground-up re-think of each single piece of content material being produced on the firm.”
In a reply to Mr. Ramaswamy on Monday, Mr. Peretti stated that his letter exhibited “elementary misunderstandings” about BuzzFeed’s enterprise operations, the values of its viewers and the mission of the corporate. Mr. Peretti owns a particular class of voting inventory that offers him an efficient veto over any dramatic remaking of the corporate or its board.
The 2 do agree on one factor, Mr. Peretti wrote.
“I’m glad you suppose BuzzFeed is undervalued — I completely agree!” Mr. Peretti wrote. He stated he would schedule a gathering with Mr. Ramaswamy.
Mr. Ramaswamy’s letter comes as BuzzFeed is combating the punishing realities of the digital media business, which have pressured the corporate to take important motion to pay down its debt and protect its standing as a publicly traded firm.
BuzzFeed has suffered because it went public in December 2021, reflecting industrywide investor skepticism in digital media corporations. The corporate’s worth has plummeted since its Nasdaq debut, falling to $2.80 per share, a drop of 71 p.c, as of Tuesday morning.
In current months, BuzzFeed has taken steps to pay down its excellent debt, together with promoting Complicated, a pop-culture web site recognized for its protection of sneaker tradition and different streetwear, for $108.6 million. The corporate nonetheless has greater than $100 million of debt on its books, based on a current submitting.
Mr. Ramaswamy has some concepts for methods BuzzFeed can jump-start its enterprise. In his letter, the previous Republican presidential candidate advised hiring high-profile “creators” like Mr. Carlson, Mr. Barkley and Aaron Rodgers, the Nationwide Soccer League quarterback. Mr. Carlson and Mr. Rodgers are common in right-wing media circles for his or her advocacy of conservative causes.
Elsewhere in his letter, Mr. Ramaswamy criticized BuzzFeed’s 2017 choice to publish a file of unverified data that asserted there was a connection between former President Donald J. Trump and Russia; a lot of that doc, the so-called Steele File, was subsequently discredited.
In his reply, Mr. Peretti rejected Mr. Ramaswamy’s request for a mea culpa, saying BuzzFeed was “undoubtedly not going to difficulty an apology for our Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism,” referring to a 2020 story on the Chinese language authorities’s detention of Muslims.
