BuzzFeed News began as a division of BuzzFeed in December 2011 with the appointment of Ben Smith as editor-in-chief. In 2013, Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Schoofs of ProPublica was hired as head of investigative reporting. By 2016, BuzzFeed had 20 investigative journalists. The British division of BuzzFeed News is headed by Janine Gibson, formerly of The Guardian. Notable coverage includes a 2012 partnership with the BBC on match-fixing in professional tennis, and inequities in the U.S. H-2 guest worker program, reporting of which won a National Magazine Award.
A 2017 study in the journal Journalism which compared news articles by BuzzFeed and The New York Times found that BuzzFeed largely follows established rules of journalism. Both publications predominantly used inverted pyramid news format, and journalists' opinions were absent from the majority of articles of both. Both BuzzFeed and the Times predominately covered government and politics, and predominantly used politicians, government, and law enforcement as sources. In contrast, BuzzFeed devoted more articles to social issues such as protests and LGBT issues, more frequently quoted ordinary people, less frequently covered crime and terrorism, and had fewer articles focusing on negative aspects of an issue. Tandoc, Edson C. (2017). "Five ways BuzzFeed is preserving (or transforming) the journalistic field".Journalism. 19 (2): 200–216.
On July 18, 2018, BuzzFeed News moved from a section of the BuzzFeed site to its own domain, BuzzFeedNews.com, with a Trending News Bar and programmatic advertisements.
