Vice and Buzzfeed ‘started believing their own hype’, says Guardian boss

Tim Burrowes

March 21, 2019 7:45

Some of the commercial woes faced by companies like Vice and Buzzfeed may be because they started to believe their own hype, the boss of The Guardian has said, as he revealed his own company is now “out of danger”.

Speaking at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London, Guardian Media Group CEO David Pemsel was asked about the 2,500 or so media jobs cut so far this year by digital publishers including Buzzfeed and Vice. The cuts included a large proportion of Buzzfeed’s Australian news team.

Pemsel: The Buzzfeed viral nirvana was false and Vice’s attitude is no longer wanted

Pemsel told the audience that because venture capital investors had rushed to take stakes in the digital startups, they had started to believe they were immune to pressure faced by other publishers.

Subscribe to keep reading

Join Mumbrella Pro to access the Mumbrella archive and read our premium analysis of everything under the media and marketing umbrella.

Tim Burrowes

Tim Burrowes is the publisher of Mumbrella and Unmade. He co-founded Mumbrella in 2008 and sister title Unmade in 2021. He's worked in the UK, Middle East, Asia & Australia and has specialised in writing about the communications world for the last 25 years. He wrote the book Media Unmade, published in 2021, and became the presenter of MediaLand on ABC Radio National in 2025.