Mark “Copyranter” Duffy, an advertisement critic and formerly the oldest staff member at BuzzFeed, penned a lengthy blog about how he got fired from the website.
“I was ‘officially’ fired at my apartment on Halloween, via a letter delivered by UPS. Inside the envelope were two copies of the legal document, one to sign and return and another for my records. Both copies had CUTE stickers affixed to the first page,” he wrote on Gawker.com.
And he later stated: “Not as CUTE: Making your advertising critic disappear posts that criticise the advertisements of big advertisers, which Ben Smith did to me on at least one occasion. BuzzFeed has a “no haters” hiring policy and an overweening desire to draw big-name advertisers into its “community” of users, in exchange for money. Which makes ranting about ads professionally for the site a complicated endeavour. At which I FAILed.”
Duffy described himself as BuzzFeed’s former advertising blogger. According to a report from Adweek last year, he left an ad agency to work at the website
BuzzFeed’s editor, Ben Smith, offered his reaction to Duffy’s blog.
“Guy writes a post accusing people of advocating ‘worldwide mass rape,’ posts without edit, assumes it’s a conspiracy when I’m not thrilled,” he wrote on Twitter.
“We parted ways with Mark in because his tone and vision are really different from ours. In particular, it’s important to him to make charges — and in one case, imagine dialogue — without the reporting to support them. That’s something he is perhaps doing with me here. Our editorial team operates independently of advertisers, and I’ve never based a decision about reporting on an advertiser’s needs,” he later e-mailed to Gawker.
