[jackowayed]

Exactly. Think of them like a television network.

A major television network (eg. CBS) airs both in-depth news coverage, trashy reality shows, fictional comedies/dramas, and sports. More and better timeslots go to things other than news, those shows are advertised more, and the most successful non-news shows have more viewers than the nightly news, but the presence of those other shows doesn't mean that it's fair to say CBS doesn't do journalism.

[hodgesmr]

And yet we're talking about online publications. There's a reason we have CBS.com and CBSNews.com. And ABC.com and ABCNews.com. And NBC.com and NBCNews.com. If websites behaved like television--with different content available at different times--your analogy would be stronger. But they don't. It's all there all the time. And for that reason, BuzzFeed's crap is much harder to separate from any "real" content.