Buzzfeed News, once a shining star of digital journalism, has announced it will shut its award-winning news division for good, laying off about 60 journalists in a move its founding editor, Ben Smith, described as “the end of the marriage between social media and news”.

Buzzfeed – for a few years regarded as a top exponent of viral news – has been struggling to maintain its buzz of late. The cheeky and provocative – if at times annoying – provider of endless listicles and outrageous clickbait headlines is reported to have fallen into financial difficulties.

The site’s founder, Jonah Peretti, is reported to have told staff: “I made the decision to over-invest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much. This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media.”

A decline in traffic to the site seems to have been caused by a drop in referrals from feeder sites such as Facebook. This was itself caused by a switch to its users watching and sharing more video on sites like TikTok. Less traffic means less ad revenue. And less revenue has meant the closure of Buzzfeed’s news operation – itself a loss leader to give the site extra credibility – and a resultant loss of jobs for its journalists.

It’s bad news for those involved – and a tragedy for the wider digital news media. Buzzfeed News produced lots of hard-edged, scoop-heavy journalism – and it will be missed. Let’s be clear: it is the valuable news division – the one that revealed the network of detention camps in Xinjiang Province in China – that is to shut. The other stuff, the user-generated free-for-all, full of videos of baby penguins being tickled and listicles setting out the best method to air-fry chips will remain – at least for now.

Buzzfeed News produced intelligent, hard-hitting journalism that frequently scooped established media organisations. It won respect and awards in equal measure.