Nieman Foundation at Harvard
A little over a decade after BuzzFeed News came to life, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti’s willingness to run a prestigious but money-losing news division has run out.
We’ve chronicled the ups and downs of BuzzFeed News since 2011, when the company hired a blogger named Ben Smith. Here’s part I of its history, from 2011 to 2017. (And here’s Part II.)
BuzzFeed is growing some serious news muscles under a silly, frilly skin, and added the header “2012” for election coverage. (More traditional news verticals will be rolled out in the coming months.) It’s gone well so far, with comScore showing 10.8 million unique visitors in December, more than double that of the same month in 2010…
It’s fun to watch them make all these hires,” said Choire Sicha, the founder of The Awl site and a veteran of the New York Web scene. “But it’s important that they don’t overspend. Web ad rates are what they are and that isn’t going to change.”
Peretti’s craving for the quick viral fix will not be satisfied by the nourishing fare put out by prestige hires like Doree Shafrir and Matt Buchanan. Either before or after acquisition, Buzzfeed will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
Does that mean that we may see BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller alongside, say, the New York Times’s David Leonhardt, chatting about Mitt Romney’s vice presidential selection? Yes, among other enticing combos, says Smith.
BuzzFeed, the media Web site focused on viral content, announced on Monday that it was again expanding its reporting staff, this time to introduce an investigative unit. A new team of about half a dozen reporters will be led by Mark Schoofs, who was hired away from the nonprofit investigative service ProPublica…[BuzzFeed] now has a news team of roughly 130 journalists.
Elder would like to hire more issues-based, global reporters — perhaps one focused on global corruption — but for the rest of 2013, she’s focused on hiring a national security reporter in D.C. and a deputy foreign editor to be based out of BuzzFeed’s new bureau in London. (BuzzFeed also has a bureau in Australia, as well as content made in New York for audiences in Paris and Brazil, all of which functions separately from the foreign desk.) After that, she’d like to dispatch correspondents to Latin America and Asia, especially China.
“Our DNA is as a tech company. There is a fantasy, and now a reality for places like Twitter, that you could create a media company, and hire no editorial staff and just make tons of money, because you wouldn’t have to pay anyone. That’s always the Silicon Valley fantasy, and sometimes reality.”
“We see with our longform stories that, in some cases, the sheer length and rigor of a piece will make the piece have a bigger impact. Just the fact that it’s 6,000 words or 12,000 words.”
“There’s also, we think, people who want to have an app that’s primarily about telling them what’s going on in the world and what the big stories are. We felt like it made sense, given that we have this really strong news organization now, to really take advantage of that and build one.”
News also gets its own category on BuzzFeed’s homepage.
In a now-deleted tweet, Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers remarks on “That Awful Moment When You Realize That Despite Sinking Millions Into Your CMS+Comments+Discovery Algos, You’re Still A Media Company.”
“I think the thing that we’ve learned is that things conventionally you think you should have, like a sports desk, don’t necessarily make sense. We ended blowing that up a little bit and changing the structure of it, because you realize that, with sports, there’s not a thing that’s called ‘sports.’ There’s baseball, there’s soccer, there’s track, and there’s the Olympics, and all these other things. There’s not someone saying, ‘I want sports content.’ We think there is because that’s what newspapers do, but newspapers also focus in on particular teams.
We transitioned to having people who do what we call ‘buzz’ around teams, for example, instead of just doing this sport thing that happened today, because there’s no way we can cover all of it. Then we have one writer who just focuses on telling really long, winding sports stories, Joel Anderson, who wrote a story about Michael Sam, the first out gay football player who just got cut from the Cowboys. Then we were like, ‘We do actually need somebody to cover big sports events, so let’s just put a person on our breaking news desk.'”
“The world needs great journalism, but great journalism needs a great business model. That’s exactly what BuzzFeed seems to have, and it’s for that reason the company is the most important news organization in the world.”
“The staff for the U.K. site now totals about 50 across all departments. It has an editorial staff of 35, though Lewis said he plans to grow the editorial staff alone to about 50 this year. Throughout 2013, Buzzfeed U.K. focused on what it calls Buzz, the lists and quizzes most identifiable with the site. But last year it began to scale up its reporting teams, including a five-person political staff led by deputy editor Jim Waterson, who interviewed Cameron on Monday. BuzzFeed U.K. also last year hired noted investigative reporter Heidi Blake to lead a three-person investigative team.
The focus on providing context has been a major talking point for BuzzFeed as its developed the app. Aside from adding background information in the main stream of the app, it has focused on contextualizing its push notifications as well.
BuzzFeed UK is “looking for reporters based in the north of England, Scotland and Wales, who have experience working on hard-hitting news stories and features that pop.”
We don’t have an existing model to copy, because we are building something that has never existed before and wasn’t even possible before social networks and smartphones became the primary way people consume news and entertainment around the world…We see a news story like artists reacting to the Syrian crisis originally by a reporter in our London office or a first-person essay about taking in Syrian refugees originally written in German from one of our Berlin reporters viewed over 3 million times because of translations to five languages.
Campbell’s first major story for BuzzFeed News, a look at battered women imprisoned for failing to protect their children from their abusive partners, was a finalist for the Kelly Award. Arlena Lindley, who was imprisoned for 45 years for failing to protect her son, was granted parole in January after being featured prominently in Campbell’s article.
Other high-impact stories have followed: After the BBC and BuzzFeed News co-published an investigation into match-fixing in the upper echelons of tennis, the sport’s major associations launched an independent review of its anti-corruption program. An examination of the for-profit foster care company National Mentor Holdings triggered a U.S. Senate investigation. And a story that revealed inequities in the U.S. guest worker program led to a congressional outcry and earned BuzzFeed a National Magazine Award earlier this month.
“So the Boston bombings happens, and immediately all of the most popular content on the site is hard news. Then there’s a slow news week, and the most popular content is lists or quizzes or entertainment, or fun content. When there’s huge news breaking, it becomes the biggest thing. But most of the time, it’s not the biggest thing.”
