Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
The media becomes an activist for democracy
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Feb. 28, 2014, 5:23 p.m.

BuzzFeed_LogoBuzzFeed editor Ben Smith came up to Cambridge this week and gave a talk at the Nieman Foundation about the site’s evolution from a meme factory into a meme factory that also reports on events in the Crimean peninsula. Our friends at Nieman Reports have video of the full event (featuring a few questions from us Nieman Labbers) and a BuzzFeed-inspired selection of quotes. This, for instance, is true:

My actual day-to-day view is that every single piece of content is competing with every single other piece of content all the time.

As is this:

One of the advantages of starting from scratch is that you can rethink beat structures. Gay rights is this huge story of the last 10 years, but it’s covered as a B-list beat at a lot of publications just because it always has been. For us, it’s very much a frontline beat, and we’re able to hire the best reporters who really own that beat.

Much more at Nieman Reports.

While he was in town, Ben also gave a talk at the Shorenstein Center over at the Kennedy School; you can hear audio of that here, read Perry Hewitt’s thoughts here, and see a Storify here.

And, if that’s still not enough GIFs for you, check out our archive of BuzzFeed-related pieces here on the Lab.

buzzfeed-lol

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
The media becomes an activist for democracy
“We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.”
Embracing influencers as allies
“News organizations will increasingly rely on digital creators not just as amplifiers but as integral partners in storytelling.”
Action over analysis
“We’ve overindexed on problem articulation, to the point of problem admiring. The risk is that we are analyzing ourselves into inaction and irrelevance.”