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BuzzFeed

Rieder: BuzzFeed a burgeoning journalistic force

Rem Rieder
USA TODAY
BuzzFeed Editor in Chief Ben Smith says he wants his news staff to report stories with "scale and impact."

NEW YORK -- When Mark Schoofs arrived from ProPublica to launch BuzzFeed's investigative reporting unit in January 2014, the site's investigative roster consisted of one person: Schoofs.

Now, just 18 months later, the investigative unit has 17 staffers, and two more are on the way.

The big investment in accountability reporting is a vivid example of the increasing emphasis on serious journalism by the site that has made its name and makes its money from its uncanny sense of what will blow up on social media, for its endless supply of sometimes silly, sometimes transcendent listicles, offbeat tales and wacky photos.

The site began its plunge into news when it hired star political blogger Ben Smith away from Politico in December 2011. Much has happened since.

In addition to political goings-on, BuzzFeed covers, among other things, breaking news, business and tech. It has a narrative journalism unit. It has overseas bureaus. Its 400-member editorial team includes 170 news staffers.

And there's much more to come.

On Thursday, BuzzFeed will debut its news app on iOS. The app will give mobile news consumers a briefing on what's going on in the world without the "Which Orange Is The New Black Character Should You Date" fare featured on the main BuzzFeed app. The news app was developed under the leadership of Stacy-Marie Ishmael, who was hired away from the Financial Times to put it together.

A sneak peek suggests it's a very cool app indeed, featuring a summary of the day's — er, moment's — top stories at the very top, and pairing news story headlines and links with value-added material providing greater context.

BuzzFeed also continues its international expansion, with an eye on not simply covering the news in other countries but becoming a journalistic player there. For example, BuzzFeed has 45 editorial staffers in the United Kingdom, 20 of them news staffers. And major moves are in the offing in the British Isles.

So why did BuzzFeed decide to embark on its steadily expanding foray into news? "News is the heart and soul of any great media company," BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti tells me via email. "News might not be as big a business as entertainment, but news is the best way to have a big impact on the world."

And, he adds pointedly, "News is also becoming a surprisingly good business. News benefits from the major shifts that are happening in the tech and media industry right now: social, mobile, and globalization.... Journalism reaches a larger audience than ever before and news organizations have more leverage and a bigger impact than in any point in history."

I've written about BuzzFeed several times, but I had never met its key staffers or visited the headquarters. I decided it was time to report from the belly of the beast.

Its temporary perch in New York's Chelsea neighborhood has the requisite warehouse vibe, with long rows of desks largely filled by young people packed closely together.

In conversations with top editors, the excitement of building a news operation from scratch was palpable. Instead of trying to preserve what's there, decisions can be made solely to reflect the world as it is today.

I asked news director Lisa Tozzi, who left The New York Times after 13 years to join BuzzFeed in 2013, what the transition had been like. "I underestimated how liberated I would feel not worrying about a legacy product," she replied, adding that she loved "working in an environment where everyone is sold on the Internet." The idea, she says, is to "create a place where you would want to work."

Editor-in-chief Smith, a veteran of New York's Daily News and the chief architect of the growing news operation, says it's helpful to build without being tethered to the past. He thinks too often critics of traditional news outlets and their bumpy transitions to the digital era too glibly ignore the real obstacles. "Changing a culture is incredibly hard," he says.

Smith, who says he wants stories with "scale and impact," early on decided that creating an LGBT beat was a priority, and later added a beat focusing heavily on Latino politics. While these may have seemed like niche beats, Smith argues that they are essential in today's world.

While BuzzFeed used to avoid the stories everyone else is doing — zigging when everyone else zags, as the great newspaper editor Gene Roberts likes to say — it has shifted gears in one respect: on major overarching stories like the rioting in Baltimore, it is determined to "play big."

When someone told Schoofs that BuzzFeed was launching an investigative team, he had no idea what BuzzFeed was. So how did he end up there? He was ultimately convinced that the site was determined to do great journalism, although it took three separate conversations with Peretti to seal the deal.

And how's it working out? "They have way exceeded my expectations and promises," says Schoofs, who also worked at The Wall Street Journal. "I've never had so much fun in my life."

While the BuzzFeed editors I met all come out of traditional journalism, they seem comfortable being part of an enterprise far better known for its nutrition-free link bait than its redeeming social value. (When I told people I was going to do some interviews at BuzzFeed, there was no shortage of eye rolling.)

"I love the fact that we work for a news and entertainment company," Schoofs says.

Nothing, of course, is guaranteed. It's by no means a sure thing BuzzFeed will be able to generate forever the incredible traffic that keeps the ship afloat and makes all of this journalism possible.

But it sure is an exhilarating ride, for staffers and news consumers alike. And at a time of so much retrenchment in the news business, a welcome one.

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