It was with great anticipation that I arrived for my appointment at the editorial offices of BuzzFeed on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. Among journalists, no other website has stirred more interest, resentment, or envy. “Why BuzzFeed Is the Most Important News Organization in the World,” ran the headline atop a recent post by a widely read tech blogger. The answer boiled down to BuzzFeed’s having found a business model that allows it to enjoy “true journalistic independence.” (That model is “sponsored content”—copy that is produced jointly by BuzzFeed and an advertiser to blend in with editorial copy, with a small, inconspicuous identifier of the sponsor.) In 2014,BuzzFeed’s revenues surpassed $100 million (or so the company says—it’s privately held and publishes no financial records). Its post in February asking people to vote on the colors of a woman’s dress—was it white and gold or black and blue?—became a national sensation, attracting more than 38 million views.
Earlier, in a tour of first-generation digital news sites, I found most of them stuck in place, unable to advance beyond their initial innovations.* I was now visiting a second generation to see whether they’ve done better at harnessing the unique powers of the Internet. BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and Kenneth Lerer, both of whom helped create The Huffington Post, and though the site is only a year younger than that organization, it’s generally considered the face of journalism’s future, so it seemed a good place to begin.
From the start, BuzzFeed has been known for its lightweight listicles (list + article), jaunty GIFs (brief animated clips), teasing headlines, and, most of all, cute cats and dogs. When the site a while back announced that it was looking for an associate editor for animals, it received hundreds of applications. At a certain point, however, BuzzFeedrealized that it could not live by listicles alone—that its readers were as interested in news and current affairs as they were in celebrity and pop culture. In December 2011,BuzzFeed hired Ben Smith, a respected blogger at Politico, to strengthen its coverage of the 2012 election campaign.
After the Boston marathon bombing sent a surge of traffic to the site, BuzzFeed brought over Lisa Tozzi from The New York Times to build a breaking-news team. It also hired Miriam Elder, a correspondent for The Guardian in Moscow, to create a world desk; it now has a dozen reporters and editors stretching from Mexico City to Nairobi. In 2013BuzzFeed formed an investigative unit and to run it hired Mark Schoofs, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist at ProPublica. Last August, BuzzFeed added to its home page a news feed to run parallel to its usual river of froth, and today one can find posts on the “16 Magical Gifts All Unicorn Lovers Will Appreciate” and “21 Celebrities That Prove Left-Handed People Are By Far the Sexiest” alongside dispatches about the war in eastern Ukraine and terrorist attacks in Kenya.
Arriving at BuzzFeed’s editorial offices (housed in temporary quarters while the main office is being renovated), I found two adjoining cavernous spaces filled with long tables, at which sat some two hundred people gazing at computer screens. I was introduced to Shani Hilton, the executive editor for news. Thirty years old, she had worked for NBCWashington.com, the Washington City Paper, and the Center for American Progress before joining BuzzFeed in 2013. I asked her to cite some recent stories she felt were noteworthy. She mentioned a report by Ben Smith about the threat by an Uber executive to dig up dirt on a reporter who had criticized the company (it kicked up a storm); a story by Aram Roston on financial conflicts of interest involving a top NSA official (which led to the official’s resignation); and “Fostering Profits,” an investigation into deaths, sex abuse, and gaps in oversight at the nation’s largest for-profit foster care company. As for regular beats, Hilton mentioned two in which she feltBuzzFeed had excelled—marriage equality and rape culture.
From talking with Hilton and with Ben Smith (now editor in chief) and from samplingBuzzFeed’s home page, I came away convinced of its commitment to being a serious provider of news; there’s a sense of earnest aspiration about the place. At the same time, I was surprised by how conventional—and tame—most of its reports are. Much of BuzzFeed’s news feed seems indistinguishable from that of a wire service. Its investigations, while commendable, fall squarely within the parameters of investigative reporting as traditionally practiced in this country, with a narrow focus on managerial malfeasance, conflicts of interest, and workplace abuses. There’s little effort to examine, for example, the activities of hedge fund managers, Internet billionaires, or other pillars of the new oligarchy.
In April, Ben Smith removed two BuzzFeed posts that were critical of the advertising campaigns for Dove cosmetics and the Hasbro board game Monopoly. Both Dove and Hasbro advertise on the site. After coming under much fire, Smith restored the posts, though he denied that their original removal had had anything to do with pressure from advertisers. Soon after, the writer of the post critical of Dove, Arabelle Sicardi, resigned. So much for “true journalistic independence.” Overall, BuzzFeed’s practice of journalism seems nowhere near as pioneering as the sleek platform it has developed to deliver its product.
Could that change? BuzzFeed recently hired Hussein Kesvani, a reporter in London, to cover life among young Muslims in Britain. The site is also considering starting a beat on the status of women in India. If BuzzFeed were to head further in this direction, it could blaze a new path. So much of today’s reporting is given over to war, terrorism, geopolitical rivalry, and high-level diplomacy. BuzzFeed could pioneer a more grassroots approach, chronicling how ordinary people live, giving a voice to overlooked populations, capturing the daily struggle of citizens as they contend with poverty and prejudice, bureaucratic obstruction and government indifference. Coverage of this sort would, I think, resonate far more strongly with BuzzFeed’s young audience than its current reporting does. Undertaking it, though, would require a radical rethinking of how to use digital technology to cover the world. One way or another,BuzzFeed needs to become bolder and brasher. Otherwise, it will remain known mainly for its cat photos.
In the meantime, the BuzzFeed formula—brisk, entertaining, visually engaging, and reliant on sponsored advertising—has had a mesmerizing effect on second-generation sites. One can see it at Quartz, the glossy business publication launched by Atlantic Media in 2012 (“Why 8-Year-Olds Should Start Thinking About Their Careers”);Business Insider, the gossipy business tip sheet (“10 Things You Need to Know Before the Opening Bell”); and Fusion, the new “multi-platform media company” created jointly by Univision and Disney to reach “a young, diverse, and inclusive millennial generation” (“Here Are 7 Very Racist Emails Sent by Current Ferguson Officials”). To be fair, these sites do employ some talented journalists, such as Felix Salmon at Fusion, but to the extent that true innovation is taking place at them, it’s far more in the presentation than in the practice of journalism.
BuzzFeed’s influence can even be seen at Vox. Launched in April 2014, this venture represents a wager by Ezra Klein that he could do better heading his own site than working at The Washington Post, where his pathbreaking experiment in policy analysis,Wonkblog, proved a huge draw, with some four million pageviews a month. Vox—one of seven sites owned by Vox Media—seeks to marry the technological panache ofBuzzFeed with the charts-and-graphs earnestness of Wonkblog. Its trademark feature is “card stacks”—a series of linked pages explaining subjects ranging from campaign finance and voting rights to obesity and e-cigarettes. Reading “11 Facts About Gun Violence in the United States,” I learned that mass shootings are not becoming more common in this country and that they constitute a tiny share of overall homicides; an accompanying graph helpfully showed the details. On foreign affairs, Max Fisher is a lively presence, writing on subjects like “AIPAC’s Most Awkward Tradition: Non-Jewish Politicians Faking Jewishness.”
What Vox most sorely lacks is a sense of outrage. Consider, for instance, a recent post headlined, “Why Does the US Have 800 Military Bases Around the World?” This is an important subject that rarely gets the attention it deserves. Clicking on it, though, I found a very brief discussion that drew heavily on a new book by an American University professor. “American taxpayers are in charge of the bill for keeping these bases running,” the post blandly stated.
This estimated $100 billion is pumped out of our economy to the location of these bases. It’s a massive military system that ensures US influence in every corner of the planet, and given the uncontested nature of this widespread strategy, there isn’t likely to be any change soon.
An accompanying four-minute video was not uncritical—it noted that all other nations maintain only about thirty bases outside their borders, and that many of the US bases were created during the cold war and so may have outlived their usefulness. It did not go beyond that, however. Neither the post nor the video mentioned that this massive system is propped up by a powerful military-industrial complex of defense contractors, arms dealers, lobbyists, and consultants. If this strategy is “uncontested,” Vox could perhaps contest it, for example by questioning the justification for these bases; that’s how change occurs. Embarking on such a course, however, would require it to challenge the Washington establishment, and to judge from my visits to the site, that’s something it’s loath to do.
Similarly anodyne is FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s creation. Mirroring Klein’s move, Silver became such a star at The New York Times that he decided to leave the paper and create something more ambitious under the wing of ESPN. Today, FiveThirtyEight has a staff of more than twenty turning out a steady stream of posts about politics, sports, science, economics, and entertainment, all relying heavily on stats and surveys. In the days leading up to the Academy Awards, the site posted regular updates on the odds of likely winners; with the approach of basketball’s March Madness, it speculated on seeds and upsets. A piece examining why some Democrats attended Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and others didn’t relied heavily on things like “logit regression” and “DW-nominate scores”; no one was interviewed, no real-life political calculations allowed to intrude. FiveThirtyEight exemplifies a troubling tendency in digital journalism—a preference for gathering data available on the Web itself rather than developing new information by picking up the phone or going into the field.
Despite the expansion in his staff, Silver’s visibility has dimmed since his departure from the Times (though it will no doubt rise again in the months before the 2016 election). In response to it, the paper created its own data-driven blog, The Upshot, which, sustained by a staff of fifteen under the direction of David Leonhardt, augments the use of surveys and graphs with interviews and on-the-ground research, thus advancing well beyond anything available at FiveThirtyEight. Similarly, The Washington Post has expanded Wonkblog since Klein’s departure, and the traffic to it has more than doubled.
The journalistic success of both The Upshot and Wonkblog has upended a long-standing presumption about online journalism, best summed up in a 2012 report on “Post-Industrial Journalism” by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism. “The fate of journalism in the United States,” it declared, “is now far more squarely in the hands of individual journalists than it is of the institutions that support them.” Since then, however, the era of the go-it-alone star seems to have receded; more and more, institutions such as the Post and the Times, with their financial support and audience reach, are critical.
Even Glenn Greenwald, the epitome of the outspoken, independent-minded, Web-based journalist, has from the start relied on institutional backing—first at Salon, then at The Guardian, and now at The Intercept. Launched in February 2014, The Intercept was greeted with great expectations. Conceived as a means of building on the Edward Snowden revelations, it teamed Greenwald with filmmaker Laura Poitras and investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, with backing from First Look Media, an organization created by billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to promote the principles of the First Amendment.
Omidyar promised to invest $250 million over five years in high-impact journalism. In addition to The Intercept, he created another site called Racket, which was to offer sharp, satirical coverage of Wall Street and corporate America; to run it, Matt Taibbi was hired from Rolling Stone. Coming in the wake of Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post, Omidyar’s venture seemed to augur a new era in which Internet moguls would apply their ingenuity—and dollars—to reinventing journalism on the Web.
Before Racket could publish a single word, however, Taibbi was gone, a casualty of bitter internal feuding, and the site was disbanded. The Intercept has survived but been plagued by similar turmoil, including debilitating turf battles between the headstrong journalists on its staff and the executive types at First Look. Their differences were laid bare with unsparing candor by Greenwald and his colleagues in a piece that was posted last October on The Intercept itself. It described the “months of constant wrangling, bubbling resentment, and low-level sniping” that had occurred over perceived infringements on the staff’s independence. Omidyar came in for sharp criticism for, among other things, insisting that he personally sign off on employee expense reports for taxi rides and office supplies.
The report left many wondering whether Greenwald and Omidyar could continue to work together. Somehow they have managed to do so, and Betsy Reed, a veteran editor at The Nation, was brought in to impose some order. Just as things seemed to be settling down, however, senior editor Ken Silverstein
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