Headquartered in New York, BuzzFeed now has more than 150 journalists, an investigative reporting unit, bureaus in Australia and the United Kingdom, and foreign correspondents in far-flung places like Nairobi and the Middle East. Less known outside media circles is BuzzFeed’s foray into serious journalism, which began two years ago when it hired Ben Smith, a former Politico reporter, as its editor-in-chief. The social news and entertainment company is famous for producing advertising-sponsored “listicles” that go viral, such as lists of golden retrievers (sponsored by a pet food brand) or popular quizzes like “Which billionaire tycoon are you?” (News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch took the quiz and got himself.) Over the past year, BuzzFeed’s traffic has soared fourfold, with more than 160 million unique visitors, according to online measurement and advertising firm Quantcast. I think that is changing.”įounded in 2006, BuzzFeed is now among the top 10 most-visited news and information sites in the United States, joining the ranks of established media outlets like CNN and The New York Times. If you wanted to actually say, ‘I’m going to sit down and talk to people and spend more than three hours on a story,’ then you go work in old media. You could just do a smart take or snark on things. “You couldn’t do things like investigations or have reporters. “There used to be this view that online publishing was about blogs that were very low-cost,” said Peretti, 40, who helped start the popular The Huffington Post, now a unit of AOL Inc. Founder and CEO Jonah Peretti attributes that to the company’s investment in building a news operation to complement its staple of entertainment and advertising-sponsored articles. When Facebook Inc tweaked its News Feed filters in December to weed out low-quality stories and other content, many were waiting to see if it would hurt publishers including BuzzFeed, the leading purveyor of “sponsored content” on the Web.īut that didn’t happen to BuzzFeed, which continues to log impressive increases in readership. The kittens haven’t disappeared, but these days there is serious journalism as well. BuzzFeed has come a long way from cat lists. Buzzfeed employees work at the company's headquarters in New York January 9, 2014.
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