Designing the Editorial Experience

(F39)_Job:01-40630 Title:RP-Designing the Editional Experience

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64 DESIGNING THE EDITORIAL EXPERIENCE

TEXT

Case Study:

BuzzFeed

WEBSITE: BUZZFEED.COM

FREQUENCY: CONTINUOUSLY

FORMAT: WEBSITE, IOSANDROID APPS

LOCATION: NEW YORK

EDITOR: BEN SMITH

VP OF PRODUCT: CHRIS JOHANESEN

FOUNDERPUBLISHER: JONAH PERETTI

YEAR FOUNDED: 2006

Anyone publishing news or content

of any kind on the web in 2013 had to

look at the BuzzFeed phenomenon

and ask themselves, “How do they do

it?” And by “it” we mean hit six-digit

site traic numbers daily and create

sponsored content that its readers

unquestioningly want to engage with.

BuzzFeed’s publishing model is

unique in that it’s a digital-first

publication that was designed around

the “social web” and sharing. The

site’s claim to fame is the pictorial

“listicle” (list article) format that takes

crowd-generated news from sites

such as Reddit and repurposes it

into scannable and sharable stories.

On the flipside, BuzzFeed has also

invested in quality, long-form political

journalism. What makes it possible

for high- and low-brow content to

coexist? In a 2012 memo that tech

entrepreneur Chris Dixon shared

on his blog, founder Jonah Peretti

explains the secret to his success:

Most publishers build their site by

stapling together products made by

other companies. They get their CMS

from one company, their analytics

package from another, their ad tech

from another, their related content

widgets are powered by another,

sometimes even their writers are

contractors who don’t work for the

company. This is why so many pub-

lishers’ sites look the same and also

why they can be so amazingly com-

plex and hard to navigate. They are

Frankenstein products bolted together

by a tech team that integrates other

people’s products instead of building

their own.

At BuzzFeed, we take the exact

opposite approach. We manage our

own servers, we built our CMS from

scratch, we created our own real-time

stats system, we have our own data

science team, we invented our own ad

products and our own post formats,

and all these products are brought to

life by our own editorial team and our

own creative services team. We are

BuzzFeed’s home page on a smartphone oers an infinite scroll of content upon request. Sponsored content is highlighted with “Presented By”

and “Partner” labels, while others wear reader-reaction badges such as “LOL” and “WTF?” Story pages lead with buzz statistics, and tools for

sharing the whole page or a specific image are featured prominently.

(F39)_Job:01-40630 Title:RP-Designing the Editional Experience

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