BuzzFeed: journalism's queen bee

Journalism is facing a change of content.

The new ruler of media, the usurper of views, is BuzzFeed and its entertainment model.

I came across an article by the Huffington Post about Steve Burns, the host of the TV show “Blue’s Clues.”

The story was just more than 530 words long, and it featured seven animated GIFs of Steve dancing around and making faces.

The story, which can be considered such in only the most technical sense, asks where the former host went after a mysterious departure from the show.

After exploring theories of drug overdose and death by car crash, the big reveal is that he didn’t want to do a kids’ show forever. And he was going bald.

This article has the format, weight and creative chutzpah of a BuzzFeed article. So how did it make it onto a website like the HuffPost?
While still a news aggregator, the site has some legitimacy in its content.
It was the first digital media institution to win a Pulitzer.

But is this what our news is reduced to? Are we destined to be peppered with factoids in between pop culture fixes?

The short answer is yes.

Part of the answer lies in BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post’s common denominator.
Jonah Peretti helped found both, and his ideas on digital media are reflected in them.
Until now there has been a divide in content style, but the time has evidently come for HuffPost to favor BuzzFeed’s entertainment flavor.

Journalism in this country is run as a business. It needs profits to stay alive. Media makes money wherever it can get viewers.
And collectively, readers have decided it’s more fun to see lists of 1990s nostalgia and take quizzes about which Disney character they’d be than to read long-form journalism.

Ergo, the more we click on these links, the more news sites will switch to this format.
Peretti is no fool. He understands what people want, and he created sites that can give it to them.

People love rapid media consumption and quick topic changes because it helps them build and rebuild a personal identity.

Peretti wrote on this idea well before creating BuzzFeed.

He said capitalism pushes people into a state of flux, where they are unsure of their personal identities, and then it gives them products from which they can build new identities.

But these identities must be weak enough that they’re forgotten when a new flux is introduced so the process can start again and more products can be sold.

The genius of BuzzFeed is it gives people choices as to how their identities are created.

By churning out a seemingly endless stream of clips, GIFs and quizzes, BuzzFeed’s readers are able to take whatever they like and add it all together to create a personal identity.

In an increasingly niche-based culture, everyone can be exactly what they want.
BuzzFeed and HuffPost are the start of this wave of change, but if their successes continue, others will follow.

How long do you think it will take CNN to post 18 ways the Obama administration is TOTALLY “Freaks and Geeks”?

Objective, hard-news journalism will suffer more than it already has.

But whose fault is this? Is it because of our changing tastes, our disapproval of tough-to-swallow but important news?
Do we always need to be building a new identity?

Or is it the media’s fault for not finding an interesting way to present hard-hitting truths?

Maybe there’s a middle ground, and BuzzFeed will find a way to keep us informed and interested.

But for now, your clicks matter.

If you complain about the decline of the press, do something about it.

Read an article that’s one big block of text. Maybe you can build an identity around the new things you learn.

sckroll@indiana.edu