‘Here is the rabbit hole’

Meduza talks to BuzzFeed chief editor Ben Smith about the future of new media

For the past three and a half years, Ben Smith has been the chief editor of BuzzFeed, one of the most visible websites ever. Producing a mix of entertainment and news, and reaching an astounding 200 million people, BuzzFeed has led a revolution in the world’s news media, changing the way people consume and share information. Early mockery has given way to imitation, and the website now finds itself busy trying to anticipate the next watershed in online media. Smith, who spent an earlier part of his career working for The Baltic Times in Latvia, where Meduza is headquartered, visited Riga recently and spoke to our deputy chief editor, Ivan Kolpakov, and our publisher, Ilya Krasilshchik.

Kolpakov: What are your specific duties as an editor-in-chief and how do you share your responsibilities with [BuzzFeed’s founder] Jonah Peretti and other top managers?

— I oversee the editorial [section]; it’s three main divisions: Buzz, News, and Life. That’s how we’ve divided up. News and Buzz are obviously online entertainment. We are famous for these, but we’re also figuring out new kinds, new formats, [and] new ways to make the Internet. And the third is Life, which is newer to us; it’s about food and style, and it’s become huge for us. And there are strong managers running each of these divisions. We also work a lot with data science and product teams.

Kolpakov: But who is the main guy? Who decides everything?

— You know, I think we’re very decentralized, and that’s the reason we’ve been able to build very fast, with very high quality. For instance, I don’t necessarily approve what any team publishes. They have the power to do that. People know what we want, but also the decision-making is very distributed.

Kolpakov: What’s it like personally to work in a decentralized system like that?

— I actually kind of miss [the old system]; we were small, [and] we were involved in everything. And now I’m here in Latvia, and I don’t even know what’s going on with the biggest story in America—it happened totally without my contribution at all. The marriage story.

Krasilshchik: Many people hate BuzzFeed because of kittens. You have so many kittens and, right alongside this stuff, you have big stories about the war in eastern Ukraine. What’s the main format here? Does BuzzFeed even have a main format? Is it possible to describe BuzzFeed in one sentence?

— Let me start with the first question. I feel like you don’t have to choose. Most people are interested in both: they’re interested in eastern Ukraine and also in kittens. More in kittens. Have you ever seen the movie Blade Runner? Remember how they tell if someone is an android? They ask them what they’d do if they came across a turtle in the road flipped on its shell. It’s a test that gets them to see if they’re an android. And humans will turn the turtle over, but androids are just like “Ahhhh!” Because the only people who don’t like animals are sociopaths. And androids. That’s my defense of animals.

Krasilshchik: We agree.

— That’s the thing about kittens. More broadly, we think people are always interested in what’s happening in the world and what’s entertaining, and if you look at the other media, like TV, you have news, and then you have reality shows, and scripted dramas, and then comedies. All these things air on the same channel, so I think it’s almost a weird question [about choosing between news and entertainment]. You do those two things, and most media do those two things. The British press has always done it, while the American press, for a while, had this idea that you can only do one thing.

I mean, what are we really changing, if your Facebook feed and your Twitter feed are already all mixed up, with everything together? So even if I, as a publisher, say we’re only going to do serious stuff, I can’t stop my serious story from being next to a kitten or next to your drunk friend in a Facebook feed. And I think, very, very broadly, we’re trying to produce content that has both scale and impact, that does something in the world, whether it brings you closer to your friends or exposes corruption—these are hugely different things, but that’s how we think about our content.

Kolpakov: Some people write that you’re the one who’s responsible for bringing more serious journalism to BuzzFeed. Is that true?

— I’ve added more of everything, but it’s not just me. When I started, I was like the seventh [person]. Then, we were much smaller than Meduza, and it was a very small group of people who were really experimenting with what people would share on the Internet, which was cats, and lists, and some weird Web culture stuff, mostly. They were starting to see, though, “Oh, there is some news [too]!” but that news wasn't really on the social media, yet. Jonah [Peretti, BuzzFeed’s founder], who is a genius, saw that this would be next.

Meanwhile, I was working as a journalist, obsessed with Twitter. I wasn't thinking about what people would share—I was thinking about how I could break news. But anyway it's the same thing on Twitter. So, obviously, we’ve brought in a lot of hard journalism, but also a lot more people are doing cats. We certainly haven't moved away from one, but it’s getting better.

Kolpakov: But what chances do you give to traditional journalism?

— I think in different places it's very different. I think in the United States there are a lot of different models emerging, [like] new nonprofit media. I think there’s probably more investigative journalism being done now, maybe than ever before. Places like ProPublica, I mean it is a totally different model, but they're really very successful. And there are couple smaller ones, the Marshall Project and some other ones. And I think that some of the traditional news outlets will figure it out and will be fine, like The New York Times.

And then again, I think you can probably do more good journalism than they've ever done. That doesn't mean you’re going to employ as many people to lay out a newspaper and write stories about what the president said yesterday, but I think it’s an environment, where it’s about the story that breaks through. There’s such an intense competition to break through… I think it’s about doing either something like “short funny quick things”—like “hey, did you know this just happened?”—or something very big, and deep, and investigative. It’s the stuff in the middle that gets lost.

Kolpakov: Maybe I’m just a poor Russian editor, but when I look at BuzzFeed’s resources, I wonder why you’re not investing more in big journalism and big-data journalism? Things like this?

— We are investing pretty heavily in the stuff like that. We have investigative teams of like 18 reporters. I mean, I think all the good journalism is investigative in some way, but they are the ones who are sometimes spending a year or more on a single story.

Kolpakov: But you don’t consider your everyday content to be bad journalism? If all good journalism is investigative, what you’re doing ordinarily...

— That's not trying to be journalism, that's entertainment.

Kolpakov: It’s not pretending to be journalism?

— No. Sometimes people on Twitter will tweet at me something like, “Here’s a list of cats, like BuzzFeed, you know. Fourteen animals that disappointed you.” Hashtag “journalism.” But no one said that was journalism. We’re not submitting that to the Pulitzer Committee. It's fun entertainment. But it's a different business, I think.

Krasilshchik: If I understand you correctly, BuzzFeed produces stories meant to be shareable on social networks. You’re saying kittens, news, anything should be shareable. Is long journalism shareable, too?

— I think the answer is that some of it is. Some is also really boring. [Before], if you had a magazine and you published a boring story, you didn't know if nobody read it. Now you do. But I do think “longform” is a funny word because there’s no one saying I want to read something really long. People say they want something deep.

In the 2012, we were among the first real online outlets thinking in longform... There were two ways to publish something really long: either you sold it to a magazine for $20,000, after six months of editing by brilliant editors, until it was this incredibly crafted, perfect product, and then it would wait another six months or a year for the right moment for that magazine, when it could appear next to the right picture. Or you didn’t sell it to a magazine, and you got payed a hundred dollars for it, and you threw it on the Internet without any editing. And it was probably so long because it had no editing.

So we’ve been experimenting for a few years with what sorts of longform journalism people share. One thing we’ve learned is that there is one kind of story nobody ever shares: it’s the classic Great American magazine story about a bunch of guys, who all like a little crazy, get some guns, go rob a bank, and things go horribly wrong. Then they all start fighting with each other, wind up in jail, and give amazing interviews to the press, and it's a really fun story. And you read it and think, “What a great story.”

Nobody ever shares that—they never share “fun” stories. I don’t think there’s any point. People need to think there was a point. And so, I don't know, people share things that have a really strong emotional core—not just some great adventure. So I think that’s the direction longform needs to move.

Kolpakov: Does all the criticism from the older mass media establishment harm BuzzFeed?

Krasilshchik: They really hate you.

— They like us now. It's not as bad as it used to be. The more they attack us, the less they can copy us. The more they sneer at us, the harder it is for them then to copy us. And now they’re copying us—they’re not sneering anymore.

Kolpakov: This morning I saw an article in The Guardian titled, “Why BuzzFeed Will Never Win a Pulitzer Prize.”

— Yeah, you know, that’s not our main goal.

Kolpakov: But you would like it, I’d think.

— Yeah, we’d take it. The author, I think, was Peter Preston—a very smart guy, and a former editor of The Guardian. His critique was also aimed the The Guardian, it seems to me, about being a newspaper on the Internet.

Kolpakov: Do you see BuzzFeed as the center of a new media establishment? Because others are already copying you.

— It’s very competitive. Yet, in this moment of incredibly fast change… I don't know. I hope we’re part of that, but I don't know about the center.

Kolpakov: But what’s your goal? What will BuzzFeed look like 10 years from now?

— I still think there are huge opportunities to do better what we’re doing today, to do new things, including internationally.

Kolpakov: When you look at BuzzFeed’s traffic, you see those 200 million readers. It’s more than all the people in Russia.

Krasilshchik: It’s a hundred Latvias, by the way.

— If we’re moving from the philosophical level back to the numbers, it’s important to us how many people we touch in a month, but it’s also important how deeply we engage with our readers: whether they’re spending a lot of time reading something, or choosing a hairstyle that they saw, or making a recipe, or exercise. You know, we feel like there's a lot of room for us to engage more deeply, to reach people in different ways, even if we’ve already reached them once in a month.

Kolpakov: It sounds quite extensive, all these levels at which you’re reaching out to your audience. What’s the next step for BuzzFeed?

— Our international edition is the next step. We’ve just hired an amazing editor in London. The experiment is if can we compete at this level in another country.

Krasilshchik: Do you think about Russia this way, too?

— We’re obsessed with Russia. We’re really interested in Russia, and I think Russia is a difficult place to be in the media business and be in business, as you guys have learned. And there are also the ownership laws that make it hard. Russians love the Internet, and are really good at using the Internet, and [the RuNet] is kind of different from everybody else's Internet. For instance, LiveJournal is still this vibrant place, and dashcam videos are everywhere. I speak really bad Russian and read Russian badly, but I can get through a lot of it. And obviously there is Miriam Elder, our foreign editor, and a lot of other people at BuzzFeed who love Russia.

Krasilshchik: We see a lot stories about Russia on BuzzFeed.

— Yeah, but there’s been a lot of news out of Russia lately.

Krasilshchik: So you’re not looking to open a Russian BuzzFeed. What about Americans' interest in Russia? Can you explain it? What do your readers think about Russia today?

— I think the US is interested in Russia, but it always wants to tell a very simple story about it. For instance, in the 90s it was about democratization, and maybe now it's... Now it's a new Cold War, or whatever it is, but I think the interesting stories are the ones that you don't expect.

Krasilshchik: You said you started with kittens, and then moved into the news. Now we see that the news and making news are very popular. Apple’s making its own news app. Twitter is thinking about it. BuzzFeed launched its own news app a couple weeks ago. Why is it so popular? Why news?

— News has always been popular. I think these apps are something different. It’s about mobile news. The general idea is that content—not just news—is just moving off the Internet, away from the http-Web, and toward whatever is next. And so everyone is trying to figure out what that is. In a way, Apple's project, Apple News, and Facebook's Instant articles—they are sort of competing against each other to be the place where you experience these news articles in a way that’s very smooth and fast and native.

We think that a lot of what's next are these different native formats and publishing directly to all these different platforms. You know it works, if you can sell advertising and collect data. Of course, it's a little scary to give up control [to these platforms], but it does feel like that's where things are headed.

Krasilshchik: When we talk about new news products—Vox, Quartz, Circa, NYT Now—their design is really clean, plain, and very high-brow. And when I look at BuzzFeed, I see a tabloid—an ugly tabloid, even, with too much content. But you have your 200-million-strong audience and you make it work, somehow.

— I think what we do is show readers other BuzzFeed stories and try understand what other stories they’ll like. We say to people, “Here is the rabbit hole you might want to go down.” I think mobile design is so different. Quartz is lovely, they are mobile first, which makes sense now. Some of our pages are very crowded and some are very clean and we feel like you can do lots of different things.

Krasilshchik: So you try different approaches.

— We think a lot about what you want to see, when you’re on the site. In anybody’s experience, BuzzFeed is not a home page—it’s a story page. And [each of] those story pages are basically front pages.

Krasilshchik: Do you measure and experiment with each button on your page? Do you test everything and see what’s effective?

— Yes. We test a lot.

Kolpakov: Does BuzzFeed have a political line?

— There’s an old tradition in the American media that you should be objective—like totally in the middle. But it’s not so easy anymore. We are surely not partisan and it's important to stay neutral in American politics. We don't see support for gay rights as a partisan position. Even with the [same-sex] marriage story, our view is that people should have equal rights. It is important that we can call the opponents [of same-sex marriage] on the phone and they can trust that we will be fair to them.

Krasilshchik: What do you read? What media do you follow?

— Twitter.com. I don't read much in print, although I’ve spent a lot of time in London over the past six months, and there are parts of the British press that are so good. I think most of the American mass media has given up on print. And newspapers are not as tightly edited or vibrant as they used to be because people are rightly focused on the Internet.

In Britain, even the papers like The Daily Mail and places like The Spectator have this complete package, where no one story is necessarily that compelling—in fact in the Mail sometimes they're insane—but there's something about the whole package that still works in a way. I think the American media is obsessing about the package because it knows that each little article will go off in its own direction.

Kolpakov: Do you have any fears in this profession?

— You mean like am I afraid this whole thing will fall apart? Yeah, and I think it's hard to know where things are headed. I think there was a moment when we all kind of grew up in the open Web, where, you know, you read on the Internet to get an first impression. Where you can go anywhere. That isn't going away, exactly.

But what happens if news breaks inside Snapchat? Will someone film and go out on Twitter? Or will you only know if you are in Snapchat? Will the people on these platforms become central? Will people be getting different views of the world inside these different platforms, whereas they used to share a platform on a more open website?

It feels to me like it's something we haven't totally figured out, yet. What's the thing that comes after the Internet?

Kolpakov: What would be the ideal future for the Internet?

— I don't know but I've already got nostalgia for the old Internet—for the purity of the blogosphere in an open Web. Snapchat just hired a bunch of great journalists to build their journalism project and it's obviously a positive development.

Kolpakov: BuzzFeed is big enough to partner viably with a major social network. You’re big enough to set some of the rules here, and you’re probably already setting the rules for the whole world’s mass media. Given all this, it’s important to know about your negotiations with the big social networks.

— When we do talk to them, I think they see us as publishers and they understand what publishers care about. They're interested in talking to us not because they want to work with us, but because we can explain what publishers will want. And if we use these conversations to screw the competition, I think that would make us bad partners, and ultimately they’d be less interested in talking to us.

I do think it’s important for us that the Web remains open—where information can spread across networks, not just inside them. For instance, something like “Instant Articles” [a new a product for publishers to create “fast, interactive articles” on Facebook] feels like a small thing but is actually huge. It’s important to us that these platforms hyperlink to the original articles (whether its on meduza.io or buzzfeed.com), and that this isn’t some underlying layer to which they have special access.

Kolpakov: Do social networks feel any responsibility for killing the mass media all over the world?

— Social networks have poured a huge amount of traffic on publishers in the past couple of years. They replaced Google as a most important source of readers. So I don't really think they're killing anything. This is a huge benefit for publishers. I think they're pretty idealistic, actually. (Though that doesn't mean they won't want to screw everyone…) I think sometimes it works for small publishers. Why would I publish on WordPress, when it’s such a headache? Or use my own CMS [Content Management System]? What if you were starting a media company today—maybe not today, maybe in two years—maybe you would only be on Instagram?

There is something called The Shade Room [a celebrity gossip site that publishes straight to social media, notably Instagram] that’s this American celebrity media thing. It’s basically about black celebrities and it’s just an Instagram feed, but it has almost a million followers. And they can sell ads on Instagram feeds. I guess that could be a whole business.

Except then you totally depend on one platform.