To the almighty powerhouse that has become everyone’s favorite Snapchat story, ripe with twerking chicken nuggets and 21 pictures guaranteed to make us laugh, thank you. Thank you for redefining what it means to be a news outlet.
Long gone are the days where journalism meant equal representation, inverted pyramids and a separation of fact and opinion. You’ve brought the industry back to its yellow roots, and rightfully so.
News, like everything else, is a business before a public service. Feeding on the fears and concerns of the public through sensationalized story lines, unverified information and anonymous sources, is the perfect way to grow your business in these uncertain times. But what’s most promising and impressive about this organization is the way it entertains the public after sending it into uproar.
After doing their due diligence to report whatever they feel like, BuzzFeed surrounds us in a comforting compilation of Tumblr posts that are too funny and times where celebrities rocked the red carpet. They do this without forcing us to leave the little news tab on the best website in the world. And as we grow weary of reading a hard-hitting story that is far beyond the 800-word average of every other lazy outlet, BuzzFeed lets us shake off all responsibility by venturing off to YouTube. This allows us to comfortably bounce between challenge videos of staff members trying to drink alcohol in the middle of the day and educational pieces that brush over serious topics but present no real scenarios to fix them.
BuzzFeed, you are the business that we should all strive to be.
Of course, you have your critics. Don’t let the bullies like CNN get you down with their criticism. As they cling to their system of information gatekeepers, along with the New York Times and others, they fail to see the future of the market. You know that you can flood the world with information; you know to give the people what they want.
So thank you, BuzzFeed. Thank you for your quizzes, your videos and your ability to infiltrate social media platforms. But most of all, thank you for redefining what it means to work in journalism. Thank you for telling us what we all need to hear.
