Twenty-Seven Things That Will Restore Your Faith in Journalism

BuzzFeed didn’t invent the idea of making content for people who don’t want to think—that’s as old as print—but it industrialized the process and then had the audacity to call it a revolution. The trick was framing laziness as accessibility, packaging trivia as community, and making readers feel clever for clicking on something engineered to require no effort whatsoever. You won’t believe became a full grammar. The listicle was the sentence that replaced sentences.

What bothers me isn’t that it exists. Every era produces its own version of the lowest common denominator and the market reliably rewards it. What bothers me is the confidence—the editorial positioning that framed this as the future of journalism rather than an extremely efficient method of avoiding journalism entirely. Real reporting is slow, expensive, unglamorous, and frequently ignored by everyone. BuzzFeed understood all of that and built something opposite on every axis, then put the word "news" on it and waited to see who noticed the difference.

Not many did, for a while. The attention economy turns out to be more volatile than the engagement metrics suggested.