Journalism for Idiots (A Partial Retraction)
On the first of October I called BuzzFeed journalism for the dumbest people in the world. That’s a paraphrase—the actual line was something like: BuzzFeed is so successful because it’s designed for the stupidest humans alive.
I illustrated the point with a photo of Lil Bub and went on to describe the editorial model: articles rarely more than three sentences, font sizes inflated to compensate for the lack of words, headlines like "This Woman Can’t Marry Until She Makes Her Husband 300 Sandwiches" and "19 Reasons iOS 7 Will Bring About the Apocalypse," interspersed with photos of bleeding terrorism victims and inspiring feminists—a full programming schedule for an audience too dim for the bottom tier of cable TV.
The comments were lively. Frank Schmiechen, then deputy editor-in-chief of Welt am Sonntag, Germany’s main Sunday newspaper, weighed in: Aha. Already the first German public educator waves his warning finger. Before BuzzFeed has even arrived here. ’The dumbest humans alive’ are, of course, always the others. This text is a self-exposure of unsurpassable embarrassment. In terms of presumption and know-it-all energy, simply unbeatable. Congratulations! The writing could also use some work.
I normally lose interest in a subject the moment I’ve written about it—everything bores me quickly, even the subjects I cared most about a week ago. But BuzzFeed, and the broader phenomenon of the remix blog, was impossible to ignore on the daily internet commute. It was everywhere. The question of what it meant for the future of journalism was alive in a way that most online debates aren’t. I kept returning to it despite myself.
So I decided to find out firsthand. For one week, this journal ran fully BuzzFeed-mode. The visual design I borrowed from an older online magazine project I’d shelved the previous year. The editorial rule was one rule only: interesting, discussion-worthy, attention-grabbing. We plowed through feed readers and threw everything into the world that was already performing on Mashable, Reddit, or Hypebeast—or that had made us laugh hard enough, or raised our blood pressure enough, that we knew it would land. No other filter.
What came out: a post about Banksy selling original work on the street for sixty dollars that ended up just under five hundred likes. Brazilian riot police showing absolutely no mercy to protesters scraped the six-hundred mark. A Game of Thrones parody video pulled around four hundred. China’s empty replica of Paris. A menstruation-print T-shirt that someone decided every woman should own. Kim Kardashian’s ass versus the dimensions of an average bedroom. We held nothing back on superlatives or exclamation points. The texts were short and blunt, the images instant, the whole thing engineered to be processed and shared without effort.
We noticed within the first day how easy it was. Not in a guilty way—in a genuinely revelatory way. The instinct for what would work was fast to develop. You read something and you either felt the hit of it or you didn’t, and then you posted it and the numbers confirmed the instinct or they didn’t, and you adjusted. By day three there was an internal competition to see who could find the thing that broke a record. By the end of the week this site had more visitors than some online magazines I know accumulate in a year. The ad inventory ran out—including the backup banners we kept in reserve for emergencies.
The other thing I noticed: it was genuinely, unambiguously fun. Publishing whatever you actually find funny or enraging, without any threshold of gravity or topical relevance, is not a compromise—it’s a kind of freedom. I hadn’t expected to like it as much as I did. I’d written the original BuzzFeed post from the outside, and the outside is a self-flattering position. From inside, the mechanics were harder to dismiss.
We decided to end the experiment as a formal experiment and absorb this register into the regular mix. I know not everyone here is interested in dads dressed as Batman, Japanese street fashion, or Nicki Minaj’s tits. But in between all of that there’s also a post about what actually makes a blog succeed, one about a city standing up for its refugees, one asking whether a new publishing platform has changed anything about how we write online. The unserious and the serious can live on the same page. They always did.
What this journal is for hasn’t changed: the young creative force online—bloggers and YouTubers and people making strange things in their bedrooms, pop culture and design and whatever’s interesting right now in whatever form it takes. A broader content palette doesn’t dilute that. It opens it up. It means I can write about something that felt too small or too weird before, and probably should have all along.
What the experiment taught me about BuzzFeed specifically: this mode of publishing is genuinely fun when you live inside the world of memes and WTF moments and viral surprises, when you’re not performing interest but have it. And it is not the future of journalism—it’s a part of journalism, the part that’s always existed, the part that traffics in the immediate and the shared and the funny. Accessibility can pull someone who came for a GIF into something harder, and that’s not a shameful trick. That’s just how writing works.
So I take back almost nothing from October first. But I’ll grant that there are multiple routes to giving people new information at every depth they want, and that I was too quick to treat one of them as simply the dumbest option. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to find the next cat with an unfortunate facial expression. Yolo.