One Week BuzzFeed

I wrote about BuzzFeed in early October 2013, and I came in hot. I don’t think they ever saw it, but I remember posting something like BuzzFeed is successful because it’s designed for the dumbest people on the internet—and I meant it. I went on about how most articles are barely three sentences long, how they blow up the font size when they don’t have enough words, how you get headlines like This woman can’t get married until she makes her husband 300 sandwiches or 19 reasons why iOS 7 is the apocalypse or just Nacho lasagna! Mixed in with photos of terror victims and brave feminists, all designed for an audience that thought every other website on the internet was too thoughtful.

Frank Schmiechen, some editor at Welt am Sonntag, shot back. He accused me of being one of those annoying German moralists wagging my finger before BuzzFeed had even landed. He said my piece was embarrassing, that I was performing superiority and using words like grenzdebil (brain-dead) like everyone else was beneath me. He wasn’t wrong.

The thing is, I lose interest in whatever I write about almost immediately. Everything bores me eventually. But BuzzFeed and the whole remix-blog concept kept hitting me over and over in my daily internet wandering, and you couldn’t ignore what it meant for how people consume content. It was impossible not to be curious about it, especially in the middle of all this hand-wringing about the future of journalism.

So I decided to find out. I spent a week running this blog like BuzzFeed—borrowed the design from an online magazine I’d shut down the year before, and made one rule: interesting, discussable, attention-grabbing. That was it. I grabbed everything from my feed readers that killed on Mashable or Reddit or HYPEBEAST, or anything that made me laugh so hard or got me so mad I knew it was gold.

What came out was stuff like Here’s China’s creepy copy of Paris, Every woman needs this period-stained t-shirt, Kim Kardashian’s ass is bigger than your bedroom. No holding back on the superlatives or the exclamation points. The text was supposed to be accessible, the images and videos immediate and easy to process. I noticed on day one how easy this was to do.

The whole thing became a competition with itself almost instantly. In that one week, I got way more traffic than magazines got in a year. I ran out of ad space by day three. But here’s what actually surprised me—it was fun. Like, genuinely liberating. Just putting out whatever you felt like, without filtering it through some idea of what a publication should be. It’s not a constraint, it’s a privilege.

The first article did okay, something about Banksy’s cheap street sale, got under 500 likes. Brazilian cops showed no mercy, cracked closer to 600. A Game of Thrones video barely broke 400. Before all this, I probably wouldn’t have published any of those. But I was wrong about them.

So I decided to keep some of that energy. I know not everyone cares about dads dressed as Batman or Japanese fashion girls or whatever. But between all that dumb stuff, there’s room for the other thing too—interviews with successful bloggers, pieces about Hamburg fighting for refugees, questions about the future of blogging. This blog is about the young internet—bloggers, YouTubers, Twitter people, as much as music and games and fashion. Whatever’s interesting.

What all this actually taught me is that this style of publishing can be a blast if you’re actually living in that world of memes and WTFs and viral chaos. It’s not the future of journalism. It’s just a part of it. The access to that casual energy can actually pull people who normally only care about funny GIFs into heavier, harder material.

So I didn’t take back what I said in October—but I’m not as certain about it. There are different ways to reach people with information, and not every publisher should be chasing German BuzzFeed. But a little more openness about what counts as worth publishing might be what was missing all along. And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find the next dumb-looking cat. This stuff works.