“A lot of times the Internet takes me to some pretty weird places,” begins the promotional clip for a new, short BuzzFeed show that will be coming to Netflix in July and will focus on BuzzFeed reporters as they report stories. From The Hollywood Reporter:
The first episode of Follow This will follow reporter Scaachi Koul as she talks about her reporting on the world of autonomous sensory meridian response (better known as ASMR). Other BuzzFeed staffers who will be featured throughout the season include senior culture writer Bim Adewunmi, senior national correspondent John Stanton, reporter and podcast host Ahmed Ali Akbar, science reporter Azeen Ghorayshi, BuzzFeed India editor-in-chief Rega Jha and senior tech writer Charlie Warzel.
Netflix is calling it a “short-form Netflix Original Documentary Series.” The company has been insistent that it has to plans to actually get into news.
These episodes will be about 15 minutes long. This isn’t the first time that BuzzFeed has done ASMR video; in 2016, it did an ASMR newscast on Facebook Live.
“We’re thrilled that Netflix saw the drama in the work of our journalism and the stories we tell,” BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said in a statement. This has elicited some “what drama?” reaction.
Considering the average news rooms consists of people looking at screens all day and all the drama is in Slack, this is going to take a lot fakery to make it watchable https://t.co/J922PXdJEY
— Rob Manuel (@robmanuel) April 25, 2018
I get why BuzzFeed wants to do this (increase profile), and also why Netflix wants to (cheap content), but will people actually watch? I'm skeptical. I just don't think journalism is as interesting to watch as journalists would like to think https://t.co/b7KOpS3P99
— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) April 25, 2018
it will involve a lot of twitter and slack, I guess https://t.co/vAL5crOVSc
— Michelle Dean (@michelledean) April 25, 2018
I mean, it’s probably not just people typing. Although the teaser video does open with somebody typing. We’ll see in July!
