Nieman Foundation at Harvard
BuzzFeed is taking its recent push into the world of audio and looking inward. The company recently launched a new podcast about, well, life at BuzzFeed.
BuzzFeed Dot Com, The Website: The Podcast, is aimed at a narrow listenership of people who work for BuzzFeed Dot Com, The Website. Scott Lamb, BuzzFeed’s vice president of international, explains: “This is a little bit of an experiment — we’ll see how it goes. It’s really intended for our international editors and those not in the New York office to learn a little bit more about what we’re doing here.”
The pilot episode features Summer Anne Burton, head of BFF, BuzzFeed’s team focused on distributed content. Burton covers a handful of topics about life at BuzzFeed, including how the BFF team was born:
When we started doing video, we thought we would do it for the website, and then it didn’t do as well on the website as it did on YouTube. And then we had also started hiring illustrators for BuzzTeam, and their work often did really well on the site, but often individual pieces of it would break off and go viral on the Internet and almost become a meme on their own.
Communication can be a problem for any growing news organization, let alone media companies that have foreign bureaus and other satellites around the globe. (The issue of communication with remote staffers came up in the debate over Gawker’s decision to unionize.) Recently media companies have started to embrace Slack as the method to keep the team in touch.
BDCTW:TP could be an odd show for BuzzFeed. It may not make you play M/F/K with the web like Internet Explorer, or offer the unexpected and unexplainable drunken debates of Another Round (highly recommend), but it could be an interesting experiment in transparency. An experiment that likely will be interesting to a somewhat narrow audience of, well, people like Nieman Lab readers. For instance, the phrase “distributed content” comes up several times in the first episode; here’s Burton giving her definition:
I think the way it’s defined, it really is pretty broad. It really depends a lot on the platform. It’s easy to think about a video as distributed content; you make a video and you can put it on YouTube, you can put it on Facebook. So it’s distributed in all these different places.
But there are things like paragraphs from a longer story that can also be distributed on Twitter through a screenshot. So we’re just kinda trying to think of different ways to take projects we’re doing and do them in many forms.
