The much-visited, Internet-meme-happy site is steadily becoming a journalistic force.
In its latest foray into the world of serious news, BuzzFeed is launching an investigative reporting unit. And it has recruited a journalist with sterling credentials to run it.
Make no mistake: BuzzFeed is still BuzzFeed. As I write this, it's ballyhooing such fare as "This Is Why We Should All Love Bats" and "A Definitive Ranking Of Every Slang Term For Vomiting."
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But go to the verticals for "world," "politics" and "longform" and you'll encounter the real deal.
BuzzFeed's ongoing evolution into a news organization is good news, indeed, for people who care about journalism, which is so vital in a democratic society. Given that many traditional news outlets have cut back in the face of the digital revolution, some of them severely, it's vital that new players enter the arena.
And they have. ProPublica has established itself as a potent investigative reporting machine. The Huffington Post has added original reporting to its mix. Politico has emerged as the go-to spot for political junkies. Local news websites have sprung up across the country.
And waiting in the wings is eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who plans to invest $250 million in an ambitious new journalism venture.
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BuzzFeed began this journey in December 2011 when it hired Ben Smith, then a top political blogger at Politico, to assemble a team to cover the 2012 presidential election. It did a fine job. Since then, BuzzFeed has set up a longform, magazine-style journalism operation, started up business coverage and hired five foreign correspondents — at a time when original overseas reporting has vanished at many legacy news outlets. BuzzFeed now has 130 journalists on the roster.
To ove! rsee the investigative unit, BuzzFeed landed an impressive get: Mark Schoofs, a senior editor at ProPublica. Schoofs also spent more than 11 years at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a foreign correspondent and investigative reporter. And when he was at the Village Voice, Schoofs won a Pulitzer in 2000 for an eight-part series on AIDS in Africa.
So why would anyone leave a perch at a highly regarded investigative reporting haven like ProPublica to go to the likes of BuzzFeed? Schoofs cites two reasons.
First, he says, "BuzzFeed wants to blend the best of American journalism's great tradition of rigorous, bulletproof, deep-digging investigative stories with the digital reality" of how people access news today. Rather than go to individual websites, people are apt to scour their smartphones for material shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
And if you want people to share your content, Schoofs says, "You have to have scoops. You have to be definitive. You have to do the work."
And, he adds, it's BuzzFeed who figured that out. "That's visionary," he says.
The second reason for making the move, Schoofs says: "It's such an amazing personal opportunity to build from scratch an investigative reporting team."
Whenever anyone leaves a company, it's natural to speculate that there was something going on that the job-switcher didn't like. In this case, Schoofs says, "I loved where I was. It's a great, extraordinary institution."
In fact, he says, his goal is to "continue the ProPublica mission" in his new gig.
Schoofs says he plans to hire six or seven reporters during his first year. He won't start until Jan. 1 so he can finish up a project he's working on at ProPublica.
Smith, BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief, uses a baseball analogy to explain BuzzFeed's leap into investigative reporting and other deep dives.
"I'm basically a singles hitter," he says, citing former Red Sox small-ball mainstay Wade Boggs as his favorite player. But he ! admires t! he kind of stories where you have to "swing for the fences."
"Investigative reporting is very important," he says, citing the allure of telling people something they don't know.
In addition to directing his own team, Schoofs will help other BuzzFeed reporters develop investigative stories from their beat reporting.
Asked why BuzzFeed has added serious journalism to its arsenal in such a big way, Smith says the reason lies in the nature of the material people are apt to share. And Buzzfeed has been all about the sharing from the get-go.
It used to be people were more likely to pass along animal photos and the like. Now many people are sharing news, which is the reason BuzzFeed hired him in the first place.
I asked Smith for his vision of the future of this unlikely amalgam of empty calories and rich fare.
"We're very ambitious," he replied. "We'd like to compete with everybody, both in journalism and entertaining content."
So, congratulations for jumping into the investigative reporting game, BuzzFeed. We need as much of it as we can get.
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