Buzzfeed: how data is shaping modern journalism

Buzzfeed is the website that has reshaped journalism – compellingly clickable headlines combined with a relentless, data-driven honing of what works online led to a new £30m fundraising round earlier this week, valuing the company at more than £500m.

Some 200 editorial staff are matched by around 100 technologists, which led Chris Dixon, of investors Andreessen Horowitz, to observe that it is one of the few media businesses where “Engineers are first class citizens.” It’s just one reason, he said, why the startup will become a “preeminent media company” in the future.

“Many of today’s great media companies were built on top of emerging technologies,” said Dixon in the blog post announcing the investment. “Examples include Time Inc. which was built on color printing, CBS which was built on radio, and Viacom which was built on cable TV,” he wrote.

“We’re presently in the midst of a major technological shift in which, increasingly, news and entertainment are being distributed on social networks and consumed on mobile devices. We believe BuzzFeed will emerge from this period as a preeminent media company.”

This is the hyperbole required from an investor who presumably hopes to make a decent return on his money, but there can be no doubt that Buzzfeed has reshaped the importance of data to modern journalism. In a web age, it is not only possible but essential to understand who clicks where, when and on what. As all major media firms are discovering, it’s harder than it looks to get that right, and the days of an imperial editor ruling by intuition are now augmented by hard facts. Such a transitional phase is daunting, but presents as many opportunities as it undermines.

So Buzzfeed has discovered that lists no longer need to be top tens, when 11, 13, 28 or 14 work just as well, but also that there is no need to shy away from the serious. It has recently expanded its emphasis on sponsored content, where brands work closely on ideas as well as paying the bills, on video and political journalism. To commemorate the outbreak of the First World War it produced an article where each soldier’s life lost was represented by a single poppy. The scale of the page underlined the horror or war, but sat alongside frivolous articles on what words mean to people from different areas. All human life, and death, can apparently now be encompassed by a website that was first best-known for its use of OMG and LOL!

This is not, of course, to say that Buzzfeed has all the answers: founder Jonah Peretti’s 200m readers are still dwarfed by rivals, and while the number of lists the world wants turns out to be larger than expected, it is presumably not infinite.

But with each new funding round, the chances of Buzzfeed failing diminish still further: it may not be the site peers seek to emulate, but it is also evidently here to stay. It turns out that beneath every LOL, there’s serious cash. As the site might add: OMG.