RE: Media

Well, I’m pretty sure it won’t, but I hope my clickbait headline got you interested. This blog is the love-child of my work at The Centre For Excellence in Media Practice. As with many love-children, it is the product of a lot of enthusiasm but very little regard to whether it’s going to turn out ok.

After her recent appointment as Buzzfeed UK’s Editor-In-Chief in September 2015, Janine Gibson said

“I can’t think of a more exciting place in British Journalism right now.”  

This appointment is a timely highlight of the journalistic seachange occurring in the industry as Gibson leaves a high profile position within the auspices of traditional journalism at The Guardian for pastures new at the self-titled ‘social news and entertainment’ site. 

Leading the charge with cute cat GIFs, listicles, the removal of banner advertising in favour of native advertising, cutting edge analytics and the recent $200 million investment from NBCUniversal, Buzzfeed is at the epicentre of social media, advertising and, of course, digital journalism.

I decided to study the the impact of these social news and entertainment sites (here on referred to as SNES) on the journalism industry because I have been interested in the changing consumption of news and entertainment since I started my teaching career over fifteen years ago. Since then, the enthusiasm of my students for the practical element of producing print newspaper and magazine productions is as strong as it has ever been. However, when once my students would bring in copies of magazines such as Company, Heat, Loaded, The Sun and even the odd broadsheet from time to time, in 2015, my students admit now they don’t read them at all in their spare time. When questioned about what content they do ‘read’, what they said constituted a bricolage of semi-curated Snapchat channels, Buzzfeed articles shared via social media, You Tube vlogs and Rookiemag.com, amongst others.  

 Just as the digital world has created a healthy ecosystem for the online journalist, its growth has also precipitated the decline of journalism in its traditional printed form. Not a week goes by without there being at least one more one article chronicling the dismantlement of traditional press. To illustrate, by referring back to the publications my students used to bring into class: Company magazine went online only in October 2014, and, as of Sept 2015, its web-link ghosts only to the new look Cosmopolitan.co.uk; Loaded’s last edition was March 2015; and, although still one of the industry’s strong performers, Heat’s average circulation per issue has dropped 36% since 2004, having averaged a regular circulation of over half a million at the height of its popularity (www.abc.org.uk). In terms of print newspapers, it is not a surprise that the industry in general has seen a year-on-year decline, with recent figures from The Audit Bureau of Circulation revealing in August 2015 that all national papers had seen a drop in year on year print sales, with ten titles seeing more than a ten percent drop.  

In contrast, the popularity of SNES, like Buzzfeed, has grown exponentially, year on year, and this growth does not seem to slowing down. According to Quantcast, for the period of 6th October to 4th November 2015, the traffic to Buzzfeed’s UK site alone had 17.6m ‘unique’ visits and 46.6m visits in total and Vice has doubled their global unique visits over a twelve month period to over 96 million as of August 2015 (comScore.com). All of this has been made possible by the rich virtual offerings of Web 2.0 and its matrix of viral, social folksonomies, syndication and dynamic content capabilities. The area of debate here is to investigate how websites like Buzzfeed are harnessing these technologies and shaping the landscape of journalism in the process. 

Buzzfeed is the poster child of the intersection of journalism, technology, advertising, social media and, ultimately, the monetizing of online content. The impact can be usefully explored within the concept of remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 1999), that is, where older or more traditional forms or methods are refashioned or reworked to create something discernibly new or different but its provenance can still be referenced - in this case, how traditional forms of print media are being remediated by digital formats. However, it is also worth considering whether this, in itself, is an adequate framework to conceptualise the seismic changes within journalism industry propagated by digital advancements.  

 Not since the late eighties, when Murdoch’s controversial transition to the more economical electronic methods, thus creating a new paradigm in journalism, has there been such a profound impact on the industry. The Wapping dispute provides a useful point of reference for looking at how technology can change the very core of how the industry operates. With the availability of electronic printing methods, Murdoch exploited technology to forge a new and cheaper business model. The remediation here is clear and straightforward - if the political angle were to be stripped from the equation, and whatever one thinks of Murdoch’s methods, the wholesale move, from typewriters to computer keyboards, and from rotary to offset litho printing, reinvigorated journalism to the extent that, as many now concede, it staggered the decline of the print industry for at least another ten years. However, where journalism became more ‘efficient’ through Murdoch’s strategy, the nature of the end product - the printed newspaper - did not discernibly change. Of course, colour printing and multi-section weekend editions became a feature of the changes, but the actual textual content and format remained the same.  

As well as Buzzfeed describing itself as 'the social news and entertainment company', it also states that it is  

“Redefining online advertising with its social, content-driven publishing technology. BuzzFeed provides the most shareable breaking news, original reporting, entertainment, and video across the social web to its global audience of more than 200M.”(www.buzzfeed.com/about) 

In just two sentences, Buzzfeed's own description encapsulates exactly how the industry has been evolving in recent years into its current form. The insinuation of placing the 'advertising' and 'technology' before 'news' and 'reporting' is an interesting one. In an arena where the monetization of content is more foregrounded than ever before, clearly journalism is having to share its territory. No longer, it appears, that the quality measure for the industry is simply good writing, readership figures and whether the editor 'likes' it; success criteria now encompass how 'shareable' and globally 'liked' a piece is, and, of course, the efficacy of the platform for advertising and its varying capacities to distribute content.  

The phrase “If it doesn’t spread, it's dead”, coined by Henry Jenkins (2009), sums up this new culture in journalism.  Going one step further, it can be noted that in new media, particularly the arena which Buzzfeed inhabits, communication IS the new consumption and the emotional currency of shareability has never been more important than at this present time. Audiences have transformed into 'multipliers' and journalists need to be keenly aware of how different social media distributes content. Where Twitter might be about timeliness, with breaking news spiking or 'trending' as quickly as it then dissipates, Facebook can carry stories longer which have a more emotional or ‘Have-a-Heart’ content, as Jonathan Perelman, VP of Buzzfeed's Agency Strategy, terms it. In his 2014 Keynote speech for Behance's 99U conference, he crystallizes the idea further, of how modern journalism reaches its audiences.  

“Content is king but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants. Great content is the base, it has to work, but beyond that it's all about understanding distribution.” (Peretti, 2014)

No longer does our content come from a limited number of fixed information sources such as magazines, newspapers of televisions, new media has created a culture in which these sources can be effectively cherry picked, or bypassed altogether, in amongst the plethora of online options - the consumption of traditional journalism is not just being undercut by digital journalism, it is competing with everything on the internet. In Matthew Britton's conversation with Jonathan Perelman in his book, YouthNation (2015), Perelman says 

“Whereas the broadcast model focussed on centralised TV and print media distributing content to the masses, the social web model relies on disparate groups - and their individual influence - to distribute content democratically.” (P169, 2015) 

New Media is consumed, shared and created by audiences variously described by academics and media figures as 'Screenagers', 'Digital Natives and Immigrants', 'Generation Like', and Generations Y and Z. Naturally, a large part of the success of Buzzfeed can be attributed greatly to the strength and influence of these digitally engaged audiences, illustrated further by Douglas Ruskoff's summative comment from his 2014 documentary Generation Like,   

 “[They] are empowered to express themselves as never before, but with tools that are embedded with values of their own” (51m 35s 2014)

This perhaps is key to understanding the growing popularity of SNES like Buzzfeed. One only has to look at the home page of Buzzfeed and its riotous jukebox of 'LOL', 'omg', 'cute', 'fail', 'win' and 'wtf' coexisting with its serious news arm, to understand the influence exerted by the values of its audience. These values are intrinsic in the semantics used, the almost child-like, playful design of the site, and its disregard for convention with stories about the Paris bombing juxtaposed with "The 27 Weirdest Pictures of Celebrities Of All Time" - a good example of their oxymoronic modus operandi.

Not only does the audience have itself reflected back by the content on the site, the audience, in many respects, is the site. The concept of participatory audiences (Ruggiero, 1992,) in the creation of journalistic content, is nothing spectacularly new. What has changed, though, is the way in which they are viewed.

Where the relationship between traditional journalism channels and their audiences has been historically very separate and delineated, with journalists maintaining the hegemonic position of being the gatekeepers of trust and authority, citizen journalism is no longer a term of disdain used by the profession. Blogging, vlogging and other participatory channels have all served to erode the dichotomy between journalists and everybody else. As Bowman and Willis (2003) state: 

“A democratized media challenges the notion of the institutional press as the exclusive, privileged, trusted, informed intermediary of the news” (p 47, 2003) 

Most of online news content is still produced, in the most part, by 'traditional' journalists, (by this, I mean those who have entered the profession through formal training) but, growing up with Web 2.0, audiences now have more capability and opportunity to fulfil the active and binary role of user and media maker simultaneously - that of the 'produser'  (Bruns, 2003).

Where some of the traditional industry players have been reluctant or slow to accept this as part of their news agenda, keen to sustain the hegemonic status quo, sites like Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post and The Guardian have led the way, embracing the opportunities the interaction with the 'volunteer' journalist offers, normalising it as part of their strategy and actively courting 'produsers' to create their own virtual fandom, and to extend the social reach through their audiences.

The Guardian has seen success with its Witness section, where members of the public are set 'assignments' to contribute to the site, The Huffington Post has its own platform for volunteer writers for its sections, 'The Blog' and 'Young Voices', and Buzzfeed also employs a number of 'Community Writers'. 

Further bridging the gap between 'armchair journalists' and professional industry journalists is the concept of the pro-am strategy. Originating from the sports world, the idea of pro-am has filtered into the journalism industry as a hybridised version of 'traditional' professionals working alongside a network of amateur 'smart groups' (Rosen, 2006).

As Jay Rosen, Professor of Journalism at New York University and author of weblog pressthink.org, addresses 'Big Media' in the context of his 2006 experiment in pro-am journalism, he states

“You don't own the eyeballs. You don't own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don't control production on the new platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new balance of power between you and us.” (2006)

Indeed, Rosen's paean to grassroots journalism appears also on The Huffington Post's website, a company with which he collaborated on offthebus.org project, an experimental pro-am platform covering the run up to the US elections, both in 2007 and again, more recently in 2012. Deemed a success in 2007, The Huffington Post announced, for the 2012 coverage, that

“If you don't like the way we professionals cover politics, we invite you to do it yourself -- and we will show your work to the world.”

Here we can see The Huffington Post not only firmly embedded into this new mindset of collaborative journalism, but actively championing it. The new media journalist, as agenda setter and guardian of news values, is now throwing the gate wide open for all who wish to come through it.

As a direct descendant of 'The former audience' (Gillmor, 2004), Rosen coined the phrase 'The people, formerly known as the audience' (2006), and with it, initiated the concept of the audience to be rethought in the context of the age of the digerati.

Remediation theory (Bolter and Grusin,1999) postulates that new media forms [present] themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media. In order to scrutinise whether this is true of SNES such as Buzzfeed, Bolter and Grusin's idea of double logic of immediacy is a useful entry point.

The holy grail of any medium is, as outlined in the double logic, is that of immediacy. Whilst true immediacy - the complete and unadulterated immersion in a particular media form or content, to the exclusion of any other external influence - is virtually impossible to achieve, media, particularly digital media, it could be argued, strive to create the illusion of the media form as an extension of the user themselves and to create seamless connections between them.

In the world of the SNES, the illusion of immediacy is facilitated by the capacity of social media. Buzzfeed, for example, as a site on its own, only gets a third of its traffic direct to the site, the other two thirds are drawn down through social media. This digital wormhole is the perfect environment for what Jodi Dean (2010) describes as communicative capitalism. She takes the position that

 Contemporary communications media capture their users in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance.  (p4, 2010)

The operative word here is capture. Immediacy, or at least the illusion of it, thrives on the undivided plugged-in attention of its audience. Consequently, there are a number of elements that can perhaps be identified that enable social news and entertainment sites to act as communicative capitalists, thus helping to perpetuate this illusion. Firstly, the idea set out earlier, that of the user's values being embedded in the content itself, underlines an important way in which social content mirrors, and thus draws in, its audience.  Social media feeds are littered with an array of Buzzfeed's quizzes, ranging from Which Philosopher Are You? (1st March 2014) to Which Adele Song Should You Sob To Tonight? (15th November 2015), and the listicle format, popularised by Buzzfeed, covers anything and everything from 22 Tweets About Procrastination Which Will Make You Laugh Out Loud (17th November 2015), 33 Animals Who Are Extremely Disappointed In You (12th April 2010) to 11 photos of US Weapons Used By ISIS (8th September 2014). Both serve to simultaneously reflect the user's values and ideologies as well to engage them further by interacting with the content. To illustrate how the psychology of this works, Dean goes on to acknowledge

 “I know that quizzes on Facebook are ingenious ways of collecting information from me and my friends, but I take them anyway. The psychoanalytic notion of fetishism provides a convenient shorthand: “I know, but nevertheless. . . .” (p5, 2010)

The same principle could perhaps be equally applied to the second way in which sites like Buzzfeed suck their audiences further through the digital wormhole of social media, that of clickbait journalism. Clickbait is a relatively new term in media, although it clearly has its roots in history as the modern day descendant of yellow journalism. As early as 1913, headlines such as those below appeared in Joseph Pulitzer's paper The World (home of the 'Yellow Kid' cartoon which gave rise to the name yellow journalism)

 King Victor Shielded By His Queen From Assassin's Bullets

"Oldest Crook" To End Days in the Prison He Loves

Crowd Tries to Kill Would-Be Murderer

Coffyn Carries Passenger in Air Trip About the Bay

 Over a hundred years later, current headlines in social news and entertainment media look very similar.

 Refugees arriving in Scotland will get this greeting           Upworthy 17th November 2015

What will our life look like after the robots steal all our jobs?     Vice, 17th November 2015

Isis says it used this soda to take down Russian passenger jet Gawker, 17th November 2015

The term clickbait perjoratively describes content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page (Oxford English Dictionary) or as Josh Benton, of Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab, defines it on Twitter Noun: things I don't like on the Internet. Although the concept will be discussed in more detail later, it is important to point out, that in terms of remediation, Buzzfeed has been central to the discourse surrounding clickbait journalism, and its role in the public consciousness. Buzzfeed itself decries that it employs this type of journalism and states

 “You can trick someone to click, but you can’t trick someone to share” (2014)

 Whether or not Buzzfeed believes it has been a proponent of clickbait or not, what is key is to understand is that digital journalism relies on the click through rate of its content. Clicking on a story is, more often than not, the semi-arbitrary result of wanting to bridge the curiosity gap (Loewenstein, 1994), sharing a story, however, is perhaps, for many journalists, the true litmus test of whether the audience emotionally invests in it and aligns with its values.

 In light of this, SNES would perhaps prefer to modify the term clickbait to clickworthy - content is always going to need a snappy headline, but, as can be evidenced by the general ennui that audiences seem regularly express about clicking on an appealing headline, only to be disappointed with the content not living up to expectations, sites like Buzzfeed, Upworthy and The Huffington Post rapidly would inevitably lose the trust of their audiences if this were to become the overarching perception. These sites need to ensure their content has a much greater impact than the simple click-transaction - and that's where the compulsion or drive to share comes in to play.

Shareability is also the crux of where immediacy (or the illusion of it) crosses into the other half of Bolter and Grusin's double logic, that of the notion of hypermediacy. Hypermediacy operates where, instead of trying to hide the presence of the media form itself, which is the underlying principle of immediacy, the audience is actively reminded of its presence. As Bolter and Grusin state

“New digital media oscillate between immediacy and hypermediacy, between

transparency and opacity.”

This oscillation is embedded within the DNA of the medium. On one hand, social content aims to draw us in through the immediacy of endless 'windowed' content, through the Droste-like effect of passively clicking on link after link, in an attempt to subconsciously fulfil our cognitive thirst for information. On the other hand, it also plays on our affective needs, and our hypermediated awareness of, and the desire to connect with others through, sharing, commenting and creating. Jodi Dean, however, offers that this communicative capitalism does not thrive because of unceasing or insatiable desires but as the repetitive intensity of drive (p6, 2010)

The very idea of hypermediacy implies awareness, and with awareness usually comes greater control and choice. However, what could be argued is that we, as the audience, might be aware there might be the appearance of choice, but ultimately, what the wormhole does is play to our desires, or drives, as Dean calls it (p6, 2010). The journey of social media distribution, for the audience, has no designated beginning - the audience usually arrives casually at the article or link through their social media feed, not through direct choice- and it has no end - the article or link may be shared, it may be commented on, it may be 'liked', it may be blogged about, or it may be ignored. The life or narrative that the audience creates for social news and entertainment content is summed up by what William J Mitchell (1994),  said when he described the hypermediacy of the internet,

 “[It] privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy and heterogeneity and... emphasises process or performance rather than the finished art object” (p31, 1999)

One perspective of this is that there is the appearance of control and choice to the audience but, in reality, social media carefully curate links, and what the audience's choice is usually comprised of is the product of social folksonomy, structured journalism and sponsored content. Deuze (2005) states that

“The manifold scrambled, edited and converged ways in which we produce and consume information worldwide are gradually changing the way people interact, are interconnected, and give meaning to their lives.” (p8, 2005)

Gunther Kress explored this idea further in his theory of multimodality (2010). He believed that media forms contain their own rhetoric of communication through the interplay of visual and textual content. When applied to New Media and Web 2.0, Kress again puts forward the idea, like Mitchell, of the social world becoming fragmented and individualized. When this occurs, there is a sense of disruption and tension when new forms of communication, created by new media, demand that

 “Social and ‘political’ relations, tastes, needs and desires be newly assessed.”  (2010)  

The corollary of this is that a new rhetoric is created. Buzzfeed has responded to this by its style of coagulating pathos, human interest and hard news into easily digestible, highly shareable items. Kress extends his theory further by postulating that in this tension, created by increased fragmentation and individuation, there is a period of searching for new conventions and norms to create a sense of stability or as Kress says, a strong frame. One could argue that Buzzfeed has led the way in creating this ‘strong frame’ and this also lends credence to how it is shaping the industry as a result.

Buzzfeed, and sites like it, rely on the 'binding technique' of social media, and the drive of the audience is accelerated by the combined effect of the cognitive and affective pull of clickbait/clickworthy content. However, this drive is no longer just  measured through quantitative viewing or readership figures, as in the past for traditional media, it can be now be measured by cutting edge analytics, as in the case of Buzzfeed's proprietary POUND (Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion) analytics software. Not only can Buzzfeed tell what the audience is clicking on and where they are getting it from, they now have the capability to know what the audience does with the content once they get it. And that is the - very powerful - difference.

This power lies not just in the content SNES create, nor simply the recognition of the cognitive or affective needs of the audience but also the understanding and acting upon the drives or desires in its distribution and the monetizing of these within the double-bind tension of social media which is both hyper-individualist and collectivist at the same time.  This is what Perelman recognizes in loose terms, as referenced earlier, and if we wrap up the idea further, in Lacanian terms, the pleasure or jouissance experienced by filling the lack or void in the audiences' world created by a fragmented, hyper-individualised digital culture, and the resulting drive for them to connect, is what SNES capitalise on.

To refer back to the concept of remediation again, in the way Bolter and Grusin define it, to simply explain it as a refashioning of older media forms doesn't feel robust enough to encompass all the different ways the nuances of new media have shaped the journalism industry. The efficiency of the term, in this context, becomes greater when combined with the acknowledgement of it as part of a continuum in defining change.

Deuze (2005) packages up remediation alongside the concepts of participation and bricolage, and this goes some way further to mapping out the complexity of the relationship between new media and the journalism industry. However, when something so fundamental changes in the media landscape, it seems that to couch it in terms which imply it is straightforwardly the repackaging of something old, negates the whole idea of the new in new media. It would seem naïve to say television was just cinema remediated because, although both forms are based in moving image, the medium and the context each occupies it entirely differently.

 Žižek wrote

 “We become 'human' when we get caught into a closed, self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and finding satisfaction in it.” (p63, 2006)

This idea fits perfectly with the nature of how audiences use SNES – once in the loop, it is hard to get out. This is by no means a passive response on the audience’s part, however. The dual effect of thirst for knowledge and desire to connect, as outlined previously, is an alluring mix for drawing audiences into the loop but, in the spirit of hypermediacy, the audience is also sufficiently self-aware to know how the whole thing works, and part of the enjoyment of the experience is the sense of escapism and indulgence it brings them whilst caught up in a constant epistemological  pursuit– kind of like a hypermediated, enlightened false consciousness meets the Uses and Gratifications model (Blumler and Katz, 1972).

Indeed, not only does the audience feel entitled to participate in the reading, commenting, sharing and blogging reflexivity offered by SNES, this participation becomes an obligation.

 As referenced earlier, SNES play on our circuits of drive. Dean claims

 “The loops and repetitions of the acephalous circuit of drive describe the movement  of the networks of communicative capitalism, the ways its flows capture subjects, intensities, and aspirations. Accompanying each repetition is a little nugget of enjoyment.” (p114, 2010)

 If we look at the ‘cute cat pics’, which have been a major proponent in Buzzfeed’s rise in popularity and are now synonymous with the site itself, perhaps Dean’s idea could explain why these became so prolific. These ‘pics’ captured a moment in time which moved the audience beyond just simply sharing cute animal photos, it allows the audience access to a dimension of affect – a cat is a ubiquitously popular creature, it is often considered ‘cute’ or humorous and these images are easy to share, to comment on and to ‘like’.  Scott Lamb, editorial director of Buzzfeed,  comments, in an interview on CBC Radio, that

 “Cats are a nice canvas for us to project our own identities [and the] default human relationships with cultural products is often about trying to figure out who [we] are.” (17.7.2015)

 It is also interesting to note that Jonah Peretti, founder of Buzzfeed, recognized the power of new media in the formation of identities, ten years before the advent of Buzzfeed. In an academic paper, Negations: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1999), published whilst he was university, he states that

 “In the post-MTV, post-internet era, our identities are more fragmented and need continual shoring up through consumerism and pop culture.” (1999)

 The ‘cute cat pic’ is not only the perfect starter-for-ten to elucidate how SNES create little moments of intensity, connection and in the formation of identity, but also to show how they act as a gateway to further ‘suggested’ content.

In order for SNES to further capitalize on their synergy with social media and create more gateways to their content, they employ the principles similar to those of structured journalism to retain audience involvement. Reg Chua (2010) defined this as

 “Rethinking how we write things and how to extract more value – and provide more value – from what we do daily.”(2010)                                      

 Whilst news and journalistic content has traditionally operated within the push model of journalism, with content being provided by media producers, and structured journalism taking the line of the pull model (where audiences can search for content, when they want it), Buzzfeed, and other SNES, oscillate somewhere in between the two – they provide ready made content and suggest or push other ready-made content, yet offer the audience choices: choices to click or pull links embedded within the content which lead to other articles from the same site, and choices to select from a conveyor belt of similar linked content. All of this serves to extend the shelf-life of stories. Buzzfeed itself lists a number of questions it asks to maximize the power of its proprietary POUND analytic software, which can accurately track the life of shareable content. At the top of the list is, of course, this question:

Can we propose stories that will appeal not only to you, but also to your friends and followers? (2015)

The concept of churnalism has been used as a term to describe the type of journalism which is derived from press and publicity releases. This style of journalism has been criticized for being lazy and unoriginal in content, with the same story appearing across a number of news sites at any given time, often with chunks of text lifted verbatim, with little or no additional content.

In an article by The Guardian, it reported that The Express, The Mirror and The Sun

 “All lifted of chunks of text from a press release last month on behalf of the Benenden Healthcare Society, which quoted a poll showing "British women spend more money on their looks than their health" (23.02.11)

 Indeed, the article continues to cite examples from all the mainstream traditional press who all used to a larger or less extent, ‘churned’ content. Although it is currently ‘off air’ whilst it finds more public funding, the site churnalism.com was set up by the Media Standards Trust to protect the integrity of journalism and to ensure standards of original reporting were kept up. Journalists, and indeed anybody, could enter text from press releases to determine how ‘churned’ the content was. One could argue that, whether the content comes from the traditional press or online sites, a certain amount of ‘churning’ is inevitable. Journalists and PR will always have a close relationship and press releases will also provide a source layer for the industry. However, the term itself has been more recently used as shorthand to describe the grey, homogenous ‘copycat’ content often seen doing the rounds on social media.

With Buzzfeed as the flagship SNES, much of the criticism about churnalism has been laid at its door.

“BuzzFeed is a site filled largely with listicles, churnalism [and] headlines sucking up to Google left, right and center.” (Betanews.com, 2015)

Whereas others lament, not the site itself, but its impact implicit the copycat sites which have sprung up on the back of Buzzfeed’s proven business model. Churnalism is, to a large extent, driven by economic reasons. Staffing numbers across the industry have been made leaner as the nature of new media requires fewer bodies to carry out more work. Profits derived from traditional sources have declined as audiences resist paid-for content if they can get it for free elsewhere, regardless of quality. Journalists have been placed under more and more pressure to churn out content, whether or not this ideologically aligns with them as a professional, or the company they work for.

An interview with a Senior Video Editor for a national middle market newspaper site revealed that there is a heavy reliance on press releases [within its reporting arm] to produce content quickly both online and in print. The online version is available the evening before the print edition and he thinks that

“The heavy traffic from this often discourages other news sources from picking [the same story] up in the same way, but there will likely be regurgitated versions of it kicking about for weeks to come.” (15.11.15)

Pablo Boczkowski, Professor of Communications at Northwestern University, talks about  “hamster-wheel journalism“ and how cultural incentives lead toward imitation and

 “An environment that encourages cross-outlet homogeneity [that] conversely discourages creativity, enterprise, and innovation.” (2010)

Buzzfeed itself is quick to differentiate itself from this negative label and Scott Lamb, in his CBC radio interview, asserts that Buzzfeed is not an aggregator and its central tenets are not lazy homogeneity but originality. He furthers this by claiming aggregated or ‘churned’ stories are not shared by its audiences and that

“Buzzfeed’s success [is listening to its audience], responding to its wants and needs, developing new stories and framing it in the best way.” (17.7.15)

Whilst churnalism is not a new concept, it can be said that its definition can be  loosely modified to reflect changes in today’s industry – that it implies a style that is repetitive and unoriginal, driven by reasons of economy and the desire to satiate audiences’ appetite for more and more content, often regardless of quality. But more than that, it is a style of journalism which endlessly comes back on itself – a form of recursion - manifesting itself in the kind of ‘Other stories you might like’ type appendages at the end of an article on social media and embedded links within the content itself. 

Much of genre theory has been centred in the study of film but, when applied to SNES, these theories can provide a useful frame for how Buzzfeed, and sites like it, have developed since their arrival on the new media scene, and how their shared characteristics and repertoire of elements (Neale, 2000) have shaped the industry.

In the early to mid 2000s, the beginnings of the social news and entertainment US ‘aggregator’ sites such as Boing Boing, which started in 1996, but garnered popularly early 2000, began to emerge. Gawker followed in 2002, Digg in 2004, The Huffington Post in 2005, and then both Reddit and Buzzfeed in 2006. All these new media sites, except Reddit, were set up by personnel with roots in ‘traditional’ journalism and the creation of a new genre within new media journalism occurs. If Christian Metz’ genre development theory (1974), which delineates genre as developing over four stages - Classical, Experimental, Parody and Deconstruction – is applied to the genre of SNES, we can see these early years of SNES forming the classical stage – laying down the blueprint for what is to come.

Following Metz’ genre development theory, in 2006, the SNES genre appears to enter the experimental stage. At the time The Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $35m(which itself had been set up to experiment with the coalescence of the news aggregator model with original reporting and content), Jonah Peretti, its tech and product focused co-founder, had already begun to experiment with the concept of the Bored-At-Work Network, which presupposes that this group contains the biggest influencers of virality.  Peretti himself had already experienced and recognized the power of virality, when his request to the company, Nike, to have the word ‘sweatshop’ printed on his trainers was refused. The resulting email exchange was initially only shared between a few friends but within a few months, it had been seen by a million people. Setting up the Contagious Media Lab experiment, using early data analytics to discover which headlines were or weren’t working, and then rewriting them, Peretti took his concept and combined it with the format of news aggregation to create what we now know as Buzzfeed. In an article on wired.com, Peretti states

 “Instead of making content that the robots like, it was more satisfying to make content that humans want to share.” (2.2. 2014)

Here, the genre takes on discernible characteristics, moving away from simple news aggregation to a more multi-modal, experimental integration to the full gamut of social media.

By 2011, the decline of the print industry had necessitated the transference of focus from print to digital to create a new backbone for the industry. It was at this time that the launch of sites such as Mail Online (in its current format) in 2006, and The Guardian's ‘Digital First’ strategy in 2011, illustrated not only the experimentation with traditional news formats, but also the industry wide response to the print sales decline precipitated by digital media.

 Other theorists have helped define genre further by recognizing its fluidity and evolution over time. Buckingham (1993) argues that

 “Genre is not...simply "given" by the culture: rather, it is in a constant process of negotiation and change.”(p137, 1993)

 Within this context, Buzzfeed’s introduction of, and experimentation with, video content within its site created a new dimension to the genre in enabling viral content. This has also enabled Buzzfeed to produce branded video content, which enhances its native advertising model, and is underpinned by its POUND analytics proprietary software. Neale (p51, 1980) states that genres are processes of systemization, and this can quite clearly be observed in the triad, which could act as a useful definition of this new media genre: shareable journalism content, native advertising and technology with analytic and metric capabilities.

Metz observed further that once a genre is established and that its form has been experimented with, the third stage of genre development gives rise to Parody. This can be observed in sites like The Onion’s ‘Clickhole’, a very obvious response to SNES’  clickbait style, UK sites The Daily Mash (2007) and The Poke (although its print fanzine started in 2002, it transferred to online only in 2010). Much has been made of Buzzfeed’s signature cat pictures and listicle format. For example,

 7 Things a Captain Going Down With The Ship Is Tired Of Hearing

23rd November 2015 www.clickhole.com

 Even Buzzfeed itself devised its own mocking ‘headline generator’. For example,

 The White House’s 25 Sweatiest Baby Tigers

26th November 2015 www.buzzfeed.com

The final stage of Metz’s genre development theory is deconstruction, where the genre is recognized in mainstream culture and where hybridity and clear niches begin to be established. For example, Upworthy was set up in 2012 and focuses on content that educates and inspires while being as rich and compelling as the best viral videos on the web. Using the native advertising model so characteristic of SNES, Upworthy has created Upworthy Collaborations and has produced uplifting and meaningful sponsored content with brands, including Starbucks, for their ‘Finding Understanding’ story of how a deaf woman found support in her community through events held at her local coffee shop, Unilever for their ‘Project Sunlight’ campaign and nonprofit organisations such as The United Nations and The U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

Despite its industry comparisons to Buzzfeed, it is interesting to note that Upworthy persisted with the aggregation model until very recently.  The introduction of the job title Curator evident in the bylines of Upworthy content, instead of Reporter or Writer, signalled how SNES have hybridized the role of the journalist with the role of the advertising professional versed in data analytics, marketing and SEO. However, it was announced in July 2015 that Upworthy would be starting to create their own original content. This may have been a response to the decline in traffic – in August 2014, Upworthy was the fastest growing SNES with 50 million unique visitors every month but current figures show this has declined by almost 20 million – and a reinvigoration of the site, akin to the Buzzfeed model, is planned.

Refinery 29, which started as a US fashion and style website in 2005, has also evolved into a niche SNES and declares itself a lifestyle platform. It initially aimed to incorporate, unsuccessfully, a commerce element in 2013 but responding to the drive for original, shareable content, it has doubled down back to content and ditched its unprofitable commerce side to join other SNES like VOX and Vice in securing significant funding from investors. In 2014, Vice, a niche site based around nefarious activities, investigative journalism and enlightening documentaries, gained $500 million in funding from investors, whilst in 2015, Refinery 29 received $50 million in financing in July and Vox received $200m in August from NBC Universal.

One of the other common elements of the genre is video content. With the majority of SNES traffic coming from social media, 60% of social content is now accessed on mobile devices and 72% of smartphone users watch video on their device (Buzzfeed Insights, November 2015). If content isn’t shareable on mobile devices, it simply isn’t shared. Upworthy, Refinery 29 and Vice have all responded by giving video content on their sites much more significant priority and, following Buzzfeed Distributed’s lead, the video production arm of the company, the digital publisher, Vox Media, has moved into online video production for its sites such as The Verge and Polygon.

 Whilst it is important to identify the semantic elements of the genre, that is, the key or superficial elements which can be recognized as being common SNES, it is also important, for a more nuanced and critical examination, that the syntactic elements of it are also considered (Altman, 1999), that is to consider the semantic elements of a text in the context of how society responds to them. Claude Levi-Strauss’s mythological theory can help to illustrate how this relationship works

“If there is a meaning to be found in mythology, this cannot reside in the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined” (p174, 1979)

Unlike film, which is usually the product of a single ‘author’, SNES not only is the product of a large number of people, it also does not inhabit once single space. Defining it and analyzing its syntactic relationships is a fluid process as the genre continually evolves, responding to social, technological and economic changes variously. As part of this fluidity, the diversification and deconstruction of the genre sees the role of the journalist strengthening in some areas of the genre, whilst being diluted in others, due to the move to a heavier reliance on video based content.

Peretti, at a talk at SouthbySouthWest’s  Interactive Festival in 2012 compared Buzzfeed to a being like a street café in Paris,

 “You have a copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, a copy of Le Monde, the newspaper, and next to you, as is often the case in Paris, is a cute dog. You read philosophy; you read the news; you pet the dog. You don’t become stupid when you are petting the dog. You are just being human!” (2012)

The words being human sum up the success of Buzzfeed, or at least its euphemistic quality of legitimizing the juxtaposition of serious news and trivial content. Audiences don’t have to choose between high and low brow content as they both now co-exist in one place. The ideal reader of Buzzfeed may be as likely to share an article on Syria as they are one on Miley Cyrus. This highlights an interesting ideological debate about journalism. Although print journalism has always been comprised of high and low brow journalism, the two forms have, for the most part, been kept apart, with audiences choosing one publication over another, high over low or low over high. Crucially, Buzzfeed makes no such distinction.

 However, Buzzfeed is clearly aware of the importance and need to retain credibility, whilst still holding onto its post-modernist values.  Peretti employs what he terms, in an interview in 2008 with Rick Alterman of The New York Times, as ‘the mullet strategy’ – where, he claims, the site has business up front and a party out the back. This strategy dates back to his days at The Huffington Post where the serious news content was kept on the homepage and looking sharp to promote its branded content in a professional way, whilst the users were invited to argue and vent on the secondary pages, because most user-generated content - Peretti claims - sucks.  Whilst it needs to be acknowledged that the majority of Buzzfeed’s traffic arrives through social media, and not its homepage, Peretti states ‘the mullet strategy’ is here to stay because as well as it allowing users to have control, a slick, pretty front page sells advertising and allows corporate sponsors [to] admire their brands.

Versions of this model can be observed across the traditional press online sites. Whilst their actual website remains ‘business out front’, as Peretti calls it, their Twitter and Facebook pages provide the ‘party’. This concept may not be solely attributed to Buzzfeed on its own but, as a flagship example of a news-based site which maximizes the power of social media, the ‘mullet strategy’ certainly underscores a key way in which the industry has been shaped.  

 However, there are concerns in the industry that, because of the necessity to have social media as part of news strategy, traditional journalism skills are being lost as a result. In an interview with Richard Holt, former staffer and now freelance journalist for publications including The Telegraph and Wall Street Journal, about the impact of this on journalism, he states

 “One experienced court reporter complained to me that having to constantly update his Twitter feed during trials - a company requirement in high-profile cases since the legal ban was lifted - meant that he was struggling to compile full shorthand notes of proceedings.” (4.11.15)

In this, Holt also flags up one of the key concerns the traditional journalists have with the way the industry is evolving. The virality and shareability of social content - something which Peretti states is the beating heart of Buzzfeed, and inextricably linked to its business model – is also seen by some as undermining the profession. Jones and Salter state that

 “News is entrenched in social media [and] run by curators, weeders and sharers.” (p 172, 2011)

In November 2013, The Australian ran a piece declaring that Twitter was the path to ruin and was an alternative media universe. The piece goes on to criticize its impact further.

 “This mad plunge into social media-driven journalism would be mildly diverting if it wasn’t so dangerous to the future of news reporting.”(13.11.13)

However, whilst there are pockets of the industry that did, and still continue to, rail against the influence of new media, there is much evidence of the traditional industry names embracing it, as in the case of The Guardian, and certainly the acknowledgement of its role in the future of the industry and the need to address and respond accordingly. Thomas Edsall, journalist and Professor at Columbia University, holds a positive view of Buzzfeed’s role in the industry.

 “BuzzFeed has advanced the notion of journalism. Insofar as they are expanding into covering national and international affairs, I think they will be doing a great service for journalism.”(thepolitic.org, 13.08.15)

Buzzfeed’s embedding of news within the social media world is also reinforced by the intrinsic notion that audiences have been empowered, and that the internet provides a platform for user-generated content in a variety of ways.  The ability for audiences to generate content through blogging and commenting has been harnessed by Buzzfeed in their development of a loyal community of writers. Similarly, The Huffington Post gives over a large portion of its site to its pro-am unpaid writers in its ‘The Blog’ section.

In an interview with one of The Huffington Post’s writers, Anniki Sommerville, she outlines one of the key criticisms about the rise of the pro-ams and its impact on the industry.

 “I think if you’re a proper journalist it feels quite threatening as all the writing I do is for free. In fact one of my neighbours is a food journalist and she had a go at me for writing a piece for ‘The Independent’ and not charging anything”. (15.11.15)

 The legitimate concerns that providing a democratized ‘voice’ and platform will erode the credibility of journalism, and, in the process, undermine the status and, thus, earning power of professional journalists is a debate that will continue to run. Anniki acknowledges the more subtle differences between herself as the unpaid pro-am and the professional journalist. Although she believes there is lots of room for lots of distinct voices, the professional journalist has a structured network behind them for fact checking and credible sources, whereas she, as the pro-am, doesn’t have this and that means she has the tendency to be more guerrilla or subjectively confessional.

 “I wrote something about maternity leave a while ago and then realised that I was in the minority. I was asked to go on Channel 4 news to talk about it and realised I would quickly come unstuck because I didn’t have all the facts at my fingertips. So there is definitely still a role for robust, empirically proven content which isn’t just ‘how I feel today’.”

 Perhaps, though, this is evidence that the democratized landscape has put pressure on the industry to give the noise of the voice and the strong opinion more importance, than the drive for accurate and balanced facts.

 However, it is wrong to simply assume that ‘traditional’ journalists are embroiled in a necessary but negative relationship with the new democratized journalistic landscape.  At a Teachers’ Insight day held by The Guardian (2.2.15), Ewan Macaskill, defence and intelligence correspondent, and Shiv Malik, investigative journalist for the paper, both expressed their advocacy about the old lines of journalism [being] gone (Macaskill) and Malik believes firmly that there is an important role for user-generated content and that, whilst it does not replace traditional journalism, the immediacy of response to news complements it.

 So what appears is that journalism is in a process of ‘settling’, where new names are jostling for position alongside the established ones, with both caught in the ebb and flow of borrowing from the other. For example, Buzzfeed UK’s recent redoubled efforts to employ respected and established journalists from the traditional media whilst traditional print magazines and newspapers embrace stylistic features and content such as the rhetoric of the listicle.

Holt, from the perspective of the professional journalist, says the industry is sometimes, however, too quick to react to trends.

“You will see Buzzfeed-style listicles all over the Guardian and the Times, when their readers can go to Buzzfeed for that. But the fear is that the newspapers represent the generation that is on the way out, and that they won’t survive unless they do everything the new boys are doing.”

Who would have thought images of cats looking cute would have such a big impact on the world of journalism? These viral images could be viewed as the signal for an industry remediated,  – a tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell terms it. In his book Tipping Point, How Little Things Make A Big Difference (2000), he outlines how little changes can have big effect and his theory supposes that social ‘epidemics’ occur when unique factors collide at the right time to produce exponential changes in their immediate context. Whilst Gladwell’s book was written when SNES were in their infancy, and Facebook was four years away from being founded, the language he uses in describing how this theory operates – ‘connectors’, ‘mavens’, ‘salesmen’ and ‘the stickiness factor’ – sounds equally applicable to describe how SNES are shaping journalism. Buzzfeed, and other sites such as Upworthy, Vice and Reddit, have all grown at a tremendous rate and have been part of creating this ‘tipping point’ in the industry. Gladwell says that we have trouble estimating dramatic, exponential change (p2, 2000) and uses his theory to explain the runaway effect of people not just doing what they think is right, but testing their intuitions. Jonah Peretti, after his Nike email exchange, tested his intuitions about what people do when they are bored at work. As stated earlier in this project, Buzzfeed is at the intersection of journalism, technology, advertising, social media and the monetization of content. Put simply, Peretti, testing his intuitions at the right time when all these factors were working symbiotically, when social media was at its own ‘tipping point’, has created a far reaching effect.

 Some conclusions

As the potential for anyone who wants to write grows, the number of people working as professional journalists declines. 2015 saw 64,000 people describing themselves as journalists or editors, down 9% from 70,000 in 2013, whilst the numbers working in PR, the people who provide journalists with press-a-porter style, churnalist-ready press releases, increases. (pressgazette.co.uk 9.9.15)

 What is the future of the industry going to look like? What will the role of the journalist look like for my students? How will I and other educators prepare them if they want to work in the industry? Ten years ago, the job title social media executive barely existed, so what other new job titles will there be available for them in the industry in ten years time?

 Richard Holt states

 “All journalists now need to have social media skills and the ability to use website content management systems.”

 In October 2014, Jason Seiken, the editor of The Telegraph, announced key structural changes for the paper. Amongst them were four key requirements for journalists to be skilled in the four areas of social, video, analytics and SEO, each journalist has to produced five deliverable ideas a day to include at least one video, one interactive and one shareable. Their journalists now have access to Parse.ly, a data analytics tool and the paper has a 25% stake in data journalism company FactMint. Whilst Holt, as someone who worked for the paper and still writes a column for them, worries for the tranche of digital immigrant journalists working within the profession, he expresses hope for new industry entrants.

 “This is ok for the youngest generation, as they know these things already and don't really need teaching. They might need their skills refining, but every 25 year old understands Facebook already.” (7.11.14)

 Cross-curricular application to teaching

 It is absolutely crucial for us, as educators, to understand and ensure we prepare our students adequately for the world of work. What we understand as the traditional journalism has to evolve. However, it is going to be a significant challenge for us as digital immigrant educators to ensure the digital natives we teach are able to demonstrate robust ‘traditional’ skills and a good understanding of new media.This also ties in with Ofsted’s addition of  ‘employability’ to its criteria for lesson observations.

Subject specific application to teaching