#ljdigital

BuzzFeed is More than Gossip and Wacky News

Over the past year and a half, BuzzFeed, which says it receives over 40 million unique visitors a month, improbably has made forays into the world of serious news and original reporting. First came politics; the site did some fine work on the 2012 presidential campaign. Late last year it hired a magazine editor to oversee long-form narrative journalism. This month it announced that it was setting up a business vertical, hiring a journalist from Reuters to run the show.

BuzzFeed Launching Longform 'BuzzReads' Section

BuzzReads will be “a bit quieter than the average BuzzFeed page,” Kandell said, with eight to 10 stories and pictures of varying sizes. The mockup I saw has a logo with a light, serif typeface, emphasizing its kind-of separate identity. He hopes to bring in RSS widgets from other longform sources like Longform, he said, positioning BuzzReads as a good citizen of the longform ecosystem.

Why is it so Hard for us to Imagine that a Site Like BuzzFeed Could do Serious Journalism? 

In many ways, a realistic appraisal of BuzzFeed’s chances to become a home for “serious” journalism can only come when we stop thinking of BuzzFeed as a single media animal — the one that is hiring an “animals editor” and asks job applicants for another position to create an instruction manual for making a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich — and think of it as a media entity like any other. If the Huffington Post can win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism, why couldn’t its offspring carve out a process for doing that as well?

The Future of Digital Publishing: A Book You Need to Read on The Street 

                   "The Falling Man" c/o Richard Drew for the Associated Press 

I hate feeling sad. I hate it when it feels like lead pillows are pressing on my heart, when my eyes feel as if small flames are brimming in them instead of salty tears, when I have to pretend that I was yawning rather than almost descending into a heaping, sobbing mess. I have never experienced a personal tragedy. My parents are alive and well, my aunts and uncles are vivacious, my dog is a bright-eyed and shedding mess, and thankfully, and both sets of grandparents are equally great at remembering birthdays and cooking great meals. So why am I drawn to stories that convey an indescribable sense of loss, to stories where the characters lives are irreversibly changed, where their loved ones are never to come back? Who knows? Maybe those stories create a renewed appreciation and admiration for those around me. Maybe I’m trying to brace myself for what will inevitably come one day. But for whatever reason, I still like them. Here are some stories that I will never be able to forget, stories that have made me feel emotions that I’ve never felt.

"The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy" by Michael Paterniti 

"The Story of a Suicide" by Ian Parker 

"The Falling Man" by Tom Junod

1. Betsey Johnson: Honor for a Life of Celebrating Youth | The New York Times | May 1999

  2. Marc Jacobs: A Man for all Seasons | Vogue | December 2011

  3. The Women of Alexander Wang | New York Magazine | February 2011

  4. Fantasyland: Jean Paul Gaultier's World of Inspiration | The New Yorker | September 2011