Ben Smith is the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed. He spoke with the Harvard Political Review at the Shorenstein Center of the Harvard Kennedy School.
Harvard Political Review: In 2011, you moved from Politico to BuzzFeed. What was tough transitioning to BuzzFeed?
Ben Smith: The thing is, I was able to hire a whole political team. It wasn’t as if I was trying to turn the world’s leading cat poster into a political reporter. That said, BuzzFeed has doubled down on the things that were working. Where as a couple years ago they had four or five people working on the very entertaining stuff, now they have 50. The transition was easier because there was also a great team who had spent a lot of time trying to think about how to spread content on the web.
HPR: Investigative and serious journalism is a new type of content for BuzzFeed. Has there ever been pushback from the higher-ups on the types of pieces you want to see printed?
Smith: No, Jonah [Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed] is totally invested and is ambitious about the volume and possible reach. The pressure on me is always to go faster and build more. The issue with the web is that it’s not a problem if BuzzFeed is covering politics, so when we do politics, we’re not competing with our other posts, we’re competing with other people covering politics.
HPR: What’s a piece that comes to mind which represents how BuzzFeed has changed article presentation?
Smith: Matt Stopera’s has a couple pieces. One was when he stood outside of the Supreme Court and just took photos of people waiting to hear the verdict on DOMA.
The other was when he had creationists write messages explaining why they believe evolution does not exist.
Benny Johnson also wrote a piece where he explained the Syrian conflict using gifs from The Hills.
HPR: As the editor-in-chief, how do you utilize technical staff to create pieces that innovate in presentation as well as in content?
Smith: BuzzFeed publishes quite quickly, so I don’t like the idea of having people invest months into a feature. We like to have things built into our content management system so you can use the feature again and again, and that gets perfected. A great example is the quiz feature, which has been very popular on the site.
HPR: How do you think about finding great talent?
Smith: It’s hard for great generalists. We get hundreds and hundreds of applications for five or six people. It’s harder to get into than Harvard. I think you generally want to hire someone who has been killing it at a hollowed-out traditional newsroom. There’s usually a 23 year-old who is running the place and you want to hire him.