"They can summarise a story more breathlessly and vividly than others": Digital disruption has remade the media© Everett Collection/Rex
Two years ago, if you’d heard of Vice or Buzzfeed, you would not have associated them with news. Vice began in 1994 as a strenuously provocative pop culture magazine. By the late 2000s it had become a mini-media empire that included a record label, a publishing wing and a film studio. Buzzfeed first appeared online in 2006 and soon built a reputation as the internet’s leading manufacturer of viral content. Its specialism is lists, commonly lists with pictures of cute animals (“15 Animals We Just Want to Squeeze,” and so on). These regularly attract millions of page views.
Yet over the past 12 months, both Vice and Buzzfeed have invested heavily in expanding their news operations—and their success is reshaping the way news is reported and consumed. Buzzfeed, which now receives 130m visitors per month, has hired high profile investigative reporters and boosted its political and international coverage. Vice has announced that it will spend £31m on expanding its global news coverage. Both have opened offices around the world, including London, and both have received the attention of Rupert Murdoch, who paid £42.8m in August for a 5 per cent stake in Vice Media.
Although their output is somewhat different, what unites Buzzfeed and Vice is their ability to attract a younger audience—18 to 34 year olds who, in the words of Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, “grew up on the web” and rarely engage with traditional news media.
Unlike newspapers and TV news, which have to design content both for the internet and for print or TV broadcasting, Vice and Buzzfeed focus predominantly on creating material that will work for the web. For Vice, this means videos, ranging from five-minute reports (a recent video covered British nationals fighting alongside al Qaeda in Syria) to longer documentaries on subjects such as prison gangs, Russian billionaires and the “world’s scariest drug.” For Buzzfeed, this means “doing news in a way that”s accessible and socially shareable,” according to Luke Lewis, the site’s UK editor. Buzzfeed has broken some major news stories over recent years, from John McCain’s endorsement of Mitt Romney during the 2012 US presidential election to Glenn Greenwald’s recent decision to leave The Guardian in order to set up his own media outlet.
Even sceptics, such as the blogger and former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, are impressed. Organisations like Buzzfeed and Vice “understand how news travels in the new media world—through social media,” he says. “It’s designed to be seen in emails and Facebook pages. They have also grasped how images—from GIFS to video—can bring the news to light. They can summarise a story more breathlessly and more vividly than others. They have mastered viral logarithms.”
What remains is the question of how the new news is going to pay for itself. All of the articles and videos produced by Vice and Buzzfeed are free, and neither is planning to set up a paywall. So far, they have made money by working closely with brands in order to create “sponsored content”—marketing that, critics say, blurs the line between advertising and editorial content. The achievements of Buzzfeed and Vice are “soiled by taking place in an ethical brothel, which is undermining the credibility of journalism itself,” says Sullivan. Shane Smith, CEO of Vice, has dismissed this kind of criticism in the past. “Part of the reason Vice is successful is because we have cash to make stuff,” he told the New Yorker in April. “Anyone who is in the media game and says, ‘I don’t want to make money,’ is basically saying, ‘I don’t want to work.’ ’Cause money makes media.”
If the future of news doesn’t turn out, after all, to lie with insurgents such as Vice, perhaps it will arrive in the more familiar form of the Washington Post, which was bought by Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, in October. “Washington is a very lucrative market, and Bezos hasn’t come here to be a news philanthropist,” says Jack Shafer, media columnist for Reuters. “He does a lot of experimenting, and not many of his bets have been wrong.”
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