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BuzzFeed now has 85m monthly visitors, and says they're seeking hard news as well as memes
BuzzFeed now has 85m monthly visitors, and says they're seeking hard news as well as memes

BuzzFeed president: 'We feel strongly that traditional media have given up on young people'

This article is more than 10 years old
Jon Steinberg tells MIPCOM audience that his site is 'bringing more hard news on a relative basis than a lot of the traditional television networks'

News site BuzzFeed attracted 85m unique visitors in August, according to a recent memo from founder and CEO Jonah Peretti. But don't be fooled into thinking all those people are there for kittens and other memes.

BuzzFeed's president and chief operating officer Jon Steinberg claimed the site is an increasingly important source of hard news for young people, in an appearance at the MIPCOM conference in Cannes this morning.

"We feel strongly that traditional media have given up on young people, and have not made a commitment to tell stories that are interesting for people under 40 or 50 years old," said Steinberg.

BuzzFeed now has more than 100 full-time writers, with a growing proportion focusing on news and politics. Steinberg said that around 40% of the site's traffic comes from links shared on Facebook, and 70% from social sources in general.

"We're bringing more hard news on a relative basis than a lot of the traditional television networks do now," said Steinberg, although he also talked about BuzzFeed's partnership with one of those networks – CNN – on the CNN BuzzFeed YouTube channel.

The alliance sees CNN providing video footage to BuzzFeed, which then "remixes and recuts" it in a shortform, shareable format aimed at YouTube's younger audience.

"There's very little cannibalisation," he said. "CNN was very forward-thinking to recognise that. A lot of television networks are wrongly scared of cannibalising themselves, but there is almost no overlap between television news viewers and online news viewers."

Steinberg encouraged news organisations to think about social sharing throughout their production processes, rather than as an afterthought.

"More so than the technology, you have to write and produce news for the social web: it has to be novel, important and have this social imperative behind it," he said, suggesting that some media have yet to move on from an SEO-focused approach optimised for Google's search engine rather than social sharing.

"That allowed people to write very boring news that was aggregated and unoriginal. And that doesn't work well on social," he said. "The most important thing you can do is to think to yourself 'why would somebody share this content?' And that's very high-quality content."

Steinberg was backed up in his claim that traditional news broadcasters aren't serving the YouTube generation by fellow panelist Moeed Ahmad, new media department manager at Al Jazeera Media Network.

Al Jazeera is launching a new online news channel for this audience called AJ+, which was announced at MIPCOM earlier in the day.

"News on YouTube and other platforms is still very limited compared to entertainment. This is a big opportunity," he said. "Our idea is to respect that audience, and make content that is native for them, made in a way they are wanting to consume."

Ahmad stressed that AJ+ will not be trying to break news, but will rather seek to add "clarity through context" to news that is breaking on social networks.

"Our aim with that is not to replace breaking news services, that you're going to get on Facebook and Twitter. What we're going to do is add the context," said Ahmad.
He also supported Steinberg's assertion that hard news can be as socially shareable as softer topics, and scorned suggestions that the growing importance of Facebook and Twitter in driving news traffic will be a bad thing for more serious subjects.

"The lack of sharing for particular verticals is not because of that vertical, it's because of poor journalism," said Ahmad.

Another panelist, Facebook's director of partnerships Andrew Mitchell, agreed. "There's actually more hard news shared, and more referrals sent from hard news, than there is from soft news," he said.

Mitchell also said that Facebook is continually tuning its news feed algorithm to ensure that when people click on lots of links to news about a particular topic – controversies around the Sochi Winter Olympic Games, for example – they'll be more likely to see more stories about that.

He also warned that Facebook is analysing how quickly its users return after clicking on stories, in order to spot "linkbait" headlines that will then be less likely to appear in people's news feeds.

"We are trying to cut down on linkbait and cut down on spammers," said Mitchell.

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