By: Sarah Smith
It is 10:15am and your Tuesday class is dragging on; the concentric circles you have been drawing are no longer doing the trick, so you finally result to opening your laptop and begin the usual mindless chain of command: Facebook, Twitter, BuzzFeed. You muffle laughs while looking at gifs of puppies or images of Nicolas Cage swinging on a wrecking ball. Among a puerile layer of articles like “17 Totally Red Manicures From London Fashion Week” and “What If Cookie Monster Edited Your Favorite Website,” lies a vault of hard-hitting articles targeting “big stories.” Located right next to quizzes like “Are You Smarter Than These Celebrities?” is a section of stories devoted entirely to world events.
What separates BuzzFeed’s journalistic endeavor from traditional online news publications is its manner of delivery. Instead of a dry editorial on the concerns surrounding Syria’s chemical weapons program, BuzzFeed’s presentation of “Syria, As Explained By The Hills” breaks down the conflict into an understandable pop culture plot. With gratuitous Spencer as Assad, Lauren as President Obama, and mindless Heidi encompassing Vladmir Putin, the article successfully outlines the history and present concerns surrounding the Syrian Civil War, while also causing enough laughter to bring tears to your eyes.
The uniqueness exhibited by BuzzFeed is due to the efforts of founder Jonah Peretti and Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith. These two individuals built a website that combines a technology platform by detecting viral content with an editorial selection process to provide a snapshot of the viral web in real time. The result is an interactive news source designed to answer any inclination generation Y may have about current events, mainstream media stories, and nonsensical trivia for cocktail parties.
While it is hard to see my 65-year-old technologically challenged father reading “10 Reasons To Be Excited About Season 4 Of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” BuzzFeed is somewhat of a cultural phenomenon among students and young professionals. According to Alexa, a commercial company designed to track web data and activity, BuzzFeed is the 181th most visited website in the world. In regards to online news journalism, it ranks below BBC, Huffington Post, and Fox News, but above NBC News, USA Today, Washington Post, and websites like Skype and Mashable.
In an unprecedented memo released by Peretti earlier this month, he graciously outlines BuzzFeed’s monumental growth. He details, “BuzzFeed reached a record of 85 million unique visitors in August. We are 3X bigger than we were just one year ago, 8X bigger than we were two years ago…by this time next year we should be one of the biggest sites on the web.” This is in comparison to The New York Times’ 17 million unique viewers in July 2013 and CNN’s 61.5 million for the entire year of 2012. In 24 months, the gif-loving news site has nearly tripled its monthly averages.
Peretti continues his Memo to the BuzzFeed Team by describing BuzzFeed’s news journalism, describing, “There is huge opportunity to be the leading news source for the social, mobile world.” According to ComScore, 35 perfect of BuzzFeed’s audience originates via mobile device, with an estimated 50 perfect of its monthly viewers through social media. This demographic exemplifies an overarching trend developing amongst the global media agencies; instead of nightly broadcasts and morning papers, our culture now demands minute-by-minute tweets, in-depth blogs, and calls for “great journalism and compelling entertainment,” Peretti’s vision for BuzzFeed’s future. Not only does BuzzFeed utilize a variety of social media platforms, it aptly presents the news in an entertaining and compelling way. See “9 Times Putin Pwned Obama” for reference.
So why should we care about “33 Surreal Photos Of The Civil War In Syria,” or why “Iran’s President Wishes All Jews A Blessed Rosh Hashanah on Twitter?” The answer to this bemusement lies in the CNN Effect. In a broad sense, the CNN Effect is a theory that postulates that the development of the 24-hour news cycle has made a major impact on the conduct of a states’ foreign policy. In essence, it is the idea that the media can actually influence foreign policy decisions. Other epithets for this phenomenon include the Al-Jazeera Effect and the Fox News Effect.
The substantial impact of media influence on policy-making decisions originates from two factors: the end of the Cold War and technological advances. Steven Livingston argues, “the vacuum left by the end of the Cold War has been filled by a foreign policy of media-specified crisis management.” Coverage of the invasion of northern Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, and Bosnia created this dynamic idea that the media was somehow instrumental in U.S. exceptionalism in the post-Cold War era. The images of frozen Kurdish children in 1992, refugees pouring into Turkey in 1991, and massive graves in Srebrenica in 1995 remain some of the most haunting news stories and still leave a bitter taste in politician’s mouths.
But did these uncomfortable emotions instigate a shift in foreign policy? Despite extensive research to unravel the CNN Effect, success at clarifying it has been minimal. In The CNN Effect: the Myth of News Media, Foreign Policy, and Intervention, Piers Robinson develops an extensive policy-media-interaction model to judge the validity of the CNN Effect. After applying the model to possible incidents of the CNN Effect, Robinson concludes, “the widespread assumption that these intervention were media driven is a myth.”
Regardless of the legitimacy of this theory, the profound effect of news media speaks for itself. The public receives a majority of its information about domestic politics, foreign policy, and other current affairs from Brian Williams, Chris Cuomo, Bill O’Reilly and Stephen Colbert, not from the likes of Jay Carney or daily State Department press releases. While these individuals and their respective networks do not necessarily influence foreign policy decisions, they do play an integral role in securing the functionality of a democratic society. They maintain a critical approach to the administration’s decisions, and ensure the preservation of an informed public.
BuzzFeed represents the existential shift of news reporting. It is witty, staunch, unique, and enthrallingly funny. It has the potential to be what fireside chats were to the 1930s, Walter Cronkite was to the 1960s, and Dan Rather to the 1990s. Savannah Grow, a third-year UGA student studying risk management and real estate, claims “I turn to BuzzFeed primarily for GIFs of puppies or in-depth analyses of David Beckham’s abs. However, in some of my more intensive surfing sessions, BuzzFeed has become the gateway drug into actually paying attention to world events. Their simplified and accurate explanations not only make engaging easy but also as entertaining as 28 Cats Who Are Having A Worse Day Than You.”
Savannah represents the power of BuzzFeed’s unprecedented approach to news reporting. By creating a relatable environment for individuals surfing the web, BuzzFeed advertently educates its viewers on crucial world issues. In this way, the GIF-loving-online-based company is generating a new populace of news-viewers. These viewers further represent an influential development of the “fourth estate” and encompass the future of affluent real time news reporting.
So here is to you BuzzFeed, thanks for the cats, invariable lists, and keeping our generation up-to-date on foreign affairs.
