BuzzFeed: a totally new way to report news and interact with your audience

My last two posts focused on what journalism has become and what it means to be an entrepreneurial journalist, so I want to focus on a website that I think uses a new idea to report news called BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed heavily focuses on photos, Internet memes, and videos. Some posts focus more on writing, but you'll find that most of them don't. This isn't a bad thing. While it's true you have to be a good writer to be good journalist, you also have to be good at understanding what your audience wants to see when they go online everyday. This is where BuzzFeed excels. From cute puppies to social justice to national news, BuzzFeed provides its audience with a new way to read and interact with online media.

BuzzFeed has a variety of methods it uses to report. Here are few examples:

13 Ways to Survive a Party Without Drinking

This post isn't "news," but it's a great example of how BuzzFeed uses memes in its articles.

James Blake and the Difficulty of Learning to be Happy With What You've Got

Then there are posts like this, which are essentially opinion pieces. Unlike the previous post, this reads like an actual newspaper article with appropriate photos.

J Street Won't Back Obama on Syria Resolution

This post is an actual news article.

8-Year-Old Boy Shot in the Face While Playing

Finally there's this post, which uses reporting skills with photos that tell most of the story.