BuzzFeed (Photo credit: Scott Beale)
Wire stories are the basis of journalism, but in the age of Facebook and Twitter, news is easily repeated over and over again. Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, sees this repetition as an issue. Smith was hired in 2011 and has since hired a staff of reporters and built more of a news atmosphere around the site. He has been challenged with finding a way to sift through all of the news that appears on the Internet. BuzzFeed essentially intends to take things like 14 First World Problems from the 90s and apply it to a variety of news stories, from political to economic.
According to Nieman Lab, Smith now plans to experiment with these wire stories, and he intends to rework these into social media. To take a step towards this end, he hired Jessica Testa, who previously wrote for BuzzFeed Shift, to cover the breaking news stories. Part of her job includes, “Creating posts on the stories that are just starting to take off on the social web, with the goal of reinventing the wire story for the social web.” Smith denies the validity of the old model, and told Nieman Lab that, “There’s no audience for, here’s this thing you just heard and I’m going to say again.”
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