Ben Smith, the blogosphere's most talented political reporter, is leaving Politico to helm the web's most popular meme generator:
It is a tenet of BuzzFeed that the Web pages users like to click are different from the pages they like to share with others. BuzzFeed encourages the second case, the sharing of links, articles and photos on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. The reporting by Mr. Smith and his staff will be produced with that sharing strategy in mind. "I already write for the social Web and consume most of my news on the social Web," said Mr. Smith, who calls Twitter his main source of news.
Ben indicated his discontent with blogging in an AdWeek piece by Dylan Byers a few months ago:
Since the early days of the 2008 campaign, Smith has distinguished himself by being first to the news. Having a jump on the competition of even just five minutes has made all the difference, he says. But a lot has changed since 2008. Twitter, Smith says, is "sort of draining the life from the blog."
"Where people were hitting refresh on my blog because they wanted to see what my latest newsbreak was, now they’ll just be on Twitter, and I’ll tweet it out and they’ll see it there," he says. "What I’m doing right now is just incredibly old school. I might as well have ink all over my fingers and be setting type."
Adam Clark Estes sizes up the "burgeoning BuzzFeed model for journalism":
Instead of just reporting on a major story, [Buzzfeed co-founder Jonah] Peretti explained, BuzzFeed's new editorial team will "refract that story in a lot of different ways." Instead of just reporting that a teenager won the Siemens prize for developing a potential cure for cancer, we'd imagine, BuzzFeed would cover the news as well as the Internet memes that the story spawns as well as other fun, shareable reactions. …
Somehow refreshingly, we couldn't get Peretti to engage in the we're-gonna-kill-print dialogue we heard earlier this year when Arianna Huffington and former executive editor Bill Keller got into a public argument about aggregation. After all, Smith will continue to write a weekly column at Politico, and we wouldn't be surprised to see BuzzFeed start sending traffic to the wonkier sites that Smith frequently links to. It all sounds so… welcoming.
What we try to do at the Dish is all of the above. There's politics up front, but also Internet memes, YouTubes, reader threads, window views, etc. It's less like a blog than it was five years ago – and more like a blogazine. Ben's own announcement here. The above image is from Buzzfeed's announcement:
[W]e wanted to reassure you all that our new classy political coverage won't mean the end of our Internet silliness. So with that in mind, here is your newest meme: "Ben From BuzzFeed."
The Dish 