Buzzfeed: What people want more of, and that's not good

Anthony Poisal
ap012215@ohio.edu

One of the fastest-growing outlets in the news world is changing the content people look for in media.

BuzzFeed, a New York media outlet created in 2006, targets a "next generation" audience that has soared to top among the world's most prestigious news sources due to its special content — "exploding watermelons, The Dress, Tasty, award-winning news investigations, quizzes and lists."

But one of those things isn't like the other: Award-winning news investigations.

Most news outlets have a divide between the two categories that BuzzFeed touts as its best content. A website is either popular because of its daily news content (like The New York Times), or it's popular because its content is more focused around brain-candy, such as an exploding watermelon.

Many of the hard-news outlets, like the Washington Post or The New York Times, have not-so-good views toward BuzzFeed's news side of operations, and for good reason.

(Image via everplans.com)

BuzzFeed openly has a lackadaisical approach to its news, with some content turning out to be hoaxes and the website revolving around a core value of getting nothing but the most clicks possible.

That's the purpose of fun quizzes, lists and other eye-catching material, but that should not be mixed into the same outlets with the element of true news.

BuzzFeed's audience is now similar, if not greater than, The Washington Post, which means those people who click on articles like this may also be reading things like this. The latter article was a news story that contained unconfirmed facts, yet still created a stir and flowed into the whole "fake news" thing that has been diluting the public's perception of journalism for the last several years.

News outlets like BuzzFeed will not help heal the wounds that media need to fix following the damage of multiple falsified reports regarding politics and other storylines of late.

So it's concerning to see that some people rely on BuzzFeed for its news content.

Now, and arguably more than ever, all hard-news outlets need to dig deeper into their fact-checking processes to ensure that the public is getting facts and not being misled into fake stories that mislead millions of people.

What BuzzFeed should do is pick a side. Either go all in on news or go all in on brain candy, the latter already proven of being successful and popular.

But BuzzFeed won't do that. Not after making it this far and raking in profit.

The solution comes at the hands of BuzzFeed's top news competitors, the real news outlets. Publications like The New York Times and the Washington Post should seek to beat out BuzzFeed's reporting. With an interesting U.S presidency taking over the world, creating branches on branches of new and growing news stories, the opportunity is there.

Out-reporting BuzzFeed's news coverage obviously won't solve some of the media's issues to an entirety, but it'll be a step toward directing people away from click-bait fueled outlets for news.

And media's successful news publications shouldn't be based around total clicks. It should be based on facts.