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Forgive me for being weepy but I want to talk about what BuzzFeed layoffs mean not just to ~the state of journalism~ but to the internet at large. A bunch of people were laid off (and more to come! Fuck!) who quite literally created and shaped the internet as we know it today.
It’s easy to know what news reporters and editors do. But there were also people who did jobs that never previously existed, creating forms of writing and content that previously never existed and are hard to define.
Writers like @Erinchack, @robotics, @mjkiebus, @sbstryker @andrea_h1ckey made the funniest things that subverted expectations - they made the things that would make me cry laughing, all the comments be “what did I just read / this sucks”.
Wonder why suddenly quizzes took over your Facebook? That was because of @LouisPeitzman , who made one viral quiz that unleashed everything else (he probably can apologize to you personally for that).
People like @expresident, @the_rewm, @conz built teams that did things no one else was doing and set the voice of what BuzzFeed is. They gave moral clarity, heart, and a mission that was never craven click-lust, but driven by serious consideration of humans (and cats, tbh).
The person who first produced and shot the entire concept of overhead-view hands doing a cooking video? The idea/look that changed all food content online and made a bajillion dollars? That was @9JaunJaun. Literally.
One fucking guy invented the whole thing. Hire him.
One fucking guy invented the whole thing. Hire him.
He also was our original art director who was the only person in 2013 who told (attempted?) BuzzFeed staff to stop stealing uncredited images from the internet. Thank him for that, it probably shaved years off his life.
@catesish built BuzzFeed. Literally. If you want to build yourself any sort of empire, hire Cates, she will make you one. And the reason she was everyone’s favorite person is because of stuff like this:
BuzzFeed changed the internet, for better or worse (if you say worse to me right now please eat my ass), and not because of the business/media narrative of vc funding or a visionary leader at the top. It worked because of an accidental assemblage of weird geniuses.
Excuse me it’s @9JuanJuan. He hates twitter anyway, which is a sign of how much smarter he is than you and me
