Quality wins in the long run and BuzzFeed is not focused on quality. Their company should be called Linkbait, Inc. They're the problem, not the solution. I'd bet against this if I could.
The history of progress & technology is of fast, simple, low-end solutions getting better over time to the point where they're strictly superior to the legacy alternatives. I have little doubt that Buzzfeed, or another upstart media company, will someday be able to do "real" journalism better and faster than the NYT.
(If anyone else believes this, come help me make it happen: http://www.cafe.com/developers)
I see BuzzFeed as a company that's found a way to exploit people's pull towards instant gratification. But it serves a terrible purpose which has short term benefits for the company but little benefit for others.
They're similar to payday loan companies. Many argue that they're meeting a market need. They maybe but they're doing it in an exploitative way. That's bad for everyone.
Depends; there's always the (no longer so quaint) Soviet usage of the term.
It is a domain of technology, the same as computing is.
> It serves an important civic and moral purpose
Which is orthogonal to whether or not it is a (domain of) technology. Medicine, unquestionably, is a domain of technology, and it serves an important civic and moral purpose, too.
Journalism may be a largely social domain of technology, but social technology is just as real as digital technology, or any other kind.
To me, they're building a platform for journalism/media. They might be in the nascent stage where LinkBait is a dominant strategy, but I'd bet that high-quality journalism will become an increasingly integral part of BuzzFeed's business as it matures.
Quality journalism doesn't pay in a dollars in to dollars out basis. A carefully-researched article that takes a week-long trip to the Congo to write will get no more and possibly fewer clicks than "Ten Amazing Shark Facts That Will Make You Shit Your Pants" that takes twenty minutes on wikipedia.
They have more in-depth content but I imagine it's a tiny part of their overall traffic: http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform
A recent piece on the AUMF and its history was an excellent read http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-w...