On Tuesday, BuzzFeed’s chief executive, Jonah Peretti, sent a letter to employees that read, in part:
We are making a big change at BuzzFeed that will simplify our organizational structure, allow us to operate more entrepreneurially, and help us better serve the hundreds of millions of people who enjoy BuzzFeed each month.
In this new structure, video won't be the job of just one department. Having a single “video department” in 2016 makes about as much sense as having a “mobile department”. Instead, it will be something we expand and embed across the organization. As digital video becomes ubiquitous, every major initiative at BuzzFeed around the world will find an expression as video, just like everything we do works on mobile and social platforms. Instead of organizing around a format or technology, we will organize our work to take full advantage of many formats and technologies.
The new structure involves splitting the publication into two departments: BuzzFeed News and BuzzFeed Entertainment.
BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, will run BuzzFeed News, which will “encompass the work that is rooted in reporting and journalistic independence — on topics both serious and fun — and focused in the long term on building the trust of [BuzzFeed’s] audience.”
The department will include the publication’s health team, breaking news reporters, foreign correspondents and investigative journalists. BuzzFeed’s news video team also will expand.
BuzzFeed Motion Pictures’ president, Ze Frank, was named president of BuzzFeed Entertainment Group. Though Frank’s department includes “short- and long-form video, posts, lists, quizzes, micro-content and more,” Frank will expand the company’s entertainment video content.
The move to create two departments—BuzzFeed News and BuzzFeed Entertainment Group—comes at a time when online media companies are grappling with the balance between covering news and politics, and lighter fare like social media, entertainment, and lifestyle.
Vanity Fair reported that the announcement comes after reports that BuzzFeed missed its revenue targets and cut its forecasts—something the company denied.
Vanity Fair also reported there’s staff concern that BuzzFeed’s focus on video could translate into less news, pointing to NBCUniversal’s $200 million partnership that “suggested the digital media company was interested in more remunerative revenue streams that native advertising.”
However, Peretti remains confident that the company’s focus on video—along with the new split—will enable BuzzFeed to effectively produce more news and more entertainment content.
In May, CNNMoney reported that BuzzFeed News was retrenching as the company staked more and more of its business on video, for which entertainment was top priority. The majority of BuzzFeed's revenue generation comes from the ad agency side of its business, which is heavily based on entertainment content.
Peretti has repeatedly dismissed that idea. "We are a global, cross-platform media company for news and entertainment," he told CNNMoney at the time. "Like most big media companies, we are able to do both."
Vanity Fair continued:
“Thinking about where we fit in the industry, it’s a lot easier to think about when we’re organized as news and entertainment, than thinking about it in terms of being organized in video and Web site, or text and video,” Peretti told the Hive on Tuesday afternoon.
As to concerns over whether this means retreating from news, Peretti said he understands that the shift toward video can be “scary for people who write for a living.” But he noted that change is an industry-wide concern, not one unique to just BuzzFeed.
For BuzzFeed reporters, he said this presents an opportunity. “Reporters and writers are the ones who call people to interview them, who get scoops. So having really great reporters is something that’s valuable to our video-news operation,” he said. “Having more video-news capacity means that our reporters can write it up and also push that to our video team so they can reach an even bigger audience.”
In his letter to staff, Peretti wrote:
We have ambitious goals for both departments. We have an opportunity to be the leading entertainment company for the mobile, social age. And we are in position to build the the #1 global news brand for a new generation who consume news differently than their parents, but care passionately about what is happening in a quickly-changing world.
This structure will allow us to be better at entertainment and better at news. It will also complete our shift to becoming a cross-platform media company, with entertainment and news both living on our site, our apps, and distributed on platforms across the web in multiple native formats. And the new structure will better support our international teams, which will continue to be organized regionally, and draw on both BFN and BFEG for support, resources, and content.
The move delivers new opportunities to BuzzFeed reporters, but it also highlights the changing climate of media relations.
PR pros should keep in mind publications’ increasing pressure to produce content—especially video content—and consider company shifts along with sniffing out individual journalists to which to pitch.
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