Tom McGeveran theorizes on what new BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith will do:
“Smith has said that the news part of the site will focus on scoops—things only they have. But by ‘scoops’ I don’t think he really means precisely what the traditional journalism world has meant. … In a lot of ways by “scoops” what we really mean is ‘fast enterprise.’ In traditional journalism, enterprise was always discretionary stuff: news you made, either by investigating it yourself or by synthetically putting together reporting or research with an idea or take that had a chance of redirecting the reporting and conversation in the future. But traditional newspapers also had to be one-stop shops: Publish only enterprise stuff and you become marginalized, because you’re not talking about the same things your readers are talking about; you’re not meeting them in the middle. The social web reduces the need to make that compromise — but only so much.”
