Poynter adjunct faculty member Craig Silverman, a scourge of inaccurate reporting and longtime correction collector, is headed to BuzzFeed to head up the Web giant’s Canadian operation, The (Toronto) Globe and Mail reported Friday.
In his new role, Silverman will run the company’s outposts in Toronto and Ottawa as staffers make content around buzzy stories, Simon Houpt writes:
Silverman said that while BuzzFeed may be covering subjects and stories already in the news, it will take a different approach. “We won’t be looking at what happened today in Parliament. At times we’ll be satirical, humour-driven, personality-driven, and I think that’s a different thing that doesn’t exist today,” he said.
Silverman is the founder of Emergent, a real-time rumor tracker born from his work with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. Emergent evaluates the veracity or falsehood of stories that gain traction on social media and traces their provenance.
Silverman’s work as a chronicler of the media industry’s foibles has led him to BuzzFeed before. In August, he questioned BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith about his decision to remove thousands of posts from the site without telling readers.
