“The 40 Greatest Dog GIFs of All Time”, "The 45 most powerful images of 2011", and “Meet The Teen Sexual Assault Survivors Who Took On Their School District And Won” are all stories BuzzFeed has published recently. To an outside viewer, these three headlines read like they could not possibly be from the same site–but BuzzFeed is working to change that perception. By creating a mix of random “listicles,” viral videos, and serious political news stories via their BuzzFeed News arm, BuzzFeed has become an increasingly popular site for the American public. The digital media company is disrupting traditional print media by organizing itself as a vertically integrated technology company. With this, BuzzFeed is a viral content company that has only …show more content…
With online news aggregators and websites, the merging of both of these elements is not much different than past offline publications. Newspapers have ever since provided a vast amount of topics, from news, to weather, to TV programs, sports, and even crosswords. Accordingly, online news websites did not feel the need to be comprehensive. The addition of original content, or journalism to the aggregator model has been presented by plenty of large Web sites that devote themselves to both, such as the Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Gawker, to name a few. Editor-in-chief Ben Smith elaborated on this combination of entertainment and serious news, in that “You’ll find that we are doing both deep reporting and original entertainment, and some formal experimentation – but we are not looking for some lame hybrid of the two, but to hit as hard as possible wherever we play.” With this, BuzzFeed is basically an eclectic agglomeration of news and entertainment, which is essentially not too far away from magazines or newspapers. However, the entertainment aspects are increasingly being separated from the outlet’s news