When Jonah Peretti first conceived Buzzfeed he intended to create a publication that found content on the internet and helped it go viral. The original Buzzfeed site consisted solely of the that the average Buzzfeed reader thinks of when they think about a Buzzfeed: short image filled articles, lists and quizzes. However Buzzfeed has since expanded into something much more significant to the media landscape today. In order to properly analyze Buzzfeed’s editorial content, its is important to know that they have organized their company into two broad sections that each produce content for the publication: Buzzfeed News and Buzzfeed Entertainment. Each section has separate staff and are lead by separate people. Under Buzzfeed News, readers can …show more content…
The Buzzfeed Copy team has 8 members spread through offices around the world (3 in New York City, 2 in London, 2 in LA, and 1 in Sydney). Megan Paolone is the Deputy Copy Chief for Buzzfeed at the New York Office. Since she was hired as a copy intern at Buzzfeed in 2013, she watched Buzzfeed grow at what seems like an exponential rate. Paolone says that the job itself has changed very little, but it is the content, and the amount of content she is editing has changed. Specifically, Paolone has seen a huge increase of the long form stories and serious news content she has has the opportunity to work on. News now takes up close to 85 percent of Paolone’s time (much to her pleasure as she entered this industry hoping to edit news). This is likely because serious new stories are on the list of things that Paolone and the copy team are required to edit before it is published. This list also includes personal essays, investigative pieces, legally sensitive information and long form features. (It is noteworthy that breaking news is not on this list, due to it’s time sensitive nature, but all breaking news is edited by a member of the copy team before Buzzfeed pushes the content on social media.) However, while every piece is edited and signed off by at least one person before publication, Buzzfeed’s copy team is simply not big enough to edit every piece before it’s published. Consequently, a large part of Paolone’s job is back reading. This means writers publish pieces before her, or any member of the copy team, read over them, but these pieces are edited after to steer clear of any error. Like Buzzfeed established which pieces must be edited by the team before publication and which can be back read, there is an established order for the back reading. Paolone