— @Nimapt
Posted 11 months ago
It’s really important that in the top third of the segment you don’t say ‘Khalid Sheikh Mohommad,’ or ‘military tribunal,’ or ‘Guantanamo’, because as soon as you say those things, people think they know what the story is. If you don’t edit mercilessly to keep out all of the words that make people leap to conclusions about what you’re going to say, you’ll never persuade people that you’re going to tell then something you don’t already know.
Posted 11 months ago
From the article:
Another aspect of modern media consumption is the mashing together of content. With Facebook and Twitter people are sharing all different types of media from humor to cute kittens to Internet memes to serious substantive reporting. BuzzFeed, as a publisher, brings all this together. The argument that cute animal posts dumb down your audience has never made sense to me. I like to think of a smart Frenchman at a cafe reading Le Monde and smoking a pipe. A lot of French cafes have dogs, so he pauses to pet the dog. When he’s petting the dog, he doesn’t get dumb and when he goes back to Le Monde, he doesn’t suddenly get smart. Humans are complex and there are all these different interests that don’t have to be perfectly resolved. You can like tabloid stuff and cute animal stuff and really smart substantive reporting. That’s not a contradiction. That’s just being human.
