I remember we had a 7 AM meeting which, for me, is incredibly early. Maybe it was the third or fourth. But she was definitely starting earlier. I came back feeling like, if anything, it would be an adventure. Arianna was incredibly charming and tireless and driven. Then we formed a partnership, also with Andrew Breitbart, who used to work for Arianna. The four of us went into business together. We started hiring a founding team. Then, of course, Roy, who was working with Arianna previously and continued, became a partner at HuffPost too.
I just want to finish the bio. Do you go to AOL then? I started BuzzFeed as more of a lab, to try to understand various things I was thinking about, as HuffPost was scaling and on its path and growing, and went from being full-time at Huffington Post to being one day a week at BuzzFeed, and then went to half time BuzzFeed, half time HuffPost.
When we sold, I was about one day a week at Huffington Post. So I would go to the operations meetings, which was all the senior managers. I would spend a lot of time emailing and IMing and talking with Paul Barry about product and tech, and spent a fair amount of time talking with Kenny about various things. There was a lot of overlap, but I realized that it was a lot less overlap than I thought. And that what you think about in the shower and in your down time is one of the most important things, in terms of providing value to a company.
It was hard to do that, being involved with two companies. Your subconscious was having to fight over what it thought about. Because it was really the first technology-based news service to take a wire service — it took Reuters — and blast it out there, in a more or less very current and real time way. It quickly became the largest news service on the web. But Huffington Post, I think, was the first news service that really got to scale without much of any original content that was created for another form.
Is that correct? Jonah : Yeah. But we definitely did it. Was it the share? Does it all go back to sharing? Is that the basis for…Or is there a formula that you think is….
Jonah : I ended up taking a side journey into search. You could get some, but we were pretty…It was word of mouth. There was some sharing. Blogs sent a shockingly little amount of traffic. They were talked about so much.
But having all the blogs link to us and talk to us got us to be like a one or two million unique visitor site. The traffic was still largely in search. So we figured out some new things with search. Also, Google changed it. It used to be…If you think of a classic SEO consultant would go to news organizations and say you should create topics pages. You should have every major topic and then you should keep linking to those topic pages and trying to win and get in the top ten search results.
You may have invented it. Or whoever died five years before Michael Jackson. So the topics pages made sense. It was like, you searched for the general topic and you land on The New York Times topic page.
It has all the articles there. The new ones are at the top. That Google was, for the first time, able to quickly react and index that. So like a beauty queen loses her crown. Nobody cares who Miss Wisconsin. That was something that was new, because of changes in Google, and that nobody really understood and no one was really focused… So there was a period of a couple years where we were able to swarm big stories, in a way that worked really well for the Google ecosystem.
Martin : Were you writing stories for the Google ecosystem. The most extreme case is a company called Demand Media. This was what About. Jonah : Right. But when you think about something like Heath Ledger dying, Huffington Post would have five people writing a story and seeing what everyone else is writing and seeing every single breaking news.
So aggregating from other sources, linking to other sources. The New York Times is saying this. This was just discovered by TMZ. It gives them the right thing.
But we brought people there through search. From a user perspective, landing on that page actually was a good experience. You do a Google search.
So, all of that made a page that Google liked and that consumers liked as this one stop shop to find out all the things that are happening all around. One example of this, I remember some reporter calling me to ask about this a while ago.
Think how much The New Yorker spent on that. A consumer is in their office. They have a little bit of time between meetings. They heard some buzz about a scientology piece in The New Yorker, they search for it. From a purely algorithmic perspective or purely technical perspective, Google is giving people, in that case, a good consumer experience. The time it took for the editor to read it and pull out relevant things.
And that links should be fairly shared. Copyright is fundamentally broken. What do you think of that dynamic, given where journalism is today, in its more traditional incarnation? Jonah : Part of the problem is that people get so rooted in the way something worked in the past, that then all of their thinking about how things should be in the future is to justify the economics of an older business model.
When you look at what technology companies have built, the technology industry is many times larger than the media industry. From a purely economic perspective, like selling iPads and iPods and computers is a lot better business than selling music even when music was in its heyday.
So it depends what you care about. If you care about the economy, you need to zoom out a little bit and look at the bigger picture. Why does someone who lives in Philadelphia have to read the local Philly paper and not everything great being produced all around the country?
And how do those new opportunities give us more of some of the things we really love about journalism. Martin : [inaudible ] close, I think of all time.
The reality is that a lot of journalistic institutions are in deep trouble. You mentioned Philadelphia. It may still be. The last time, for pennies on what they were sold for on the dollar before. Tribune company is in bankruptcy. So, Jonah, nobody seems to be able to come up with a model for local journalism so that all of these corrupt state houses have a watchdog in their community. Jonah : By the way, BuzzFeed just published a 6, word piece on scientology.
Jonah : [laughs] We take shit for things. So it is possible to fund that kind of work online. We did it. But to me, I agree. It was a very interesting philosophical question. Jonah : Or Twitter. Should they be organized for the good of the consumer and what the consumer likes, or should they be organized for the good of the business models of existing media companies?
Or should they be organized according to some higher principle of journalism or what people should receive? Those are three very different things. You would organize what you feature very differently.
Martin : But this is a history. John Huey characterized it this way. Above the timeline are these swimmers. There are people who are making decisions and trying to find their way.
Another theory is that, the decisions that I talked about before, the historical decisions, the decision to give content away for free, give links away. The link economy, as Jeff characterizes it. Not go hard at copyright. These were decisions that were made, in the mid to late nineties, early s. I made some of them. Things would be a lot different if they had been made in a different way. The way the industry was. That is our intellectual property.
It could have been even worse. It could have been worst if the newspaper industry had decided that any time someone tried to rewrite their story, they were going to sue them.
I think the Internet is a massive technology that has changed so many things. It has a certain logic to it. Networks have a different logic, that is counterintuitive to people. The way networks function is still counterintuitive to people.
Increasingly through social networks, where people are the ones making the decisions about whether to share stuff. That would have been true, even if every piece of premium content was behind a pay wall. Martin : Skipping forward now. Your point about scientology is a really interesting one. We just had the Goldsmith Awards, at Harvard.
One was a tribute series on fire retardants and the corruption in the chemical industry. A new business model or set of economics are emerging. It might not be the Tribune Company doing those things in the future. The next day, Peretti got an email from Nike rejecting the order and "saying the word 'sweatshop' is inappropriate slang," Peretti tells the audience in New York City: "I just responded It means a shop or factory where workers toil around in unhealthy conditions.
Now can you send me the shoes? After a series of back-and-forth emails, in which Nike continued to reject the order, Peretti pasted the correspondence together and sent it to a few friends. At a time when the concept of "going viral" didn't yet exist, his creation became an early email forward and ended up reaching millions of people. Peretti's email spread so widely that, despite knowing little about the sweatshop issue, "I ended up on the Today Show with Nike's head of global PR and Katie Couric talking about sweatshop labor," he tells Raz.
He starting asking himself, "How can a student with no context in the media reach millions of people about an issue he knows very little about? Since launching, BuzzFeed has about doubled their audience every year, Peretti tells Raz.
Soul food and the stories it tells about America By Jamil Smith. The Taliban, explained By Sam Ellis. Facebook is quietly buying up the metaverse By Peter Kafka. Sign up for the newsletter Sign up for The Weeds Get our essential policy newsletter delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email required. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy.
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