Playful Attitude
Sharing informs the overall attitude of the company. “People at BuzzFeed are hardwired to think that way,” said Shepherd, adding later that if a piece isn’t getting shared then it’s not resonating with the audience. While not everyone embraces the practices and products of the game team, and they don’t augment some of BuzzFeed’s most serious news content, they contribute to shareable content, which is, by its nature, more playful than traditional journalistic output. Sharing constitutes the reciprocal relationship between BuzzFeed and its users. As Shepherd put it, “We do the equivalent of play testing with our posts. We’ll try a bunch of different things and then the stuff that is doing well and getting shared is the stuff that we start showing people more, and the stuff that isn’t really working, we won’t show people as much.”
While staff is implicitly expected to reshape work based on user response, BuzzFeed’s experimental culture means that not every piece is necessarily a direct reaction to user demands. Said Shepherd, “You’re not going to be censured for doing something that didn’t work because in fact you’re supposed to try to do a bunch of things that don’t work.” Success is measured by how well journalists attune to users. Electronic displays exhibit the most currently read articles and pieces—something other companies, like Gawker media, do.41 Staff members also have access to metrics about posts, especially seed and social traffic. While seed traffic registers unique visitors to the BuzzFeed site, social traffic—or the traffic from sharing via social media—matters more to members of BuzzFeed and represents not only a wider spread but a successful article for the company.
Play imbues the corporate climate as well. Yue described BuzzFeed as having a “play spirit” long before the game team was established. She added that she found experimentation to be an important asset of the company and one that separated it from the bureaucracy of both traditional newsrooms and perfection-oriented game studios. “At BuzzFeed we don’t always have the resources to get everything right the very first time. Our strategy is to keep trying and experimenting. We roll stuff out, get feedback from user comments and sharing data, and then make improvements for the next game.”
This vision of content creation, along with user response, has even colored BuzzFeed’s fast-paced expansion. Such is apparent in its mobile platform, which for the game team has meant designing products that can be used transmedially, and the recent unbundling of its editorial divisions to allow for more autonomy between different content creators. BuzzFeed seems to unconsciously adhere to a basic tenet of game design—that a game is only as good as its player. If the player isn’t having fun, and BuzzFeed doesn’t abide by its audience’s interests, the best games are rendered useless.
It should be noted that the iterative and experimental quality of game design is just one potential avenue for exploring how newsrooms can adopt playful practices. Equally important is the ability to subvert and challenge norms. While BuzzFeed’s brand subverts traditional news norms, this quality can now be found in dozens of newsrooms where tinkerers and developers have devised many successful playful products in the last few years. An example can be found, somewhat uncharacteristically, at The New York Times. Senior software architect Jacob Harris created the “Times Haiku” as an afterthought. Harris said, “I tend to just sort of do these sort of silly projects at the Times sometimes because either I’m bored with something I’m working on or, you know I actually did the haiku thing because I was depressed. I had been doing elections, elections, elections, elections and then the elections stop.” The space and time to play, even if just between projects, can net unforeseen positive results.