Playful Problems
Still, this time and space is just one challenge newsrooms face when trying to incorporate iterative and experimental design strategies into their work and workflows. BuzzFeed is no exception and, like other newsrooms, still sees problems arise from its playful atmosphere.
As a brand, BuzzFeed is often dismissed because of its entertainment-centric model, and its playful content hardly disabuses readers of this perspective. From its inception, BuzzFeed was disinclined to become a traditional news site. While its “News” section might not produce the lighthearted fare of the “Buzz” division or the game team, the site as a whole maintains a playful attitude in service of its users.
There are also practical issues involving play at BuzzFeed. First are concerns about preservation, in which the organization is not overtly interested. For instance, Shepherd said, “Sometimes I’ll come across some old, beautiful thing that I was proud of that doesn’t really exist anymore, and that’s a bummer,” because, he added, “in terms of the site, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not like those things are getting traffic anymore. We’ve moved on.”
The preservation of content is less important than its immediate shareability. This contemporary viewpoint isn’t necessarily at odds with the event-driven focus of traditional news creation. How to both preserve and innovate within digital media remains problematic. Both the forms and content a company like BuzzFeed creates could be lost to time. Shepherd said that he has gone back to older posts on BuzzFeed that are available in order to review content. “Going back to old stuff that we used to do is often a source of new ideas. The web, in some ways, is cyclical. Things that were cool in 2007 that the web as a whole decided to stop doing sometimes will suddenly come back up.”
A second dilemma revolves around the spatial and organic quality of form and content creation. By its own admission, the game team is not utilized by the entirety of the organization, including the more traditional “News” division, but works project to project. Furthermore, although Buzzfeed has a relatively horizontal organizational structure, boundaries between editorial, development, and advertising are still circumscribed. Company strategists are not particularly focused on finding ways to further integrate game design throughout BuzzFeed, a posture many of the advocates of game design interviewed for this report repeated.
However, this impasse is not insurmountable. For instance, The Washington Post restructured its newsroom starting in 200942 when it integrated its online and offline content and more recently moved embedded engineers inside the newsroom.43 The Post has since continued to develop and innovate in a manner not dissimilar to BuzzFeed with a surfeit of content-specific applications for mobile devices, along with the use of quizzes and other formats. Both the Post and BuzzFeed demonstrate the importance of spatial and departmental dynamics, where, unlike traditional editorial, developers can impact the creation of novel forms of news and build upon user reaction.