Playful Products
In addition to fostering specific practices in the newsroom, BuzzFeed creates exclusive products that take the ethos of play into account. The game team has fashioned interactives (which they call “formats”) that can be used across content and eventually incorporated into the website’s content management system (CMS), as are the long-standing and ubiquitous quizzes that editorial employs even in its more traditional “News” section.
One example of the team’s more popular interactive formats was a name generator created for the television show Game of Thrones, which allowed a user to input his/her name and be dubbed with a moniker rewritten in the fantastical style of the show. They fashioned a similar generator to enable a user to compose a BuzzFeed-esque headline. Other creations include a chatbot written to simulate an obdurate worker during a 2014 Comcast scandal, a tattoo-generator based on the show Orange is the New Black, and a more traditional game entitled the “Sleepy Sloth Sprint.”39
Once a product is developed, it is first released internally—one of Leffel’s favorite parts of the process. Anyone can give feedback. Yue described the benefits of an internal release: Editorial, which usually has more of a casual games bent, provides different type of criticism than the more “savvy” tech group.
Formats are quick to build and easy (as well as inexpensive) to produce. Without significant investment, the group is willing to move on if something doesn’t appeal to its audience. “Each version [which is published] is like a chance to test something else. So that’s kind of like where we’re iterating, but we don’t go back and fix [formats].” said Leffel, who added later that they work with live versions of their new formats in conjunction with an editor to create a post, and later tweak and improve upon the product for future articles.40
Hansen provided further insight into the motivations behind these expeditious releases: “It’s better to get the idea out there; you make assumptions and [those] glaring problems, the hundred thousand people that look at it are going to find those instantly and that informs what is actually important and the direction you should go. So, it’s okay if it doesn’t work because you learn stuff about it and then you can do better next time.”
A similar mindset informs Shepherd’s vision of the content he generates:
And so the thing that I talk about a lot is the Venn diagram of “It’s Good,” “I Liked It or It Was Meaningful To Me,” and “It Was a Hit.” And the center of that Venn diagram is awesome when you get there, but as long as you hit one of those three circles, you’re [doing] a good thing and if you keep making things that hit one of those, you’re often going to hit the center.
To achieve this, Shepherd encourages a constant state of creation in terms of what can qualify as content. This is evident in the sprints that Shepherd imposes—in a fixed amount of time, he and other editors make as many types of a particular format as possible. The game sprint he did with the team netted, among other things, the headline generator. Shepherd utilizes the playful and competitive nature of the sprints to overcome the pressures of content creation. Thus the attachment to form and content are in constant flux and their value is not judged solely by editors, but by the key metric for audience interest—shareability.