Can BuzzFeed usher in a new golden age of journalism and advertising?

Smith isn’t entirely off-base, though, when he claims that fresh content is winning the day. “What people want to Tweet is great original stories, the first stories,” he says. “An hour after a New York Times article breaks, nobody Tweets, ‘Wow, look how fast this other website got up a mediocre aggregated version!’” As our own Erin Griffith pointed out in a recent post, Google’s new “Author Rank” initiative prioritizes original reporting done by verified authors in search results, which strengthens such claims about the importance of originality.

In a sense, BuzzFeed is aping the Huffington Post’s growth trajectory. It started out with low-nutrition posts about cute animals and gimmicky slices of life, but it is now building a strong editorial team and pushing into the mainstream. HuffPo started a similar way, with sensationalist stories and zingy headlines, only to later layer in more traditional news sections such as business and technology. So, while CEO Peretti might be reacting against his HuffPo past in the way he is monetizing the site and in the way its stories spread, it’s not clear that the company’s editorial strategy is really any different.

Without mentioning HuffPo by name, Smith also seems to be trying to contrast BuzzFeed against its predecessor. Over the last five to 10 years, media went on a “detour,” he says, in which publishing strategies were driven by search engine optimization and aggregation. “The two things you were trying to do were to build a portal where you just have one of every story. It didn’t have to be the best story, it didn’t have to be the first one, you just had to have something up there and people would click on it if you wrote a sexy headline.” In effect, he says, you could trick readers into clicking on your content. That’s not as true in the age of the social web, where Facebook and Twitter are gaining an increasingly large say in determining what people read.

In 2012, 9 percent of Americans who read news on digital devices said they “very often” got news through Facebook or Twitter recommendations. A Reuters poll, meanwhile, found that people aged under 25 are twice as likely to find their news through social media as they are through a search engine. And BuzzFeed has certainly found success in social. According to the stats it publishes with every post, the publication routinely attracts vastly more traffic from Facebook and Twitter than it does from Google.

The social sharing paradigm is completely different to the SEO one, Smith argues. Unlike in the SEO era, when scamming clicks was easy – the most egregious case in point is to be found in HuffPo’s infamous “What Time Is The Superbowl” post – only in the rarest of exceptions is it possible to trick someone into sharing a story, he says. Still, as Peretti told Sarah Lacy at PandoMonthly in September, BuzzFeed looks at customized content for social sharing as almost a science, albeit one far less cynical than the cold calculations of SEO. “In order for an idea to replicate it has to be simple enough for a friend to talk about it at a party,” Peretti told Lacy. “It has to hit something deeply personal that ties in with people’s sense of identity.”

For all the talk of a return to the golden age of advertising and editorial, however, BuzzFeed is going about its expansion in a decidedly traditional way. With big-money editorial hires – such as Ze Frank, Rolling Stone war correspondent Michael Hastings, and former Spin magazine editor Steve Kandell – and the fast addition of new sections, it is relying on business conventions that were forged back in the real golden age of news, when newspapers could print on actual paper, turn a pretty penny on classifieds, and fill up their pages with supermarket ads.

There is also a sense that BuzzFeed might be rushing it a bit. Its vision for its entertainment vertical doesn’t quite seem fleshed out, with Richard Rushfield plying his introductory letter with vague promises of “taking our readers deep into the story of Hollywood” to “ask the questions no one else is asking,” and to “do something different and to capture, every day, the reality of the craziest story on Earth.” Similarly, Smith describes BuzzFeed’s soon-to-be-beefed-up tech section as focused on tech culture as its intersects with Web services and social platforms, which isn’t exactly saying much.

This apparent lack of substance might be expected for a young publication exploring new fields – certainly, PandoDaily could be fairly accused of such editorial wobbles in its early days – but it also plays into the hands of critics who are eager to paint BuzzFeed as a company concerned with metrics-over-substance. Last April, for instance, Gawker Media owner Nick Denton said of CEO Peretti: “Jonah – whether at Huffington Post or BuzzFeed – has always cared more about the volume of discussion and social sharing than its quality.”

A couple of weeks ago, Will Leitch at Gawker Media’s Deadspin mocked the people who praise BuzzFeed. In an essay entitled “It’s Not OK To Be Shitty,” he parodied the genuflecting: “BuzzFeed has put a bunch of pictures of kittens together in a way that is easily passed around by idiots? THEY HAVE FIGURED OUT THE INTERNET THEY ARE SUCH BRILLIANT PACKAGERS OF CONTENT THE FUTURE OF MEDIA.”

While it is true many media watchers have focused on BuzzFeed’s social prowess, bolstered by Peretti’s reputation as a kind of viral wizard, the publication is actually benefiting from a suite of digital characteristics that are coalescing as the web enters a new, more mature age. The web is no longer ruled by SEO, aggregation, apps, display ads, or email direct marketing; it is instead governed by cross-platform principles that allow content on the open Web to travel easily between devices, and go to wherever readers are. At the same time, readers are more willing to accept sponsored content being included “in stream” with the normal editorial product rather than pegged to corners and side columns.

Because it has been among the first to successfully gather the various threads of a maturing web, BuzzFeed has placed itself at the forefront of an emerging era of digital publishing. Alongside it, some of the “new media” stalwarts are starting to look decidedly old hat. Today, the likes of the Huffington Post, Slate, Politico, and the publications in AOL’s stable act like creaky veterans with the problems of legacy internet companies, including pageview-driven mentalities wedded to SEO and aggregation, and heavy reliance on display ads and the desktop Web.

On the other hand, BuzzFeed is not alone in its journey into the new frontiers of digital publishing. Its fellow travellers include Vox Media – which owns SB Nation, The Verge, and Polygon – Atlantic Media’s Quartz, and PandoDaily, which, while all unique in their own ways are adopting similar methods.

Of course, even if the web has grown to the point where BuzzFeed can make a staff-heavy publication profitable, and can expand in a way that harks back to the days of star reporters and deep sections, it still has its differences from the newsprint era. Most prominently, readers have to get used to seeing listicles about 23 animals defying gravity alongside serious stories about, say, President Obama’s nomination for Secretary of Defense.

You won’t see that in the New York Times, and to Ben Smith, that’s entirely the point. Such odd juxtapositions are part of the new media reality – news delivered via social no longer comes in neat bundles.

“Animal pictures and political writing and world news and writing about sex are all going to be mixed up one after another in a way that is uncomfortable in older media organizations but is actually the reality of how people consume media now,” Smith says. From his point of view, readers have gotten used to that surprisingly fast. Smith adds: “I expected more resistance.”

It might well be the case that in the tablets and Twitter age, news habits die fast.

This article by Hamish McKenzie originally appeared on PandoDaily and is published with permission. Illustration by Hallie Bateman.