Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

When many people hear the name BuzzFeed, they may think “exploding watermelon.” That’s reasonable enough, since BuzzFeed’s video of a melon unable to take the pressure of one more rubber band got more than 5 million views last April — with 800,000 people watching the messy event as it happened on Facebook Live.

But I get a different image: I think of the dogged reporter Andrew Kaczynski, surrounded by researchers, spending endless hours listening to old audiotapes, and coming up with scoop after scoop in the campaign season. It was Kaczynski’s team, for example, that found the radio clip of Donald Trump telling Howard Stern in 2002 that he thought the Iraq War was probably a good idea. That contradicted the Republican nominee’s claim that he opposed the war from the start.

Under editor Ben Smith (formerly of Politico), the company founded in 2006 has moved away from its listicle-and-cat-video heritage by hiring strong news talent, including investigative editor Mark Schoofs from ProPublica....