Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Ben Smith of Politico will lead BuzzFeed’s effort to report news.
BuzzFeed, a site where the editors and algorithms sift the Web in search of viral articles elsewhere, has decided that it needs articles of its own.
In a move that is sure to surprise the political and journalistic classes, the site is hiring Ben Smith, one of the foremost writers at Politico, to build a new breed of social news organization.
As editor in chief, Mr. Smith will hire more than a dozen reporters right away, said Jonah Peretti, who founded BuzzFeed with Kenneth Lerer, “and then we will keep growing from there.” The reporters will be scoop generators, Mr. Peretti said. “By breaking scoops and drawing attention,” he added, they will help increase traffic and, by extension, advertising sales.
It is a tenet of BuzzFeed that the Web pages users like to click are different from the pages they like to share with others. BuzzFeed encourages the second case, the sharing of links, articles and photos on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. The reporting by Mr. Smith and his staff will be produced with that sharing strategy in mind.
“I already write for the social Web and consume most of my news on the social Web,” said Mr. Smith, who calls Twitter his main source of news.
Mr. Smith, a popular political reporter, was one of the first people to join Politico after it was conceived five years ago. He was “present at the creation and was instrumental in establishing our voice and journalistic sensibility,” said John Harris, the editor in chief of Politico.
Mr. Harris said he had imagined that someday Mr. Smith would want to act on his “obvious entrepreneurial streak.” Mr. Smith’s byline on political news will remain exclusive to Politico through the presidential primaries next year, and he will remain a weekly columnist for the Web site. “Keeping his voice and ideas on politics was a very big deal to us,” Mr. Harris said.
“I had no plans to leave Politico at all,” said Mr. Smith, whose Politico blog was expanded last month. “I was totally bit by the bug of how exciting this was.” He has not decided whether to change his Twitter handle, which is @Benpolitico.