Viral Media: Audience Engagement and Editorial Autonomy at BuzzFeed and Vice

Abstract

As organisations ‘native’ to the digital environment, sites like BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox and The Huffington Post have been well placed to take advantage of new technologies and pioneer new approaches to creating and distributing media. Despite this, they remain conspicuous by their absence in contemporary media scholarship.

This article will focus on two North American digital-native media organisations: BuzzFeed and Vice. As two of the largest and most popular digital natives in the world, these organisations merit closer critical attention. Little remains known, for instance, about the types of content these organisations produce, or the routines, cultures, and practices that undergird their sites of content production. Given their expanding role in the contemporary information ecosystem, it is vital that scholarship does more to take these social actors into account.

In the interest of advancing our theoretical and empirical understanding of virality in media, this paper examines the extent to which news production at BuzzFeed and Vice is impacted by the ‘quantified’ audience, and the normative implications of these findings with regards to journalistic autonomy.

The findings of this research are based on semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with 22 journalists from BuzzFeed and Vice, in the US and UK.