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Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

What's tough here, and I agree wholeheartedly that the Times isn't doing a great job digitally, is that the companies that seem to have a better grasp on digital (HuffPo, Buzzfeed, Vox, etc.) only have a grasp on strong digital business models and don't seem to have a grasp on delivering quality journalism/user experience.

The Times is still a great news site because of it's great reporting. And valuing great reporting is inherited from the paper newspaper days. But it would be amazing to see a company value great reporting while simultaneously seizing the ways the internet has improved our ability to communicate.

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I'm surprised that anyone even remotely considers Buzzfeed to be "journalism". Buzzfeed is like the zester to the lemon that is world events.

I've been pleasantly surprised by some of Buzzfeed's journalism. This article [1], a rich narrative following one of the few female boxing judges, has original reporting and is well written. Funnily enough, I discovered this article via a link from New York Times' wonderful new NYT Now app.

[1] http://www.buzzfeed.com/joelanderson/the-woman-who-kod-manny...

Well, it is surprising, but between all these lists of funny gifs and celebrity photos lie a solid, proper journalism stuff. For example, they recently started a political ruckus with a single article: http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/bidens-son-polish-ex-presi...

I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't seen any of the output yet, as it's rather new, but Buzzfeed started expanding their operations past lists of gifs sometime last year. Going as far as hiring an investigative team in late 2013 and getting some industry names (e.g. Pulitzer winner Mark Schoofs) to join by using the money from an enormous venture round offer higher salaries than many of their competitors.

It was a shock to me when I heard this as well. But I've seen some of the work at Buzzfeed lately and they're even publishing strong cultural essays like this one: http://www.buzzfeed.com/syreetamcfadden/teaching-the-camera-...

Buzzfeed has spent the past 6 months standing up a really great investigative team. They hired Mark Schoofs (a Pulitzer winner) from ProPublica as the head of their investigative team (http://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/21/mark-schoofs-leaves-propu... ), and recently were joined by 2014's Pulitzer winner for investigative reporting, Chris Hamby (http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/04/8543804/... ), and they've hired several really awesome people to fill out data/developer roles on the investigative team like Jeremy Singer-Vine (http://www.jsvine.com/ ).

Buzzfeed appears to be making a real go at the investigative journalism thing and it'll be interesting to see what they do.

It occurs to me that what BuzzFeed's doing is that following the mantra of "Don't create something unless you're sure you can sell it"

They've mastered the art of selling a product (Journalism, faux or otherwise), now they're attempting to produce as much of it as they can.

They've also realized that there's a market for all sorts of it, from the low-brow click-bait up to the hard hitting investigative stuff and are attempting to fill all the slots.

The next decade (or just 2-4 years) is really going to be interesting.

When "Jennifer Lawrence Sports A Goatee On Jimmy Fallon" is top news on Buzzfeed, you know it'll def be very interesting for a long day.

I don't get all the Buzzfeed hate. I've loved it from the first minute and it's constantly getting better. And I'm in my late forties having grown up on and still pay for quality journalism.

I'm always surprised that people think Huffington Post has any sort of innovative or effective grasp of digital journalism.

Their only innovation, and the core of their value, is realizing that most publishers will not bother to sue them for republishing articles. As such they are able to "publish" (i.e. copy/paste) tremendous amounts of interesting content for almost no cost.

Of course it's not hard for HuffPo to compete against other publishers when HuffPo can use those publishers' content against them for free.

Quartz? Verge? ArsTechnica?

All pretty forgettable. The Verge has really tanked in quality in the last few months. A good proportion of their content is now blogspam from other sources. Case in point, see anything 'written' by this staff member: http://www.theverge.com/users/casskhaw

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