Ben Smith, editor in chief of Buzzfeed, stood to the side and smiled, staring at his iPhone as he swiped through e-mail messages and retweeted something about Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.
What is BenSmithing? To the Republicans who coined the term last year, it refers to writing an article that supposedly tackles a Democratic Party scandal, but is actually intended to dismiss the issue, something they believe Mr. Smith has often done for President Obama.
But to Mr. Smith’s Buzzfeed colleagues, the term has become an absurdist catchall they use to poke fun at their boss. Sometimes BenSmithing is to share dirty pictures over Snapchat. Other times BenSmithing is to dance a clumsy version of the Funky Chicken.
Are any of them true? “I have in fact sent Katie Notopoulos a creepshot on Snapchat,” Mr. Smith said by e-mail the day after the party, referring to his fellow Buzzfeed editor.
Maybe he’s joking. But Mr. Smith, polite and mild-mannered as he is, has been known to shock people before. In December 2011, he announced that he was leaving Politico, the insiderly political site at which he had been a star blogger since 2007, to take the top editorial job at Buzzfeed, a site better known for cat GIFs and dorky “listicles” (articles in list form, like “33 Animals Who Are Extremely Disappointed in You”) than political muckraking.
“It just wasn’t a place for a political reporter to go,” said Josh Benson, a founder of Capital New York, a news site founded by some of Mr. Smith’s former colleagues from The New York Observer.
“But there’s an ‘on the other hand,’ ” Mr. Benson said, “which is that it didn’t surprise me one bit. He’s got that entrepreneurial thing. He’s not content to make the doughnuts.”
Mr. Smith, 36, has long had a reputation for doing things his own way. Before Buzzfeed, he was known for pulling city politics into the digital era with The Politicker, a blog he started for The Observer in 2004. While other print reporters were waiting for deadlines to share the news, Mr. Smith had the then-novel idea of publishing what he knew on the Web and letting readers leave comments, producing a lively and often indecorous forum that transfixed Gotham’s power brokers.
“It’s not just that he did it first, he did it well,” Mr. Benson said.
It’s that forward-thinking mentality that helps add some clarity to the Smith-Buzzfeed marriage. Buzzfeed, which was started in 2006 by Jonah Peretti, a founder of The Huffington Post, operates on the philosophy that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are America’s new front pages and that the content people view online is determined more by what their friends share than what is found on the home page of a news organization. As such, the distinction between Web ephemera like baby videos and traditional journalism has all but disappeared.
Mr. Smith, who was born and raised on the Upper West Side, appears to fit right in so far. He has brought political reporting to Buzzfeed without betraying its signature attitude. The site’s year-end roundup of political stories was titled “The 15 most OMG Buzzfeed Politics Stories of 2012,” and its most popular political post of the year was “A User’s Guide to Smoking Pot with Barack Obama.”
Not that it’s all LOLs and pot smoking. On Mr. Smith’s fourth day with the company, Buzzfeed broke the news that Senator John McCain would endorse his former rival Mitt Romney, a significant scoop in the minute-to-minute world of campaign reporting. And last July, the reporter Rebecca Elliot published a deeply reported investigative article on the conditions at a hospital in Afghanistan that was being financed by the United States government.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/fashion/ben-smith-the-boy-wonder-of-buzzfeed.html?partner=rss&emc=rss