If you’ve been expecting me to write about my spring break, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you. As I have already mentioned, I was in New York over the break, so I don’t have any glamorous or exciting stories like a lot of my friends. I spent most of last week in a state of jealousy, looking at photos my friends have taken over the break, marveling at their adventures (white shark diving, among them!), and admiring their suntans.
Do not take that to mean that I did not enjoy the break though! It was relaxing; and of course, I was not the only Sternie “on the New York trek” as we called it, so I still had the opportunity to hang out with my friends and have fun!
What I really want to talk about though is our trip to the BuzzFeed office last Friday! It was organized by the EMTA, and we had the chance to hear from several people: including the CEO and co-founder Jonah Peretti.
I assume a lot of you are familiar with BuzzFeed, and how unique it is in the sense that the website uses 3 different types of content on the same platform: entertainment/humor (what they started out with), branded content, and reported news. Apparently it gets 40 million unique visitors each month, which is quite impressive.
Jonah Peretti is also a co-founder of The Huffington Post, and he talked to us about how he got involved with these projects. He said he had always been interested in why and how people shared content: evolving from email forwards back in the day, to organized sharing through social portals such as Facebook and twitter.
What prompted him to start BuzzFeed was that he noticed a shift from search engines to social: in the past, most online content was based on what people searched for, but now it’s becoming a much more “human” space, and they’re making content for people, rather than search algorithms. He chatted with us for an hour, and then we also had the chance to hear from Aswini Anburajan (Director of Partnership Development), Jonathan Perelman (VP of Agency Strategy & Industry Development), and David Spiegel (Executive Director of Sales). David is actually a part-time MBA student at Stern, and he was the one who had the idea for the trek; another demonstration of how Sternies like to help each other out. I thought it was an amazing trek—I have always loved BuzzFeed, it was great to see their office, and hear about the work that they do.