Search Results for: BuzzFeed

Missing Michael Hastings

Longreads Pick

The editor of BuzzFeed remembers a friend, colleague and fearless journalist. Hastings died Tuesday in a car crash in Los Angeles, at age 33:

“Michael Hastings was really only interested in writing stories someone didn’t want him to write — often his subjects; occasionally his editor. While there is no template for a great reporter, he was one for reasons that were intrinsic to who he was: ambitious, skeptical of power and conventional wisdom, and incredibly brave. And he was warm and honest in a way that left him many unlikely friends among people you’d expect to hate him.”

Author: Ben Smith
Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Jun 18, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,014 words)

“How I Met My Dead Parents,” Anya Yurchyshyn, BuzzFeed.

Longreads Best of 2012: Doree Shafrir

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Doree Shafrir is the Executive Editor of BuzzFeed. Her story, “Can You Die from a Nightmare?” was featured on Longreads in September.

This year I read a lot of great personal essays, but these were my favorites.

Meaghan O’Connell, “Places I’ve Lived: A Nanny’s Room, the Perfect Sublet, and a Place You Can Instagram,” The Billfold

The story of young people moving to New York and learning how to navigate the city, particularly its real estate, will never get old, but it’s hard to do well/without sounding like you’re trying to mimic Joan Didion. I loved Meaghan’s piece because it was so perfectly of its time and place, and yet managed to capture the timelessness of feeling that, for the very first time, you’re really on your own in a city that doesn’t give much of a shit. 

Lena Dunham, “Seeing Nora Everywhere,” The New Yorker 

No one could quite believe it when Nora Ephron died, partly because she’d concealed her illness from all but her closest friends and family, but also because she was the premiere chronicler of love and relationships and making it as a woman, and if she was gone, what did that mean for the rest of us? There were lots of tributes to Nora Ephron, but Lena Dunham’s resonated the most with me, because she portrayed so beautifully Nora’s brilliance, her empathy and her wit.

Amity Bitzel, “My Parents Adopted a Murderer,” xoJane 

The particulars of the story were so outlandish that it almost seemed impossible for someone to write about it eloquently, but Amity Bitzel’s essay about her parents adopting a young man who had murdered his parents, and what it was like for her as a 13-year-old, managed to be affecting and beautiful, and maybe most amazingly, not sensationalistic. 

Emily Gould, “Laughing and Crying”, Emily Magazine 

Emily is so, so good at talking about those feelings that you’d really rather not admit you felt, much less put on the internet, and she is also really good at being funny about it and making bigger points about success and jealousy and autobiography. She writes in this piece, which is also about “ladyblogs” and a visit to PS1, “I have made so many decisions based on my desire to never seem publicly weak or vulnerable,” and that seemed like just about the most perfect articulation of human behavior I’d ever read.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Longreads Best of 2012: Doree Shafrir

Longreads Pick

Doree Shafrir is the Executive Editor of BuzzFeed. Her story, “Can You Die from a Nightmare?” was featured on Longreads in September.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 10, 2012
Length: 1 minutes (383 words)

“A Mormon Reporter on the Romney Bus.” —McKay Coppins, BuzzFeed

More from BuzzFeed

People who suffer from parasomnias, or sleeping disorders, often sleepwalk and experience night terrors, putting them in potentially dangerous situations:

My research tells me that most people who suffer from night terrors describe episodes that sound familiar: They feel suffocated, they are about to die, there is someone in the room with them. That doesn’t, of course, make my individual night terrors any less scary, and it crosses my mind that I could actually scare myself to death.

The prevailing theory about Tobias Wong’s death was that he hanged himself while experiencing a night terror. I imagine that something in his mind told him that hanging himself was the only way to escape whoever, or whatever, was chasing him, in the same way that I have thought that the only way to save myself was to jump out of a window or smash a pane of glass.

I realize that I want to talk to Dubitsky, both to find out what it was like for him and also to see how closely my experiences dovetail with his. If unintended suicide is the logical extreme of a sleep disorder, am I in imminent danger?

“Can You Die From a Nightmare?” — Doree Shafrir, BuzzFeed

More Buzzfeed

David Johnson has sent more than 260 emails to Jay-Z, but has yet to receive a single reply. That may not mean his messages aren’t being read:

‘[Jay] has opened every single one of my emails, even re-opening them to re-read,’ says Johnson. ‘He has clicked on links and had emails open for as long as 20 minutes.’ He knows this because he uses a tool called ReadNotify, which embeds a small, unique invisible image in every message he sends. When the message is opened, the image loads from ReadNotify’s servers, which record the time of the view, its duration and rough location. ReadNotify then gives the sender a read receipt, confirming that the message was seen. These services have been around for years, and they work — this kind of “bugging” is an old email marketing trick.

“Tracking The Biggest Star In The World.” — John Herrman, BuzzFeed

The complete origins story of the Huffington Post. How Arianna Huffington, Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti first connected, and how they turned the company into a media empire, and now Pulitzer winner: 

In the course of a few hours, Peretti would watch with wonderment as Arianna Huffington eased herself from setting to setting, all the while making the person she was talking with feel like the most interesting and important person in the world, hanging on every word, never shifting her attention to check one of three BlackBerries. ‘I loved being a gatherer,’ Huffington would later say. ‘I don’t really think you can make gathering mistakes.’

Peretti saw this talent through a different prism. ‘Arianna,’ he says, ‘can make weak ties into strong ties.’

“Six Degrees of Aggregation.” — Michael Shapiro, Columbia Journalism Review

See also: “BuzzFeed, the Ad Model for the Facebook Era?”

Inside the social media factory created by former Huffington Post cofounder Jonah Peretti—how they’ve cracked viral content, invested in original content, and made money: 

At around 5 p.m., Stopera published ‘48 Pictures That Perfectly Capture the ’90s’ on BuzzFeed. ‘These pictures are all that and a bag of chips!’ he wrote at the top of the list. A BuzzFeed visitor with an appetite for ’90s nostalgia could scroll down, gawk at the 48 retro images, read the deadpan captions, recall Bob Saget, Tipper Gore, and Scottie Pippen, laugh at the crazy fashion, and resurface to the present day in a matter of minutes. It racked up 1.2 million page views.

“BuzzFeed, the Ad Model for the Facebook Era?” — Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Can CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen Turn Viral Funny into the Future of TV?” — Adam Sternbergh, New York magazine, Dec. 13, 2010