One way to generate news during the ample down time at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions is to “frantically try to engineer a meeting” between Captain Morgan and Ted Sorenson.
Another way is to pair New York Times reporters and editors with Ben Smith and his BuzzFeed politics team and task them with “present[ing] a robust online video report during both conventions, including expanded live segments,” as the Times put it in its announcement of the collaboration today.
From the pairing, the Times gets “BuzzFeed’s energy and keen ear for how political stories play out in the social sphere,” per Times assistant managing editor Jim Roberts, and BuzzFeed gets “such a respected news organization as The New York Times, and one that understands and values online reporting,” said BuzzFeed’s Smith.
What will the rest of us get? That remains to be seen. It’ll be interesting to watch how this combination clicks (and tries to get the rest of us to, too).
What we get is the excitement of seeing the temperate conventional wisdom of the Times paired with the brash conventional wisdom of Buzzfeed.
"It appears as though Mr. Obama's critics have decided to unite behind the incumbent, something most observers anticipated."
"INDEED IT DOES AND INDEED THEY DID! LET'S SEE HOW THAT DECISION IS PLAYING OUT ON TWITTER!"
#1 Posted by Weldon Berger, CJR on Tue 19 Jun 2012 at 03:20 PM