Before I started at BuzzFeed, I worked at My Place Pizza, a Newtown staple, from the age of 15 through 22. On a typical Friday, by far the busiest night of the week, we made 300-400 pies. I can’t help wonder how many pizzas My Place made this past Friday night.
I was there on September 11, 2001, and making pizzas proved to be an effective way to take my mind off what was happening 50 miles away. On Friday morning, working at a job that requires me to stare at Twitter all day, I didn’t have the luxury of work as an escape, of distracting me from that 50-mile divide. I heard the news of the shooting at 9:30, and didn’t take my eyes off Twitter for the next 10 hours as things played out in a strange and confusing way. By noon, I had to turn off my phone. I simply posted on Facebook: “Thank you for all your texts, emails, tweets, gchats. No one from my family is in Newtown at this time. Everyone is okay.”
That had to have been a tough one to write, but the perspective is enlightening. Thanks Mike for being willing to share.
My favorite end-of-the-year lists are always the photos. Here are a few that have made their way online so far; I’ll be updating this list throughout the month so send me your lists.
2012: The Year in Photos from In Focus: Alan Taylor is still my favorite picker of photos. Here’s part two.
Best Photos of the Year 2012 from Reuters: Almost a hundred photos, heavy on hard news.
The 45 Most Powerful Images of 2012 from Buzzfeed: A wide-ranging selection of photos designed to tug at the heartstrings. See also The Best Animal Photos of 2012.
Pictures of the Year 2012 from AFP (Agence France-Presse): Not an official list but a nice selection of AFP photos nonetheless.
Matt Stopera’s BuzzFeed list is rad.
Yo Nick: We know you have servers and history and traffic and all that other crud, but your network of sites is so perfect for Tumblr that it will be like sucking the life out of the room when your server rack gets put back together and you return to the internet in your scrolly, advertisey, comment-mess-withy form. Obviously this was a necessary backup — and we understand if you don’t choose to stay, and glad that your staff is doing OK enough after the hurricane that you’re keeping the content flowing — but this is such a good fit for your style of writing that it actually feels like you’ve been running a Tumblr on here for five years as opposed to twelve hours. Here, we’ll even make a deal: When Adrian Chen decides to unmask a creepy dude from Reddit again, just put a jump on it! We’ll all click!
And for Tumblr, let’s make the inverted argument: Gawker and Buzzfeed could have taken their sites to Angelfire or Xoom, but they chose Tumblr. Doesn’t this scream opportunity? There are some great sites on Tumblr already — but there could be some next-level people-doing-it-for-a-living types on here (including the aforementioned) if you worked on your monetization strategy a little more and thought about how to get publishers a little help.
Basically, what we’re saying is that this format is perfect for you, Gawker, even though this is a backup pair of white denim jeans because you spilled pomegranate juice on your other pair. Just a thought.
Datagram, the ISP whose Manhattan servers host BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Gawker, and other sites, has lost power, an official there told us via text this evening.
“Basement flooded, fuel pump off line - we got people working on it now. 5 feet of water now,” the official wrote.
BuzzFeed’s site and story page are back online, thanks to a Content Delivery Network, Akamai, which hosts the content at servers distributed around the world.
FIVE FEET OF WATER took down three of the biggest new-media sites on the internet. At the same time. Think about how crazy that is.
Andrew Sullivan has had a long week, guys.
meltdown is putting it lightly
Though you have to admit, his response to the article was pretty spot-on. “Buzzfeed has some fun. I deserve it.” I think Sullivan’s a legend at the blogging game, but they totally nailed this and created what’s probably their best article all week.
There didn’t seem to be any debate-themed drinking games posted on tumblr today, so we thought we’d make one. It’s weird no other sites decided to make one of these, oh well. Try out the BuzzFeed Presidential Debate Drinking Game!
Unemployment counts for a drink? Man, Buzzfeed’s trying to give us alcohol poisoning.
BuzzFeed totally cut to the chase and grabbed the best part of every infomercial — the part where people are trying to do a mundane task and are absolutely awful at it. Supremely entertaining.
BuzzFeed knows how to create traffic from thin air. (Related: This Chicago teachers’ strike deal is actually a pretty serious story, kids.)
Starting today, BuzzFeed will travel back in time starting with three decades (20s, 30s, 40s) and adding three new decades every week and a few special eras (Dinosaur times). Be sure to check out all the content from the POV of each time period - just click on the Time Machine above the mast.
This wins some kind of award.
One year ago, journalist Jose Antonio Vargas revealed to the world that he was an undocumented immigrant — building his entire career, which included time at The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, on a lie. Vargas looks back at the past year in an interview with BuzzFeed, where he considers the weirdness of becoming an activist, his friends lost (many in the news industry), and his friends gained (Mark Zuckerberg, Aaron Sorkin). Great piece.