now I start to understand her love
a farewell to BuzzFeed News, by SMI and Millie
We wanted to be your smartest, most interesting friend. But first we had to ship a mobile app, for iOS and Android. In six months. And no, there wasn’t a team in place. Or a way for the main (brilliant!) CMS to power a mobile app. Or a business model or plan of any kind.
And so the original Team News App was born: SMI, Millie, Laura, Aaron, Sam.
We spun up a CMS that could send push notifications, including from our phones — one that blasted “push it real good” whenever we hit send. That CMS, a sketch that became a prototype that had a picture of a cat built into it - made it to the end of BuzzFeed News. (Minneapolis massive: you all were the best).
We launched a newsletter.
We sat in ridiculously designed chairs from which we could barely see each other and talked about why headlines mattered, about the power of bullet points, and the importance of a finite feed and a sense of completion (“Quickly Catch Up” / “You’re all caught up”). We tore through prototypes (Dave Mauro, Gordon Mei: legends, both). We brainstormed how we’d sound and how we’d look and whether emoji counted as punctuation.
We launched the iOS app on the day Dylann Roof massacred Black people in their church. We worked, nonstop, for three straight days, figuring out how to appropriately and thoughtfully deliver tragic breaking news to new audiences on a new platform in real time. Handing over coverage across time zones and back again.
A few days later, the Supreme Court ruled that states could no longer ban same-sex marriage. While Chris Geidner was racing to get the ruling, SMI and Millie were in a hotel room in Minneapolis (hi, SRCCON!) waiting to send the push. Chris sent us the news; SMI and Millie sent the push. Accuracy and clarity were always the goal, but boy, did it feel good to be fast and right. We beat every other news organization’s push alert. By minutes.
We were editors, reporters, product managers, customer support (Bari and Alp, thank you); evangelists for mobile and new workflows and ~documentation~. We spent way too much time writing longform release notes, love notes to our beta testers and our audiences replete with easter eggs.
We even figured out how to integrate advertising for Trevor Noah and the Daily Show into the app — because never let it be said that we weren’t aware of or didn’t work with “the business side”.
We watched as The New York Times launched and then shut down NYT Now. We got daily questions about why “we weren’t growing as fast as SmartNews” (spoiler: they raised tens of millions of dollars and threw it at growth).
We watched as our developers and our designers got reassigned to the all-consuming pivot to video.
And we watched as other news organizations adopted and adapted our innovations and voice and vernacular. That felt like winning: everywhere you looked, there we were.
Attribution
I see her doing something simple, paying bills,
or leafing through a magazine or book,
and wish that I could say,
and she could hear,
that now I start to understand her love
for all of us, the fullness of it.
It burns there in the past, beyond my reach,
a modest lamp.
— Mother's Day by David Young