Everyone else in the office was chanting, "DRESS! DRESS! DRESS!" - max seddon April 20, 2023
Nemtsov's friends were crying to me over the phone about his brutal murder. I ran into Ben Smith's office to make calls. During Trump’s first press conference as president-elect, I stood next to our editor in chief and watched the soon-to-be leader of the free world single us out as a “failing pile of garbage.” Within an hour, we were selling shirts plastered with the phrase. Once, I got assigned to follow exotic dancers around at a predawn chicken-wing-eating contest. We got Barack Obama to use a selfie stick and also published the Steele dossier. It published a Donald Trump profile so scathing that it very well may have goaded him into running for president. There was the Facebook Live experiment in which two bored staffers got 800,000 people to concurrently watch them put rubber bands on a watermelon until it exploded-a piece of content that will live in “pivot to video” infamy.Īnd for an offshoot of a place (somewhat unfairly) known as a listicle and cat-video factory, BuzzFeed News had an outsize political influence. There was “ The Dress,” a bit of internet ephemera that went so viral, we joked that that day might have been the last good one on the internet. I don’t mean to sound self-aggrandizing, but it is legitimately hard to capture the cultural relevance of BuzzFeed to the media landscape of the mid-2010s, and the excitement and centrality of the organization’s approach to news. Glorious chaos was everywhere around you, yet it felt like the perfect vantage to observe the commercial web grow up. For most of that time, it felt a bit like standing in the eye of the hurricane that is the internet. I worked at BuzzFeed News for nearly six years-from March 2013 until January 2019. Morgan’s chattering faded, and the newsroom returned to its ambient humming of frenetic keyboard clacking-the sound of the internet being made. A few months later, the story he’d been working on would help free an innocent woman from prison.
I remember our lone investigative reporter, Alex Campbell, scurrying away from his desk, a row away from mine, to continue his reporting call in silence. Morgan was barreling through the office, lifting his shirt up, smacking his belly, and cracking jokes about how pale all of us internet writers looked.
I looked up to see Tracy Morgan three feet away, surrounded by a small entourage of handlers. If you’re curious to know what it was like to work at BuzzFeed News in the salad days of the mid-2010s, here is a representative anecdote: I was sitting at my desk one morning, dreadfully hungover and editing a story titled “ The Definitive Oral History of the Wikipedia Photo for ‘Grinding,’” when the sounds of a screaming man broke my trance.
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