BuzzFeed创始人的网络传播心经

    眼下，传媒圈正在热议企业家乔纳•佩雷蒂，人们聊的不仅仅是他最新创立的网站BuzzFeed。这位《赫芬顿邮报》( The Huffington Post )联合创始人因探索信息的在线传播方式而声名鹊起。他把一种学术兴趣转化为一系列盈利前景可观的企业，进而促使业内人士反思分销内容，尤其是在线分销内容的方式。

    这段对话的灵感源自今年我在纽约举行的美国杂志媒体大会(American Magazine Media Conference)上对佩雷蒂的采访。下面是这次对话的精华部分。

    苏安迪：到现在为止，大家都知道BuzzFeed是一家怎样的网站，或者至少访问过这家网站。那么，在你的心目中，BuzzFeed究竟是什么？

    佩雷蒂：我想我浏览BuzzFeed的角度或许跟许多读者不大一样。我主要思考的是，思想如何传播，信息如何传播，为什么有时候你真正引以为傲、费心费力创造的东西却无人关注，倒是一些你抱着“玩票”心态，顺手做的东西却无心插柳柳成荫，获得共享，四处传播，还产生了巨大的影响。所以，我把BuzzFeed看成这样一个平台，它能够让我们理解人们如何分享、扩散娱乐内容、新闻和品牌内容，也就是我们在我们创建的这个平台上扩散的所有这些不同类型的内容。

    创建伊始，我们真的就是一家实验室，尝试着了解这样做是否行得通。现在，我们是一支具有奉献精神的团队，我们的编辑、记者和用户正在这个网站上创造供整个互联网分享的娱乐内容。

    你打算引领BuzzFeed走向何方？你并没有把这家网站本身定性为一家新闻企业。它最类似于传统媒体世界的哪一家媒体？

    我认为，某些互联网公司确实可以跟某家传统实体进行比较。比方说，现实世界有各种拍卖活动，现在eBay把拍卖活动转移到了网上。再比如，人们经常去传统的商场购物，亚马逊(Amazon)就是一家在线商场。实际上，我们经常说《赫芬顿邮报》就是一家“互联网报纸”。这家网站与纸质版报纸具有一定的可比性。

    People in the media industry are buzzing about entrepreneur Jonah Peretti, and it's not just his latest venture, BuzzFeed, that has them talking. The Huffington Post co-founder has made a name for himself exploring the ways information spreads online, turning an academic interest into a highly lucrative series of businesses that are prompting people in the media industry to rethink the way they distribute content—especially online.

    The inspiration for this conversation came from an interview of Peretti that I conducted at this year's American Magazine Media Conference in New York. Here are the highlights.

    Serwer: By now, everybody knows what BuzzFeed is, or at least has been to the website. What exactly, to your mind, is BuzzFeed?

    Peretti: I think I maybe see BuzzFeed differently than a lot of our readers see it. I think a lot about how ideas spread, how information spreads, why is it that something you're really proud of and you spend a lot of time creating sometimes doesn't go anywhere, and something that you kind of do on the side, on a lark, ends up getting shared and passed around and having this big impact. And so I think of BuzzFeed as this platform that enables us to understand how people are sharing and distributing things like entertainment content, journalism, branded content, all these various types of content that we distribute on this platform that we built.

    When we started, we really were a laboratory trying to understand how this stuff works. Now, we're a team of really dedicated editors and reporters and people creating entertainment to distribute across the web on our site.

    Where do you want to take BuzzFeed? You don't characterize it as a journalistic enterprise per se. What is it most analogous to in the traditional media world?

    I think that there are certain companies that, on the web, you can compare to a traditional entity. So you can look at eBay and say there were auctions in the real world, and now there are auctions online. Or you can look at Amazon and you can say there were stores that people go to, and now there are online stores. In fact, at The Huffington Post, we talked about the "Internet newspaper." It was kind of comparing the site to a [printed] newspaper.