Today we are introducing a product that is the combination of a couple of things we at BuzzFeed: News and technology.
Last July, Ben Smith talked about a vision for a BuzzFeed News app that would be "primarily about telling people what’s going on in the world and what the big stories are."
And who would the audience for this be?
Well, as Ben told Nieman:
“There’s a general news audience of people who don’t want to know what’s happening every four minutes, but are informed, educated people who want to know what’s happening in the world — people who in some sense used to be known as daily newspaper subscribers"
We know a lot about the 25 million people who visit BuzzFeed News each month. More than half of them are on mobile, and they are young (skewing 18 to 34), and very often women.
Our younger audiences often come to BuzzFeed News via our lists and quizzes — come for the cats in tiny hats, stay for the hard-hitting investigations. This is precisely the reverse of what we see with older folks, who say they want news, but often spend more time on the site trying to see if we can guess their age.
So we know young people are into news and that they want to quickly catch up on the news in a way that's easy, interesting, and accessible.
Which brings me back to the BuzzFeed News app, which you can check out starting today on iOS*.
#teamnewsapp is delighted to present what we hope is a smart, interesting, accessible way for our audiences to keep up with what's going on around the world.
(*Android users, because I know you will ask, give us a couple more months. We are reticulating splines on an alpha build for Android as I type this.)
When BuzzFeed launched Cute or Not, an app for lovers of cute animals, our vice president of product Chris Johanesen wrote:
We’re excited about native apps because we can provide deep experiences that aren’t always possible on the web.
We've written a lot about what we've been up to and how we think about things and how we got here. Now we're putting our work out into the world.
The BuzzFeed News app will deliver:
* Excellent journalism from our more than 170 BuzzFeed News reporters around the world, selected and created by a team of editors
* The top stories, even if BuzzFeed didn’t write it, and the background and context to those stories
* Our fix to the push notifications problem. You’ll have a robust notifications system, based on your preferences
* A sense of humor
* Native screensho(r)ts (however you feel about that word...)
* Everything we learned about news apps from building the BuzzFeed News newsletter, which just crossed 30,000 subscribers (Nice one, Millie)
* Intelligent background caching, which means you won't be stuck with nothing to read on the subway or when you're without a data connection
* And of course, we support gifs natively (Thanks, Curtis and Paola!)
Download our News app for iOS. Let us know if we've done the job we set out to do.
Yours,
smi, Noah, and #teamnewsapp