Ben Smith, The Boy Wonder Of BuzzFeed

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA / New York Times Published: February 15, 2013

s3-ec.buzzfed.com

“BenSmithing is now an official term!” shouted Michael Hastings, a Buzzfeed reporter and author, at his book release party in Chelsea on a subfreezing night in January. The roomful of young reporters, ad salesmen and b-list political gadflies (Meghan McCain turned heads all night) hooted in approval, and they were all like:

s3-ec.buzzfed.com

Ben Smith, editor in chief of Buzzfeed, stood to the side and smiled, staring at his iPhone as he swiped through e-mail messages and retweeted something about Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and he was like:

s3-ec.buzzfed.com

What is BenSmithing? To the Republicans who coined the term last year, it refers to writing an article that supposedly tackles a Democratic Party scandal, but is actually intended to dismiss the issue, something they believe Mr. Smith has often done for President Obama, which they think makes him all like:

s3-ec.buzzfed.com

But to Mr. Smith’s Buzzfeed colleagues, the term has become an absurdist catchall they use to poke fun at their boss. Sometimes BenSmithing is to share dirty pictures over Snapchat. Other times BenSmithing is to dance a clumsy version of the Funky Chicken, and his colleagues are all like:

s3-ec.buzzfed.com

Are any of them true? “I have in fact sent Katie Notopoulos a creepshot on Snapchat,” Mr. Smith said by e-mail the day after the party, referring to his fellow Buzzfeed editor, who was all like:

s3-ec.buzzfed.com

Maybe he’s joking. But Mr. Smith, polite and mild-mannered as he is, has been known to shock people before. In December 2011, he announced that he was leaving Politico, the insiderly political site at which he had been a star blogger since 2007, to take the top editorial job at Buzzfeed, a site better known for cat GIFs and dorky “listicles” (articles in list form, like “33 Animals Who Are Extremely Disappointed in You”) than political muckraking. But ever since joining, he's been like:

s3-ec.buzzfed.com

“It just wasn’t a place for a political reporter to go,” said Josh Benson, a founder of Capital New York, a news site founded by some of Mr. Smith’s former colleagues from The New York Observer, who was all like:

s3-ec.buzzfed.com

“But there’s an ‘on the other hand,’ ” Mr. Benson said, “which is that it didn’t surprise me one bit. He’s got that entrepreneurial thing. He’s not content to make the doughnuts.”

Mr. Smith, 36, has long had a reputation for doing things his own way. Before Buzzfeed, he was known for pulling city politics into the digital era with The Politicker, a blog he started for The Observer in 2004. While other print reporters were waiting for deadlines to share the news, Mr. Smith had the then-novel idea of publishing what he knew on the Web and letting readers leave comments, producing a lively and often indecorous forum that transfixed Gotham’s power brokers.

And that was all like:

Want to know more? See the rest at the NYT here