Will Buzzfeed Save The Republican Party?
Salon
After looking to leaders ranging from Sarah Palin to Mitt Romney, the Republican Party has found a new savior, Ben Smith.
As Brian Fung from National Journal reported yesterday, the National Republican Congressional Committee is revamping its website to be more like Buzzfeed, the viral news website that Smith edits. This doesn’t mean that it’s adding more cat listicles, instead the NRCC is trying to create more viral content and keep visitors to its website engaged longer.
As Fung describes:
“BuzzFeed’s eating everyone’s lunch,” said NRCC spokesman Gerrit Lansing. “They’re making people want to read and be cognizant of politics in a different way.”
The committee spent hours poring over BuzzFeed’s site map and layout, studying how readers arrived at its landing pages and bounced from one article to the next. Unsurprisingly, a ton of traffic came from social media — but a lot of it also seemed to come from the site’s sidebar, said Lansing. So the NRCC’s redesign includes a list of recent and popular posts.
Other changes include shorter posts, fewer menu items and a heavy helping of what now passes for social currency on the Web: snark.
This move has drawn a lot of admiring comment from political observers but it’s questionable how successful it will be. After all, the NRCC has a very specific mission, to elect Republicans to Congress and specifically by raising a lot of money for them. There’s a limit to what can be done within these limitations. There’s also the other obstacle. If there’s a demand for this, the market, including Buzzfeed will fill it. As Alex Pareene of Salon points out:
If an audience exists for a BuzzFeed of the right, BuzzFeed will happily be the BuzzFeed of the right, because capitalism. In fact, they are already producing cheap viral crap for conservatives to like on Facebook. Recent attempts include What It Feels Like Being a Conservative on the Internet, which went viral but was deemed “fail” by the BuzzFeed community, and “7 Things Democrats Would Have Freaked Out About if Bush Had Done Them,” which was voted both “win” and “fail.”
The author of that latter piece, Benny Johnson, was hired (from Glenn Beck’s the Blaze) basically explicitly to create viral conservative content. (Well, and regular viral content, too.) He’s also recently big-upped Utah Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz and — pay attention, NRCC — counted down “13 Ways Republican Can Win the Internet.” (I can sum up: It seems that the RNC postmortem was tl;dr.)
This is not to say that the NRCC’s effort can’t be successful (in fact, it’s tough for any GOP efforts on the Internet to be less successful than the status quo) but that there is a ceiling to what it can achieve. The Republican Party needs to do a lot of rebuilding and there is no magic bullet or magic .GIF that can turn things around in the short term.
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