For BuzzFeed, best know for viral fluff like “50 photos of cat heaven,” the new story is its most ambitious plunge yet into the rarified world of New Yorker or Atlantic-style essays. At a deeper level, BuzzFeed’s initiatives will test whether digital upstarts can replace the literary pleasure and cultural power of established print titles.

Turning to the story itself, ”Atari Teenage Riot: The inside story of Pong and the video game industry’s big bang” is a spry, deeply researched account of how a group of maverick computer types installed Pong games in TV sets and placed them in bars around San Francisco. The gaming pioneers earned millions in quarters and gave video games a permanent place in America’s cultural landscape.

The story is a good read but is more remarkable for the way it’s presented: in white on black letters and with vibrant pictures and animation that conjure up the era of Pong. It looks like this (in the story, the image is animated):

The Pong tale is not the site’s first long-form story, but it is the deepest that BuzzFeed has reached into its technical bag of tricks. The result is a new and distinct form of storytelling that strives to offer up the same depth and beauty of print magazines. It’s unclear, though, if BuzzFeed can also match the output of those publications.

“We are not a ‘GIF of the day’ or ‘one longform story per week’ kind of place, so it’s impossible to really set expectations on quantity here. We’re very much focused on the quality,” said Executive Editor Doree Shafrir, a former Rolling Stone editor who is one of several high profile hires BuzzFeed brought in this year.

Despite the lofty goals, there are still two wild cards here. One is whether BuzzFeed (or anyone else) can duplicate the aesthetic escapism of a print magazine; the Pong story, which I read on both a tablet and computer, was smart and the layout was beautiful, but it didn’t feel as relaxing as reading the New Yorker on the couch.

Second, there is the business question. It’s terrific news that BuzzFeed’s ambitions stretch beyond cats and OMG, but can they pay for them? After all, the state of online advertising means BuzzFeed can’t (for now, at least) fund its essays with high-priced Tiffany’s or Cartier spreads. At the same time, the site may be hard-pressed to apply its “native advertising” approach to long-form stories.

In the bigger picture, BuzzFeed is one of several disruptive publishers helping to define what long form will look like in the digital age. Others include The Verge and Gawker which are likewise offering free, quality essays. Meanwhile, platforms like Byliner and Atavist are providing new ways for authors to charge for long-form content. For now, it’s too soon to say if these companies will come to displace the New Yorker as a new form of magazine — or if, instead, there will be room for all to flourish.

(Image by alphaspirit via Shutterstock)

The plans, announced this week, involve building a team of reporters and editors who will apply BuzzFeed’s technology-driven approach to topics like celebrity foibles and the business of movie making. This approach, which often relies on lists and pretty pictures (see “50 kittens giving you kitty-cat eyes” at right), is based on creating content likely to be shared on social networks like Facebook.

BuzzFeed’s unabashed mix of high and low content may have disrupted news and political coverage in New York, but will it stand out in image-is-everything Los Angeles? LA entertainment and celebrity news is already dominated by picture-heavy media purveyors like TMZ, Sugar Media and the growing Penske empire which controls titles like Deadline and Variety.

BuzzFeed’s executive editor Doree Shafrir said in a phone interview that the site doesn’t consider the entertainment field to be over-crowded.

“I don’t agree that the current players in the space are thinking about viral the way we are,” said Shafrir, predicting the site would be able to replicate its success in political news, where BuzzFeed came out of nowhere to be a major media force. As with its hiring of Politico’s Ben Smith, BuzzFeed is stocking the LA office with journalists with lots of social media chops, including Hollywood veterans Richard Rushfiled and Kate Aurthur.

BuzzFeed, always two steps ahead on the social and technology front, has so far proved unstoppable. Its LA arrival, with top talent and a proven playbook, means it will get at least a foothold in the entertainment niche — though the town is likely to prove its toughest challenge yet.

(Image by Yuri Arcurs via Shutterstock)

But here comes BuzzFeed. The viral media site, which has already disrupted news and political reporting, thinks it can apply its super-sharable formula to 10,000-word essays.

For the unfamiliar, BuzzFeed made its name with internet fluff (a “cat that look like Rembrandt“) but has lately been powering up with high-profile hires like Politico’s Ben Smith and Rolling Stone’s senior editor, Doree Shafrir. The latter, as BuzzFeed’s executive editor, is now hiring a long-form editor.

“There’s opportunities to do really compelling jorunalism that originates in online form,” said Shafrir in a recent phone interview. “Right now a lot of the best long-form stuff originates in print and we’d like to change that.”

And there’s the rub. While other forms of journalism were ripe to be disrupted by BuzzFeed’s technology-driven platforms, the company will have a harder time taking on the likes of the New Yorker. Consider that there are two good reasons why the most celebrated long form journalism still starts in print: simplicity and status.

The first relates to readers. Long-form reading is a relaxing, immersive experience best enjoyed on the couch. The simple elegance of a print magazine continues to be the superior way to deliver that experience. As for status, a print appearance still remains the pinnacle of prestige for writers – to many would-be Nabokovs, a BuzzFeed appearance just doesn’t carry the same cachet as seeing their name on the cover of The Atlantic.

Shafrir, needless to say, is not fazed by these obstacles to BuzzFeed’s long-form ambitions. She points to the viral success of her own recent 7,000-word opus “Can you die from a nightmare?” as evidence that BuzzFeed is a good vehicle for long-form content. She adds that future long pieces on the site will focus on both universal themes (like sleep and night terrors) that everyone likes to share and also on pieces that will generate intense interest among specific communities — say surfers or parents of autistic children.

As for the natural appeal of magazines to both readers and writers, larger forces are tilting in BuzzFeed’s favor. One is the ever-improving quality of e-readers and tablets which are becoming almost as light and elegant as a New Yorker page. This will appeal to the couch crowd as will BuzzFeed’s decision to insert a “read it later” button right into the stories. You can see how this works here (the reader simply chooses her favorite service from a drop-down menu and the story is zapped to a reading list where it can be read anywhere later on):

And finally, a younger generation of writers are less likely than their forebears to have print prejudices. As this astute Poynter piece points out, newer literary sites like The Awl are finding success by rejecting the convention that online writing should be kept to 800 words or less.

The point is that, the evolution may be slower, but long form’s move to digital sites is as inexorable as that of other journalistic genres.

(Image by  cosma via Shutterstock)

Amy Odell, previously editor of New York magazine fashion blog The Cut, is editor. They are joined by former Jezebel writer Anna North as senior editor and Hillary Reinsberg, who wrote for Abrams Media’s “The Jane Dough,” as associate editor. (Former Rolling Stone writer and Gawker editor Doree Shafrir is executive editor of BuzzFeed.)

BuzzFeed is launching the new vertical as part of its push to become a fully fledged news site. Several high-profile bloggers have joined the site in recent months, including Politico‘s Ben Smith, Rolling Stone contributing editor Michael Hastings and Shafrir. There is a Tumblr devoted to these hires, “Has Buzzfeed Hired Anyone New Today?“

Odell tells Fashionista that Shift will stand out from competitors like Gawker’s Jezebel and The Awl’s The Hairpin: “I feel like women’s media, especially Jezebel and The Hairpin which I read and I love, has identified the issues facing us as women. We don’t want to just highlight that they’re out there and that they exist but we want to move past them. We’ll do that through interviews with very successful woman–whether it’s the CEO of a successful fashion company or a senator and find out how they got there and what it’s like. There aren’t that many women out there in positions of power and we want to talk to the ones who are to find out how they got there so we can be like them too.”

In her inaugural post, Odell writes that Shift will cover questions like these:

How can women bridge the gap between our income and our male counterparts’? How can we attain the power we need to make decisions about our own bodies? How can we be taken seriously as we work toward those things while indulging in a little mindless feminine fun, like shopping, reading Us Weekly, or tweeting about how Nicole Kidman looked like a big Vajazzle at the Golden Globes?

Sports, Too

Buzzfeed also launched a sports vertical today, BuzzFeed Sports, edited by BuzzFeed Senior Editor Jack Moore and Kevin Lincoln, who will be deputy editor of the vertical.