For the unfamiliar, BuzzFeed is the brain child of technology and marketing whiz Jonah Peretti, who delights in churning out stories with pretty pictures for the “bored at work” crowd. The site’s bread and butter is stuff like “37 Items the Kardashians have slapped their name on” and “Flock of Angry Kittens gets a Bath” that are intended to generate a maximum amount of Twitter and Facebook hoopla. BuzzFeed  recently launched a politics vertical that offers items like “Eight Images from Mitt Romney’s business career” and “A Very Sad Picture of Newt Gingrich.”

So why is the ever-serious New York Times getting mixed up with this potpourri of pop culture reporting? The move is actually a shrewd one.

First, BuzzFeed recently hired Politico’s Ben Smith to lead up its politics vertical. Smith is one of the very best political reporters of his generation and he made his name in the online environment. His presence will give the NYT-Buzzfeed venture both gravitas and tactical guidance (in addition to the silly stuff, BuzzFeed’s political coverage has also included insightful coverage of health care, immigration and more). The new web video presence will also complement the Times fledgling online show TimesCast Politics.

Second, the New York Times stands to learn of a ton of new social media tricks. Unlike traditional news outlets, BuzzFeed is all about turbo-charging stories for social channels, an approach that recognizes that social is increasingly driving online news consumption. This means that the Times has an opportunity here not only to increase the visibility of its convention coverage but also to develop tools it can employ in other areas of its reporting. The Times could, for instance, be in a position to bring a BuzzFeed-like touch to its MOMA reviews or its World Series coverage.

Finally, a bit of BuzzFeed brashness will be a welcome addition to often dull convention coverage. The gatherings that once provided high political drama are now little more than tedious tub-thumping pageants — maybe more viral video will change that.

“We think BuzzFeed’s energy and keen ear for how political stories play out in the social sphere will be a valuable and interesting contribution to The Times’s video presence,” said Jim Roberts, assistant managing editor of The New York Times in a press release.

[Image by Muriel via Shutterstock]

Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten has confirmed it is leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, together with existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital plus angels.

WSJ reports sources as saying the deal means a $1.5 billion valuation.

Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani (via announcement):

“While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining.

“We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world.”

In other words, Rakuten is excited about how enthusiastically Pinterest users clip and share items they might want to buy.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silberman:

“Our goal is to help people discover things they love, by connecting people through their shared interests. Bringing Rakuten on board gives us an amazing opportunity to move a step closer to this goal.”

Pinterest’s visual presentation of those products is not the only potential boon to e-tailers (it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to present product listings in this way); the tie-in with social sharing could effectively enable social commerce.

There is a wide number of retailers for which Pinterest could perform this role:

• Rakuten has built up its heft through acquiring the online retailers Buy.com in the U.S., Priceminister in France, Ikeda in Brazil, Tradoria in Germany and, recently, Play.com in the UK.
• It also recently bought the Kobo e-reader and e-book store business.
• And it has made investments in Russia’s Ozon.ru and the AHA Life luxury shopping site.

Pinterest has boosted web referrals for sites in certain categories like women’s lifestyle publishing, so some publishers, as well as retailers, had become excited about the possibilities.

It’s unclear what the e-commerce investment means for the media’s current Pinterest penchant, but some pundits think content and commerce is a marriage made in heaven.

The Next Web had reported on Wednesday its expectation that Pinterest would announce a funding round at a $1 billion valuation on Friday, which is also Facebook’s IPO day.

Pinterest had previously taken a total $37.5 million from angels, Bessemer, Ron Conway, FirstMark, Andreeson Horrowtiz and others, through an angel and two proper rounds.

Now that Yahoo has managed to make its way through yet another CEO shuffle — its sixth in just five years — the former portal has to get back to the main task at hand: namely, figuring out what its future looks like. By replacing Scott Thompson with Ross Levinsohn, who currently runs Yahoo’s global media business and used to be a senior executive at News Corp., the company seems to be indicating that it wants to focus (again) on being a media player. But does Yahoo even have what it takes to succeed as a new-media entity? There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, and the company’s knowledge gaps are not going to be easy to fill.

The news that Levinsohn had been elevated to the top spot sparked a lot of favorable reactions from those in the media and tech sphere. Although some observers — including former Adweek editor and author Michael Wolff — seemed less than enthusiastic about his abilities, others such as former Myspace president Jason Hirschhorn were much more positive, saying the company couldn’t have made a better choice. Many pointed to his purchase of Myspace while at News Corp. as a sign that Levinsohn is both a forward thinker and willing to make big acquisitions to further those goals (Myspace’s decline into irrelevance began after Levinsohn left the company, his supporters say).

Media is no longer about who has the most eyeballs

But while seeing Myspace as an opportunity in 2005 may be a mark in Levinsohn’s favor, some of what the new CEO has said about Yahoo both before and since he took the position raises questions about where he sees the company going as a digital-media entity. In a memo to the troops in the wake of Thompson’s departure, he said Yahoo was “achieving genuine and meaningful successes in the marketplace every day and heading in the right direction,” and in an interview with paidContent last year he said:

Yahoo is the premier digital company in the world and embracing that isn’t a hard thing to do. That’s just fact-based. Tell me what other type of media can sit with you and say ‘I’ve got the top 19 #1 or #2 newspapers, I’ve got the top 20 shows, I’ve got the 19 of the top 20 radio stations, 19 of the top 20 magazines’?

But does that mean Yahoo is well-positioned to be a media player for the next decade, rather than the past one? That’s not entirely clear. Levinsohn seems to think having a huge number of eyeballs aggregated around Yahoo’s various properties is a sign of success, but that’s arguably not what media companies of any kind ought to be concentrating on right now. Increasingly, advertisers don’t want hundreds of millions of eyeballs to show banner ads to anymore. They want targeted reach and they want mobile and they want social, and there aren’t a lot of signs that Yahoo has what they need.

In an interview on Friday at Harvard, the head of Google’s news division — former Salon CEO Richard Gingras — compared newspapers to Yahoo and not in a good way. He said newspapers have suffered from the same kind of problems portals like Yahoo have since the social Web started changing the landscape: Namely, they are still operating on the assumption that aggregating a lot of miscellaneous content together in one digital bundle is what readers and advertisers want. But that is not the case.

Where is Yahoo’s social or mobile strategy?

Google may not have solved the issue of adding social signals and features to its business, but at least the launch of Google+ has been a credible attempt in that direction. Does Yahoo even have a social strategy? Not long after it gave up on the search business and handed that responsibility over to Microsoft, the company effectively admitted defeat on the social end of its media operations by integrating with Facebook. Is that the beginning and end of its ambitions when it comes to adding social features to its business? If it is, then Yahoo is going to have a big problem on its hands.

Mobile is another aspect of a modern media strategy where Yahoo seems to have virtually no role to play. Apart from the occasional bundling deal, there is no sign the company has anything to offer — and what it does offer often seems to be a day late and more than a dollar short. Could it acquire something like Flipboard as a way of making a move in that area, the way CNN acquired Zite last year? Possibly. But then Yahoo’s history of acquiring things only to let them wither on the vine isn’t likely to fill anyone with hope.

The biggest challenge Levinsohn and Yahoo face is thinking about media in a different way, and it is the same challenge newspapers face: Just as they got used to being the main destination for people in search of content when paper was the dominant delivery system, Yahoo still seems to be stuck in a mindset that sees media as a game of scale, where the player with the most eyeballs wins. AOL has arguably been playing the same kind of game, and it hasn’t been having much more luck than Yahoo has.

If the rise of Facebook as an advertising entity has shown anything, it is that what matters now is targeting and focus — the ability to drill down into precise market segments and base decisions on actual user behavior. Just how valuable that is for Facebook and for advertisers may still be a question mark, but there is no question that advertisers want it. And Facebook is a lot better positioned to offer that than Yahoo is. If Levinsohn wants to own the future of media, he’s going to have to figure that out, and fast.