BuzzFeed News is launching a morning show on Twitter later this year, and it’s hiring a team to get it off the ground.
The next broadcast from the company that brought you exploding watermelons and a live goat ambush is a weekday newscast aimed at “an audience that wakes up hungry for the latest in ‘fire Tweets,'” according to a May 1 press release from Twitter (which also announced streaming shows with The Verge and Cheddar).
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The project is picking up steam. On July 27, Twitter announced in its earnings letter that Wendy’s had signed on to be the project’s presenting sponsor. And last night, BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith tweeted out a job ad for a booker to work on “an hourlong broadcast each weekday morning from 8 to 9 a.m. ET.” BuzzFeed News is getting together an entire team for the show, which the company is treating “as seriously as any organization would,” said Matt Mittenthal, director of communications for BuzzFeed.
Very cool gig for an experienced, ambitious booker who wants to help build something exciting https://t.co/cLtM7sQPpS
— Ben Smith (@semaforben) August 6, 2017
BuzzFeed News is planning to announce the launch date and the title of the show sometime this week or next, Mittenthal said.
This isn’t the first foray into streaming for BuzzFeed News, which has experimented with zany live video experiments and higher-end, professional broadcasts. The viral news organization partnered with Twitter for an Election Night Live Show that featured real-time results and on-the-spot reports from journalists at BuzzFeed. The show reached 6.8 million viewers, some of whom watched the stream for as little as three seconds, according to Variety.
The Twitter livestreams, which are ad-supported and controlled by the partner organizations, are part of a recent push on Twitter’s part to build its content portfolio. Other social platforms, such as Facebook and Snapchat, have played handmaiden to news organizations looking to strike deals with distributors and tap into larger audiences.
