Q&A: Brianne O’Brien, Lead Editor, Audience Development @ BuzzFeed News

This week, The Idea caught up with Brianne O’Brien, a lead audience development editor at BuzzFeed News. We talked membership, avoiding news fatigue, and thinking like a user.

Tell me a bit about your role at BuzzFeed and what led you there.

Coming from Wisconsin, and having lived in the UK, and now being in New York, I have worked across various types of newsrooms, from local TV to nonprofit radio to different international organizations. When I first joined BuzzFeed News, I first joined as a mobile editor for the app, and that was under the direction of the crazy brilliant Stacy-Marie Ishmael. Within my first year, the majority of my job involved curating the BuzzFeed News app, and crafting and sending push notifications. This was before alerts became what’s now considered a standalone platform. I reported pesky product bugs to our tech team and edited our daily newsletter.

I also happened to be based in London, which meant I was extremely focused on the content needs of an international audience, while the U.S. was asleep. Then, we reorganized a bit, and so our homepage, social and mobile teams merged into what is now known as news curation, and I was leading a news curation team out of the London bureau, which meant overseeing daily distribution across all of BuzzFeed News platforms: social accounts, homepage, partnerships, and those mobile products that I had mentioned.

This past year, I relocated to the U.S. and moved into a lead audience development role. I basically get to geek out over analytics and really hunker down to think about strategy and growth for our existing products, but also ways in which we can reach new audiences through different initiatives.

What does your team’s strategic development process look like for a given product?

It’s tough to speak about the strategy ins and outs of one product, mainly because we’re constantly adapting given the current news climate, and I think also given the ever-changing habits and attention span of our audience. We don’t consider them just readers; it’s important to remember that they’re listeners, viewers, participants, and members, too.

I will say with all of our strategies, we’re very cognizant of our audience’s expectations and values. No matter what the platform or product, we’re trying to foster this transparent and inclusive relationship with our audience. What this could look like might mean going deeper to explain the actual reporting of a scoop or investigation, why or how we made a correction, and what sort of reporting we’re doubling down on. And then also why we make certain distribution decisions. By doing that and welcoming audience feedback across platforms, including the good, the bad, and the ugly, it not only keeps my colleagues and me on our toes, but ultimately makes our work better.

Can you speak to the strategy behind launching the BuzzFeed News membership program, and also describe what that product is to readers who might not be familiar with it?

Before we launched in August, we heard directly from our readers that they wanted a chance to play a bigger part in our journalism, especially with specific beats or investigations that really moved them. We started off by accepting one-time donations in August. That later morphed into this recurring membership program, where we offer both monthly ($5 a month) and annual ($100 a year) membership options.

We launched that in November, and it’s still very new to us within the newsroom, and we’re really looking forward to continual feedback from our audience through surveys and different messaging and getting in touch with them across our platforms to hear what membership means and looks like to them and flesh it out as the year goes.

What are the biggest challenges that you’ve faced in the audience team?

Specifically speaking from my role and things that I’ve seen in the newsroom, I think it’s so easy to remain in this autopilot/news junkie mode that we sometimes as editors forget to switch off, and really think about how the average person consumes and digests media. For example, the average person does not opt in to push notifications from over 20 different media outlets. We do, but they don’t.

I think no matter what our role in the newsroom is, it’s vital to constantly keep audience at the forefront and continually ask ourselves really tough questions about how to better optimize for the user experience. I think that’s just something I’m constantly seeing, and it’s so easy to autopilot, but you have to remove yourself and take a step back.

What’s the most exciting thing you’ve gotten to work on?

I’m really jazzed about membership right now. I think that’s something that we’re seeing across a lot of different digital native outlets. I’m excited because it’s a unique way to get in touch with audience, especially your super users, your super readers, your ambassadors, however you want to label them, it’s a just a whole new side, and I’m excited to explore it deeper. We’re still in the very beginner stages, and it’s something I’m really excited to see evolve.

Can you tell me a bit more about your international experience and how that work was similar or different from your work here in the States?

We work with so many different teams across the newsroom. We work side by side with curation, the team I was on before, and that doesn’t change. The great thing about having coverage in different time zones is we ensure we have someone on around the clock, and so my role has changed quite a bit. Within my first two years, I was very much in the thick of the news cycle, covering breaking news events, everything from devastating terror attacks to shootings to very combative political elections, so news fatigue was very real for me at the time.

Now I’ve slowed down quite a bit, and I think having had that international experience and really focusing on the needs of what international audiences are consuming, how they’re consuming it, what’s the top-line that doesn’t involve a story coming out of Washington, I think it really does put things into perspective, and you really think outside of the box and you aren’t so U.S. focused. That has helped me understand the lay of the land outside of my home country.

I think people shouldn’t get too comfortable because platforms and consumption habits will always be changing. It really does pay off to do your research, to look at the data, to welcome critical and constructive feedback, and to really learn to love to be flexible. You take all of that, you adapt, and you repeat. I think that’s extremely vital in this digital ecosystem that we all find ourselves in. One thing just in general, my incredibly savvy boss Roxanne Emadi always says, there’s so much to do. And she’s right, there’s so much that the future will bring, but I do think there’s a lot in store for our team. One specific thing that keeps us moving in the right direction at BuzzFeed News is our ability to be nimble. Being stagnant is simply not an option. We’re in a strong position to do more and reach new heights, like I said before, we get to collaborate and have the support of so many different teams across the company, and that is something we don’t take for granted.

What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen in media recently from an organization other than your own?

I have three:

1. The Cut on Tuesdays is my go-to listen during commutes.
2. The Women Photograph initiative, which tracks a number of different datasets to analyze the ways in which women photographers are hired and published in photojournalism. They looked at the latest photo bylines of eight different newspapers throughout 2018, and they tallied the number of images made by women photographers, including women who identified as POC, and I think that’s a really amazing initiative that I would love to see more of those happen across other media sectors.
3. I’m really intrigued by The Correspondent, the English version of the Dutch startup. I was really impressed by its ability to surpass its crowdfunding goal before the site even launched. They launched $2.5 million in 29 days with the sheer power of email campaigns, come on, that’s incredible. I’m really watching that space closely as they develop their site and they’re messaging further and find unique ways to engage with their members.