Capital New York spoke with new BuzzFeed San Francisco bureau chief Mat Honan about his plans to cover the tech industry.
Here is an excerpt:
CAPITAL: How will Buzzfeed’s coverage of Silicon Valley differentiate itself from rival outlets? What are your plans?
HONAN: The most important thing I want to accomplish early on is to hire really good people from all walks of life and set them free to do their best work.
Then I think there are some very basic things we can do. Some of it will be simple, like speaking in jargon-free language yet also recognizing that we don’t have to painfully explain terms to readers who are coming to us from mobile and social sources. I don’t want to sound too much like a tech blog or a newspaper. Tech news, for a mainstream audience, written in a way that isn’t insulting to your intelligence.
Also, we want to play really hard on social. We have the luxury, to some extent, of not having to drive people back to our site, which frees us up to do things in a little bit of a non-traditional manner. You haven’t really started seeing the fruits of that yet, but you will. We’ve played around with it a bit, but that’s about it.
