Explaining Federal Reserve policy via GIFs

Capital New York interviewed new BuzzFeed deputy business editor Tom Gara about how the website delivers business and financial news.

Here is an excerpt:

CAPITAL: In the same interview, Lauria talked about publishing a mixture of “insider-y posts” and listicle explainers. Do you think the younger readers who account for a lot of Buzzfeed’s readership will ever be interested in the kind of stories a Reuters or Financial Times produces? Where do you stand on the notion of explaining something like Federal Reserve policy through movie GIFs?

GARA: I really disagree with that Mencken quote about nobody ever going broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public—at least when it comes to news, underestimating the intelligence of your readers is a great way to go broke. And that goes for teenagers as much as it goes for octogenarians—if you’re running a news organization on the assumption people are dumb and deserve to be fed trash, not only are you kind of evil, but you’re missing out on the much bigger opportunity of assuming people want to read great stuff and know what’s really going on in the world.

Personally, my thoughts on Fed policy via GIFs: If you can actually explain the policies of the Federal Reserve via GIFs, that’s pretty amazing talent and you really should do it — and there are some good examples of the Buzzfeed Business team doing things like that. But if you can’t really do that, and the end product is jokey fluff that doesn’t live up to its promise, AND your job is being a reporter for a news organization, then there are probably about 300 better uses of your time.

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