LEXIE TUCKER WRITES – BuzzFeed, a site that every millennial is well aware of, has finally made a move to provide quizzes, funny cat gifs, and “would you rather” polls to Japan. At the helm of the site will be founding editor Daisuke Furuta.
As a former member of the digital editions team at The Asahi Shimbun, Furuta is more than prepared to take on the task. According to TechCrunch, Furuta served as a correspondent in Southeast Asia and also worked at the newspaper’s Singapore bureau. When he came back to Tokyo in 2013, he wrote articles for their site withnews, which produces content very similar to what is found on BuzzFeed.
Furuta stated, “BuzzFeed’s goal is to merge the best of traditional media, internet culture and technology to bring great news and entertainment to the people around the world to share […] In addition to delivering great content to Japanese readers, we aim to provide content from our launching editorial team in Japan to readers around the world.”
With news outlets in countries such as America, the UK, India, and Australia, it will be interesting to see what kind of articles spawn from BuzzFeed Japan. The site will be run by Yahoo Japan, and will also be the news franchise’s first venture into East Asia.
BuzzFeed’s Vice President of International Scott Lamb praised Furuta’s journalistic abilities saying, “His vast experience as a reporter combined with his passion for and deep understanding of the web makes Daisuke Furuta the perfect person to lead our editorial team.”
BuzzFeed is often knocked by critics as being the antithesis of good journalism: a “clickbait-topia” of sorts. In a world where it seems like all news is bad news, maybe we could all use a daily dose of cute animal pictures. Hopefully Furuta will bring the lighter side of Japanese culture to a world-wide audience.