Dive Brief:
- Variety reports that BuzzFeed News has an exclusive deal with Twitter to live stream election night coverage for as long as five hours. The program will be called "Election Night Live."
- The ambitious project has been put together fairly quickly, per Variety, with the green light coming in September followed by a a scrambling search process that found CNN, MSNBC and E! ex Bruce Perlmutter for executive producer.
- Broadcast HQ will be BuzzFeed’s New York City offices, and Perlmutter said, “We still have a thousand things to do” this week.
Dive Insight:
Twitter has been eager to broker marquee video deals since promoting live video as one of its core offerings, and it previously broadcasted two presidential debates in partnership with Bloomberg and then Buzzfeed News in October. The re-upped deal with BuzzFeed might be gunning for the attentions — and viewership numbers — of the publisher's young-skewing audience, and BuzzFeed, for its part, is seeking to better legitimize what it hopes to be a harder news platform.
As Variety notes, BuzzFeed's most popular live video to date has been footage of a watermelon exploding, and the site is pushing further past fluff into more serious political and news coverage through Twitter. Twitter has always been the big social media platform for staying current on news, so the second screen possibilities of the deal are huge, with the ability to both stream live coverage as it happens and utilize feeds for discussion and breakers.
BuzzFeed’s video and journalistic ambitions have likely grown after NBCUniversal invested $200 million int he company last year, with a comparable round of funding expected soon. However, Variety reports "Election Night Live" will not include NBCU resources.
