YouSaid · the spoken record

Shani Hilton

lines on the record: 54
first: 2016-01-21
most recent: 2016-01-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I try to, when I am away, when I'm actually on vacation, I try not to look at work, but otherwise I'm peeking at my phone.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not parallel, but I think of the Al Jazeera, HDH, Peyton Manning story from a couple weeks ago, and there seems to be an issue with that story. But part of the issue with that story was it was coming out from Al Jazeera. So a lot of people hearing it said, well, that's just not a credible story. It's coming from Al Jazeera. They didn't understand what it is. But you guys think you've sort of cleared that hurdle, a buzzfeed investigation is no longer sort of a question mark”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it just depends on it's often like information sharing when you have these different pieces of the puzzle and you're able to bring them together in collaboration with another company.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was not the first time we worked with BBC. We worked BuzzFeed UK, worked with them on another story that was another investigation around an English charity called Kids Company. But this was BuzzFeed US, BuzzFeed UK, and BBC working together on the match-fixing story.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably a middle ground, right? Where you're not really spending much time thinking about the media, right? And maybe you don't know what BuzzFeed is or you see their stuff. But you see their stuff and it's showing up in your newsfeed and maybe you don't think of them as a serious news organization, not because you're a jaded media person, just because you're just a regular human being.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think we're kind of at a weird place where people who are familiar with the media landscape don't have those questions anymore. It's very clear to them what we're doing and why we're doing it. And then there are people who think it's funny to make jokes about cat pictures and sure. I love cat pictures. It's probably a middle ground.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big, ambitious, important stories, stories that get attention Stories that hopefully comfort the afflicted, right? When you do these sort of things, do you keep running into people saying, why is BuzzFeed writing about match fixing and tennis or trying to figure out who killed someone or any of this stuff? Or do they go, oh, no, no, it's natural that you guys would do this. You're a big national news organization.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think that we are just going to keep hammering on stories around just like really the thing that I'm focused on is uncovering wrongdoing, basically, and seeing where we can make inroads there, big and small. I mean, I think, you know, we're really interested in stories around we had this big tennis story recently that showed evidence of match fixing. We have stories just of kind of, you know, American stories of injustice, whether that's people who've been sent to jail wrongly or trying to figure out who killed a woman, this woman Jessica Chambers, that was a big story for us. Just telling these stories that, I don't know, that opened up our understanding of the country and the world also.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be lucky. What's the so we've got the election coming up? That's obviously going to be a big story for you, and I think Ben Smith, that sort of Corrida's identity as a journalist. What else is going to be important to you coverage wise the next six, nine months?”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's more like you know you get a sense from the person what they want to do, and I think we've been lucky basically.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's been a mix up to now of finding really just like the top of the class best, most experienced reporters and bringing them in and editors. And then also using their expertise to help train up younger people. That's been actually the most fun thing is when you bring in somebody who's got a ton of experience and maybe they have a Pulitzer and maybe they have worked for 20 years, it's really important to us that those people are excited and psyched to work with a 24-year-old who just got out of college and is on her first beat. And luckily we've had that success with those relationships.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that part of the game plan? Look, we've got the money whether or not it's NBC Universal money doesn't matter. We can go out and hire a really credentialed, relatively expensive reporter, or do we not want to do that? Are we better up sort of training up someone from our own ranks?”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that's one tactic, right? It's like hiring somebody who's really good and sourced up on that. But we haven't quite figured out what to do there.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that something you go, all right? Well, maybe we speed this up and we go take some of that NBC universal money and go hire the best, most prominent, or some version of that, someone who's really good at national security and bringing that.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just like foreign policy, thinking about FBI, et cetera. And each of those people has spent the last 20 years getting sourced. And it's really hard to crack that beat.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Question. That's I would say national security has been challenging. We have this great young reporter, Allie Watkins, but it's really, the problem is that there are like seven national security reporters in the entire country slash world.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think it's attractive, but I don't know that it's actually as beneficial. I mean, eventually there's a lot of money in TV right now, but does that stay true forever? I don't know.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't even know that TV is that attractive in my, I mean, but that's just my personal opinion. TV is that attractive?”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty good though. I mean, it's pretty interesting, right? Because BuzzFeed, Box, Vice, a bunch of these big digital publishers are very attractive right now, I think, to the television guys. Talked about this before. And meanwhile, I think there's a lot of energy expended depending on who you talk to. And some of the digital publishers to figure out how to get onto DV because that looks like a pretty attractive platform. It's not clear to me exactly how those things transfer though.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I popped in a couple times and it seemed pretty clear that the relationship is really opportunistic and I think that that makes the most sense and we haven't really had a reason to work more closely with them for BuzzFeed News so you know that's what I'm focused on.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“App newsletter, website, Snapchat like Vox Media that I work for, BuzzFeed got a big investment from NBC Universal last summer. What do you think is going to happen there? What do you think you're going to end up doing with NBC? Are you guys going to make television shows for them? Are you going to take their TV shows and distribute them on BuzzFeed?”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's really become part of our core strategy, the app, the newsletter, really kind of building out Budsweed News as a specific entity.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've been thinking about that not in that much detail, though we do have a Snapchat team that's based in LA from Zay's team, and they oversee the Buzz Feed Snapchat, and sometimes we do what we call a Snapchat takeover with, for example, we did a Muslim identity content one recently. Yeah, but so the questions of Twitter goes to 10,000 characters. Do we just start publishing stories on Twitter? Maybe. We use Instagram. Obviously, we're doing Facebook thinking about native content that does take up a lot of our time, but we haven't quite made an official decision on that strategy yet.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, do you think about all right, well, this is a story, maybe, I don't know, we're covering the primary, right? We're going to cover the Iowa primary, the Iowa Caucuses. Should we think about creating stuff that's specific for Snapchat, that's specific for Twitter? Do we do one story and then cut it up five different ways for five different platforms?”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's part of my job. It's something that we're actually kind of thinking about really actively right now, which we're calling sort of news curation, which is essentially instead of having three separate groups, one that runs the homepage, one that runs the app, the news app, one that does socials, we should bring them all together because what they're essentially doing is the same job. They're telling readers a multitude of platforms what matters. And so that's something that we're just currently trying to figure out right now is how to really centralize this idea of telling people what is happening.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, my theory I was arguing with Chris a bit was I don't think millennials are significantly different than people who are older than them. They're just younger. Maybe the way they consume media is different because they're spending more time on a certain platform. But it seems to me that really what you guys are talking about, if we're talking about digital publishers, right, when they're talking about millennials, they're really just talking about figuring out ways to reach large audiences online.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I personally do not spend a lot of time thinking about whether this story reaches millennials. I do think that often it happens by default. If you have a reporter who says about retail a lot, you're obviously going to reach a lot of millennials because they shop and because they work in retail. And so in that way it's really great to be able to target an audience that we already know that we have and be able to tell them the stories that matter to them. But millennials, I think, are essentially interested in the same thing that other people are, which is like tell me something I don't know. Tell me something I care about. I don't know what else there is to say on that. Yeah.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's important to crack it in that it's really a huge moment for video right now, but it's not more important than the reporting and writing that we're doing.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you know, it's been really actually been a lot of fun getting to work with them more, and I think that's been the nice part is, you know, Joan has been encouraging video to sort of integrate more with the rest of the company. And so that's been a good experience overall.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the thing that we know we don't want to do is replicate television video that just does not work. What we've been experimenting with are things like trailers for big stories, mini docs around big stories. We've done a few of those with our bigger features. And then also what we kind of tentatively have been calling slideshow videos, but they're essentially picture, text, picture text with music and sometimes sound that run on Facebook. Things that can reach a lot of people and inform them and then things that are specifically documentary style around a big story.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We actually have started doing a bit more. We have a New York based video team now that works on what we're calling BuzzFeed, which is lists and quizzes and lifestyle content and also news. So we have a small team of people doing news videos.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's been really fun actually with some of our much more experienced reporters and editors to see them really embrace the web. Like you have our investigations editor who never sent a tweet before he came to Buzzweed and now is obsessed. And not that he tweets all day long, but that he is constantly tweaking and thinking about exactly how to word things and get them out there. And he really has embraced it. So it's very fun to see that kind of thing happen.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and often you can find that some of your older editors or reporters are very inclined to experiment and try new things because they've been in careers for the last 10 or 15 years where they had to do the exact same thing every day the exact same way. And so you're”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's I mean, I think the thing that we try to focus on is making sure that people don't feel like they can't try something new. That's huge. And so that's something that you learn quickly has very little to do with age in terms of personality type. Like young people are not necessarily more inclined to be experimental. And sometimes they can be very stuck in their ways. And often you will find...”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you're onboarding people, when you're saying this is the BuzzFeed Way, this is how we do things, or this is how we did things a month ago, and maybe it's going to change tomorrow. What do they typically have to unlearn or learn? What's something new that they're doing at Buzzfeed they weren't doing somewhere else?”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For our news reporters, a lot of them are young. Most of them have had jobs at other places. Not all of them. Some of them are right out of college. But in terms of our more senior management, most of those people are older than I am and have decades of experience at various posts.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there is a mass shooting template, unfortunately. Also with political primaries, we have pretty experienced long-standing political reporters and editors who know what to do during that process. And then, you know, we have investigations, which we treat pretty traditionally in a lot of ways. So there's some things that we do have a template for, other things, not so much.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think there is a bit of a template for some things. You know, if you have a mass shooting, we've had enough of those in the last two years that we know exactly what to do when that happens. So there's a mass shooting template.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does, although I think you know the core of the way that we do news has been about not being necessarily comprehensive, not necessarily serving everything, but figuring out where we can break through and really throwing our resources at the places where we can add something as opposed to like trying to keep up with everybody else.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's about ambition and not feeling like, okay, we've figured it out because what you end up doing is you become stagnant and we're still in a state of figuring things out. And that's really the challenge, especially as we become more established. And so for people like me or for Ben, who we are into change, we're used to it. We're down with it. The bigger we get, the harder it is to get people to realize, oh, like, we don't always have to do things the way that we've done them for the last six months. We can change that.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You think that's more about people who can figure out how to grow as a company grows, or do you think it's about people who can do a certain kind of work, a certain kind of journalism, but can adapt to however BuzzFeed's changing the way it goes about doing media and journalism?”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think the thing that you learn, the thing that's interesting early on is with an unproven startup that has a news presence, the hiring is tricky, right? Because there are people who are willing to make that jump, but not all of them jump from wherever they were, whether it's a magazine or some other established organization. And some of them can scale as the company scales and can be ambitious. And some of them can't. And it's really interesting to learn how people grow with the company that's growing really rapidly.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you know what was great about it was that we were all sort of Know, I think it helps that we had good, decent instincts about how to do that.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, fashion essays I had the sports team. It was weird. We had a sports team. They reported to me we had our early, early tech team reported to me.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, my thought was, you know, it seemed serious. Ben, to me, is like a very weird, very similar journalistic instincts. I thought like, this is the kind of person that I would like to work with. Jonah Pretti has only ever been very pro-news as a core part of the business. And the investment that they made early on, it was just really clear to me that at the very least, I'm going to come out of this with some great work under my belt.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was sort of looking around, but I also, somebody that I really trusted suggested BuzzFeed to me and I thought, okay, well, you know, this person thinks it's BuzzFeed, then I'm going to try that out and see what happens. Like I felt confident in my ability to get a job if it didn't work out.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they're starting to figure it out. I'm seeing a shift, but I still do feel like. Going to the digital side of a legacy publication is not ideal.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wasn't that interested in working in traditional media because I knew that I 100% did not want to work on the web for a place that was not primarily digital. Because I had done it and I didn't like it Because it's really difficult to be a second class citizen in a newsroom where the old media is what matters most. And while I really liked when I worked for Digital for NBC, it was really fun and I learned a lot. I also just didn't feel like it was a job that would lead to being the primary part of.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really fun. I mean, it was, you know, I was dazzled by seeing the Empire State Building outside of my window. But, you know, I thought it was the kind of stuff that was working on the internet at that point. It was interesting essays. There was some reporting. The politics team was all really smart and good and people that I had heard of and known for some time. I had read Ben years and years before during the 2007 election. So I felt confident in the journalism that they were doing. But we didn't really have a breaking news team at that point. So I kept inserting myself because it had nothing to do with my job. My job was like fashion and essays.”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I was like, this place is willing to hire me. We'll see, you know, I'll hang around there until the wheels fall off”
2016-01-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed Executive Editor of News · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT