OMG! Buzzfeed Coming To Canada

Buzzfeed, the world’s online source for the Best, Worst, Craziest, Hairiest, Lamest, Most Shocking, Most Terrifying, Most LOL, Cringiest and Least Attractive of everything, is coming to Canada!

The website that first put the letters “OMG” in a headline announced its plans to expand to the Great White North on Thursday. Buzzfeed says it will be opening an office in Toronto, the Financial Post reports. Little information is available regarding dates and times.

According to Bloomberg, Buzzfeed has already established a marketing team in Toronto and will be assembling an editorial team this spring.

Buzzfeed began in 2006 when Jonah Peretti, co-founder of the Huffington Post, set out to develop “an experimental lab that focused on tracking viral content and making things people wanted to share,” its website explains. Barely a decade later, the company has offices in New York, London, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Sydney.

With 200 million visitors, Buzzfeed touts itself the “leading media company for the social age.”

In addition to being the internet’s undisputed dispenser of lists, quizzes, lists, fails, lists, and GIFs (also, lists), Buzzfeed began covering international stories in 2012, after the Arab Spring became a viral topic on social media.

Since then, the website has added portals for stories related to politics, business, technology, and LGBT issues.

“We realized we had a huge hole in the content we were publishing,” Buzzfeed CEO and co-founder Jonah Peretti told NPR. “We didn’t have news. We didn’t have reporters. We didn’t have any of the kinds of things that were starting to become increasingly shared across the social Web.”

Ben smith, editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed, explained to NPR that the move to report on politics and social issues was born of a need to keep up with competitors like the New York Times and the Guardian.

“These are stories that people are sharing,” Smith told NPR, “these are meaningful stories that are advancing the news.”

Since becoming EOC, Smith has expanded Buzzfeed’s presence to Cairo, Istanbul, and Nairobi, hiring local reporters in each city in order to add “distinctive takes,” to its reporting, NPR says.

Does this means that, come spring, Buzzfeed readers will be able to enjoy authentically Canadian reports on authentically Canadian events, such as the latest developments in the 2012 $18 million maple syrup heist? You bet your beaver pellets they will.

But until then, fans will have to subsist on Buzzfeed’s hilarious listicles like this one about the charming authenticities of its northern neighbour (note: Canadian spelling).

[Photo Credit: Ottawa Citizen]