How Buzzfeed is remaking campaign coverage.

IT’S EASY TO FORGET that eight months ago BuzzFeed didn’t even have a politics section. The website was known primarily for posting goofy and/or heart-warming lists created expressly for readers to share on social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Among the most popular BuzzFeed articles of 2011 were “20 Alcoholic Beverages Inspired By The Harry Potter Series,” “Basset Hounds Running,” and “Scared Bros at a Haunted House.”

But Jonah Peretti, the site’s CEO (who, like its chair, Kenneth Lerer, also co-founded The Huffington Post), knew that BuzzFeed would benefit from focusing on politics during an election year. People would be obsessed with the campaign and covering it well would offer a shortcut to respectability, a way to implant the brand in the media elite. And so he hired Politico’s Ben Smith, one of the most talented and admired scoop-mongers in the game.

Eight months later, under Smith’s direction, the website’s politics vertical (which is just tech-speak for “section”) draws several million unique visitors a month. Many of its reporters are regulars on cable news, and nearly all of them are central to the political conversation on Twitter. Even The New York Times recognizes BuzzFeed’s power: It will be co-producing videos with the site at both parties’ conventions. “We’ve been doing thorough reportorial, narrative journalism for many, many decades,” says Jim Roberts, the Times’ assistant managing editor and the person who suggested the partnership. “The lessons we can learn from BuzzFeed are going to be valuable.”

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Smith strolled across the website’s New York office—STOP TWEETING BORING SHIT, reads a sign on the wall—to chat with McKay Coppins. Coppins was working on an article about The New Yorker’s website, which was reeling from the news that its science writer, Jonah Lehrer, had fabricated quotes. Smith inspected Coppins’s story and noticed that he had buried his only piece of fresh information: An editor at The New Yorker went on record saying that the episode wasn’t going to halt the magazine’s attempt to expand online. Even though it wasn’t a particularly interesting or important bit of news, Smith told Coppins to move it much higher up in the piece, because, as Coppins explained later, “It’s the tweet”—the tiny morsel that Smith felt had the best chance of getting attention on Twitter.

In a sense, all of BuzzFeed Politics’s articles, even the long ones, are spiritually 140 characters or fewer. This is no accident; as Peretti likes to say, “Twitter is the homepage of politics.” (Facebook, typically a much larger traffic-driver, is not where the elite political conversation plays out.) Not only has Twitter grown at a staggering rate—the 1.8 million tweets published on Election Day 2008 equal the number sent every eight minutes in 2012—but it has also uniquely lent itself to, and helped speed up, the minute-to-minute, who’s-up-who’s-down political culture. It’s the place where reporters share their stories with thousands of followers, trade gossip, and spend most of their waking hours. “In the past, you’d have to be on the press bus or in the file room to see how the political narrative gets formed,” says BuzzFeed reporter Michael Hastings, a veteran of the last two presidential elections. But this year, he adds, in a typically tweet-ready sound bite, “Twitter is the bus.”