The Birth of the BuzzFeed Style Guide

My first day at BuzzFeed was October 29, 2012. It was also the day that Hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record to date, hit New York City. And so while all my new coworkers were adhering to contingency plans and working from their own or someone else's home, I spent my first week at this weird little startup (at the time, comprising roughly 150 employees) hanging out on my couch, meeting all my new colleagues over email and Twitter — and frantically combing through my Twitter history for anything inappropriate, which I would soon learn was wholly unnecessary, if not detrimental to making new friends — trying to figure out a logical, sustainable system for copyediting a site that had never before employed a copy editor. All this as the entire editorial team swarmed the story of the storm from every angle possible, from the somber and heartfelt ("60 Extremely Powerful Photos of Sandy's Destruction Everyone Needs to See") to the silly, absurd, and uplifting ("Hurricane Sandy Texts from Your Mom"). It became immediately clear to me just how dedicated, intelligent, creative, diligent, fearless, and ridiculous the entire group of humans I would go on to call my BuzzFeed family was. From day one (literally) I've been filled with a profound sense of pride and awe that has only intensified in the years since, as I've watched the company balloon into a household name and witnessed the birth of BuzzFeed News, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, the BuzzFeed Entertainment Group, distributed content, and a global, cross-platform network of reporters, editors, video producers, illustrators, and more.

BuzzFeed had hired an editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, at the start of 2012, and that fall the longform (aka features) vertical would launch under features editor Steve Kandell; it was due time, the powers that be had decided, for a copy editor. Luckily for me, I'd projected just the right combination of strangeness and competency during my interview and was selected to fill the role, despite the copyediting test consisting primarily of a story about Mitt Romney — the problem being that I didn't know anything about politics, and still don't. (Sorry, Ben, please don't fire me.) My interest in politics peaks during presidential elections, but even then, it's marginal at best, so I was worried I'd missed something huge, like affiliating someone with the wrong party or not realizing some fancy political term was entirely made up. ("Just because I don't use assemblybustering regularly doesn't mean other people don't, right?" — me, asking myself this question during the copy test.) Such was not the case, miraculously, and I was put to work as BuzzFeed's copy editor several weeks later, where my coworkers were foolish enough to trust I wouldn't butcher their finely tuned prose or routinely ask them ignorant questions about the words sitting in front of me. I like to think I've come through roughly 75 percent of the time.

With no one IRL to show me the ropes during my first week, and little training in place for new hires (even less so when I was being trained via screen, in the middle of a hurricane, a needy cat meowing furiously by my side), I improvised. I started poring through the homepage, making edits on stories I thought were interesting enough to click into. I made the choices I thought were best, with little to no pushback (mostly due to little to no oversight); everyone else was just trying to figure out this BuzzFeed thing too. Said process would go on to be the foundation for shaping my attitude toward copyediting the site in the years to follow: Using your best judgment and your experience to guide you, do what you think is right and then ask other people if they agree. If they say yes, cool. If they say no, work something out together that seems most appropriate.

The first style call I was asked to make was one of utmost importance to our nascent food section: how to spell the abbreviated form of macaroni and cheese. I settled on mac 'n' cheese, because theV is cuter than an ampersand, and it signifies that letters have been elided on either side of the n. I did not consider and an option; when spoken, the abbreviation of this delightful dish typically loses any inkling of a d sound. The conversation with our food editor at the time went like this:

EMILY: hi

how do you want me to write down mac and cheese like should I say macaroni and cheese every time

ME: hey! maybe mac 'n' cheese?

EMILY: ok

ME: is that cool?

EMILY: yeah whatever you want!

ME: k!

Even in instances as petty as The Great Mac 'n' Cheese Call of 2012, I felt a supreme responsibility to put into place the most logical and appropriate language guidelines, given BuzzFeed's readership ("everyone on Facebook," as Ben Smith made sure to inform me during my interview). The site needed standards that accurately reflected the tone of its lighthearted and sometimes utterly ridiculous posts and engaged readers with the site's signature relatable, conversational tone, as well as rules that maintained the integrity of news stories — ones that wouldn't distract readers, pull them out of immersion, or cause them to question our authority.

All of a sudden I found myself tasked with the even more supreme responsibility of creating a style guide for BuzzFeed. The existing "style guide" consisted of roughly four lines on a bare-bones intranet page: It was composed exclusively of notes on formatting numbers and a rule that the first line of a dek — i.e., the typically one- or two-sentence subheading that expands on or supplements a headline — is always in boldface. (That rule has since been overturned, as the site's content evolved and deks generally got shorter.) With a two-and-a-half-week trip to Thailand looming in January 2013, I had a non-negotiable deadline; I had to pull it all together by the end of December. I consulted style guides from prior gigs (I had previously been the copy chief at Teen Vogue and had copyedited in both full-time and freelance roles for a host of national magazines), asked former coworkers to send me additional style guides for reference, and pooled all my resources within the company: some style help from the music editors, recipe-formatting thoughts from the food gang, language suggestions...