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Entertainment July 15, 2019
What it's like to work for one of the world's biggest media companies.
If you’ve been on the internet, ever, you’ve probably heard of a website called Buzzfeed. It’s a site for news, listicles, blogging, and really fun quizzes. They also have a network of YouTube channels for quite a few different video series. One of Buzzfeed’s most popular is a funny as hell series called, Ladylike.
Ladylike is a series that follows a group of young women who do challenges mainly related to women’s lifestyle interests. This includes things like makeup, fashion, and food.
I reached out to one of the incredible ladies behind the series, Kristin Chirico, to talk about content creation. Audiences know her as someone who is not only talented, but uses her platform at Buzzfeed to promote messages of body positivity towards women of all ages.
Chirico said that in order to be a woman in the media, we need to have nerves of steel, composure, poise, persistence, and to always stick up for what we, as women, deserve.
But who is Kristin Chirico? How did her journey actually begin and now what is it like to work for one of the world’s most popular entertainment companies?
Kristin Chirico said that when she came to Los Angeles, she was working as an assistant to political consultants in Beverly Hills. She was unhappy at her job and felt that she wasn’t going anywhere with it.
Chirico said that she had a friend who was working at Buzzfeed at this time. They suggested writing some community posts for the website to see if it was going to be a good fit for her, which could potentially lead to a full-time position.
Community posting is when readers can submit an article to Buzzfeed where it gets approved for publication. The beauty of community posting is that it gives writers some creative freedom to pick what they actually want to write about. The downside of all this is that community posters do not get paid.
Chirico wrote a few posts and one of them got a lot of likes and shares. This brought traction to the site, landing her an interview for a full-time position. Her hard work and persistence transformed her from someone working for free to a full-time staff writer at Buzzfeed.
“At first I was writing about anything. But then I started writing about women’s bodies. That’s kind of where I started to find my groove,” Chirico said.
Chirico said that for the most part, the most important aspect of posting written articles, other than creating good content, was understanding what would do well and get traffic.
“I think understanding why people care about media online is probably the number one job skill for people who are trying to make media online,” Chirico said. “There’s a lot of technical skill involved in that too. But the majority still is having the emotional intelligence to understand why people like things.”
Although she wrote for a while on Buzzfeed’s blogs, more people know Kristin from her hilarious on-camera presence. Ladylike, on Buzzfeed Entertainment’s YouTube Channel, is run by Chirico and four other badass ladies. Chirico, and Frederica “Freddie” Ransome, Devin Lytle, Jennifer “Jen” Ruggirello, and Chantel Houston do challenges, go on adventures, share opinions, and much more.
I asked Kristin what a week in her life as a content producer, director, and on-camera personality was like. She said that it all starts with pre-production. She said it’s about the main questions of, “What do we need? Who do we need? Where will we be shooting?”
“It’s kind of figuring out basically everything you need for the shoot and then making sure that you kind of pick the things that you want from that,” Chirico said.
She explained that a lot of choices need to be made in the planning stages of each video. If it’s a fashion-centric shoot, they want to make sure that they have a stylist who can dress a variety of bodies. Or, if they need certain props they have to find a way to procure them.
She said that producing is, at its core, figuring out how she gets the elements needed to create videos. The producer then molds these pieces together to be executed in line with what they envisioned when pre-planning.
Chirico stressed the importance of being able to multitask. She explained that at Buzzfeed, a lot of the time, there are maybe four or five people on set for one video, most of whom are doing a couple of different jobs.
“There may be one person who’s running A-cam, someone running B-cam, and maybe one of these people is also doing sound,” Chirico said.
She and the other members of Ladylike also direct their own videos as well as appear on camera, which is by itself a pretty demanding job. She said some of her favorite videos to do are the travel pieces. Chirico has one series where she goes on vacation with nothing in her suitcase. The challenge is then to try and find good plus-sized clothing wherever they are.
On their recent trek to Hawaii, there were four people to operate two cameras, sound, and to figure out the lighting while on location, while Kristin and Jen (Ruggirello) were also on camera. She explained that this was one of those times when you needed to have composure and to be able to think on your feet.
“You don’t have like a hundred people running around on one project like a TV show does. We are basically a backyard theater that happens to be owned by a major corporation.”
The way we tell stories on the internet has changed so much within the past ten years alone. Buzzfeed, in particular, is dedicated to getting new voices and perspectives in the spotlight. Kristin Chirico has advocated for plus-sized women all throughout her career at Buzzfeed. She did so when writing on the blog and now in her videos on Ladylike’s channel.
I know she will continue to do great work, and I hope that in the years to come, there will be more publications like Buzzfeed and more content creators like Kristin Chirico. Buzzfeed’s appeal is that they are open to hearing stories from perspectives that we don’t traditionally hear from. I think that there can only be more women like Kristin and the other women from Ladylike in the future; because the future is female, and it’s diverse and it’s full of kindness. Oh, and maybe there’s a little laughter in there.
