2016
After the success of my last portrait project, I decided I want to do something similar for the following hack week. In the last project, photographing and interviewing my subjects allowed me to get to know many people within the tech department that I wouldn't typically interact with. As BuzzFeed continued to scale, the harder it was to 'know' or even ' know of' everyone on the team. Being very much inspired by Humans of New York, I decided to create "Humans of BuzzFeed", a blog that would periodically post portraits and snippets from interviews as a service to the entire tech org.
Unlike last time, this project would be internal-facing rather than external. Also unlike last time I decided I didn't want to do this alone. I recruited a team of four other people in various departments in tech to help me out with photographing, interviewing, editing, and publishing the interviews. As a result of the combined team effort we were able to produce 20+ interviews by the time we 'launched' at the end of hack week. We developed our own small scale publishing workflow in order to stay on target, expanded our scope to interview employees outside of tech in our LA and NY offices, and kept up interviews and publishing new content for up to six months (until the following hack week). Eventually our project gathered the interest of BuzzFeed's international and recruiting teams and with their help we were able to scale the project internationally to all of BuzzFeed's offices.