Buzzfeed Hires 'Online Curiosity Collector' and Diaper Expert Katie Notopoulos
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"Online curiosity collecter," Twitter power user, and sometime Gawker contributor Katie Notopoulos (pictured right) will be joining BuzzFeed as a senior editor in two weeks, working with managing editor Scott Lamb to bring her ongoing documentation of the weird, stupid, gross and hilarious on the internet under the BuzzFeed banner.
"I believe that Buzzfeed really does 'get' the social web, and I'm excited to add to what they already do best. PLEASE DON'T MAKE FUN OF ME FOR SAYING THAT," Katie told me over instant messenger before sending me links to a series of Twitter accounts written from the point of view of sex dolls.
"Katie Notopoulos is an incredibly gifted finder of compelling, viral patterns and curator of online culture, which should really just be called 'culture' at this point," BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith said in email that had no links to sex doll Twitter accounts. "She's been doing for years what BuzzFeed specializes in: Telling contagious stories built for the social web, and she's going to be working with Scott Lamb, Matt Stopera and other BuzzFeed veterans to perfect her craft and ours."
Smith did not comment on ongoing rumors that Jonah Peretti is planning to replace him with Horse of Horse ebooks.
Katie is like the six thousandth person BuzzFeed has hired (including former Gawker writer Matt Cherette) since they poached Smith away from Politico last year. We wrote about her pioneering work in the field of "found schadenfreude" in January:
Katie is an expert in what she told me she calls "found schadenfreude": all that hilariously weird and stupid stuff on the internet that most people never read. Comedian Julie Klausner, who hosts Katie on her podcast "How Was Your Week?" calls her an "online curiosity collector"; What Katie does, essentially, is a very specific and very funny kind of curating — sorting through the constant and impenetrable noise of Twitter or Flickr to find the bizarre and ugly and idiotic. "It's noticing a pattern," Katie said when I asked about her method. "When it becomes a pattern, it's funny."