On Tuesday, BuzzFeed will unveil “CNN BuzzFeed,” a YouTube channel based on content from CNN, including archival and current content, that is designed to be shared over social-media networks.

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In addition to feeding the tireless AllThingsD news machine, our editors also dropped by a few other outlets this week to talk about lots of things, including the fate of long-form journalism in a short-attention-span world and how to restore the Start Menu on Windows 8 until Microsoft decides whether or not to restore it for you. Here’s a rundown of those appearances:

• Kara Swisher spoke with Bloomberg West about her recent article for Vanity Fair magazine chronicling the rise of Instagram and its sale to Facebook:

• Kara also dropped by “Marketplace” for a chat about the place of long-form journalism on small-screen devices. Her take: Mobile devices offer plenty of room for both in-depth journalism and short-form “listicles” like those popularized by BuzzFeed:

• Walt Mossberg appeared on The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” program to discuss his review of Start8 and Pokki, two third-party utilities that restore the Start Menu to Windows 8:

• Finally, Peter Kafka joined “On The Media” to discuss the future of digital advertising as streaming online video grows in popularity:

In addition to earlier investors, who include Lerer Ventures, Oak Investment and Bedrocket, SoftBank Capital has also put money into the new round; SoftBank principal Nikhil Kalghatgi will join the company’s board.

NowThisNews has now raised nearly $10 million in the last year; Eric Hippeau, Lerer Ventures’ managing director, says NowThisNews is still talking to some strategic investors about kicking in a bit more. Danielle Morrill noted the new round earlier this month.

So that’s the money part. How’s the startup itself doing?

Just fine, said Hippeau. He said the company, which launched last fall, has already created 300,000 videos, and that last month it generated 20 million video streams. By comparison, HuffPost Live, Huffington Post’s own version of a video news service, generated 48 million streams in March.

The big caveat with NowThisNews’ video stream numbers is that the conceit behind the service is that it’s “mobile first” and is supposed to reach a new generation of video viewers who live on their phones. But Hippeau said that a majority of the company’s views are coming from the Web, via syndication deals it has with outlets like BuzzFeed, MSN, the Guardian, Forbes and the Atlantic.

“They’re going through the same experience that a lot of people who are trying to do mobile are going through, which is that you’re going to build a mobile audience not only through mobile but from the Web, as well,” Hippeau said.

The big question is whether NowThisNews’ product, which generally leans on quick-twitch, MTV News-style summaries, or found footage with music overdubs, can stand out in a world where there’s a whole lot of that stuff — particularly on YouTube, which pulls in a billion viewers a month, and is increasingly reaching those folks on their phones, too.

Here’s NowThisNews’ take on a pregnant panda story. If you’re looking for a voice-over, there isn’t any. But there is some explanatory text on the video’s homepage: “‘Evolutionarily Challenged’ Panda Is Artificially Inseminated. Dying breed can only mate once a year.”

We are thrilled to welcome Jason Del Rey to the staff of AllThingsD, where the accomplished reporter will be covering e-commerce.

That includes such critical companies as Amazon, Groupon, eBay and the fast-growing online payments business, as well the escalation of the Internet of Things and the continued mashup of the offline and online worlds.

Del Rey is perfectly suited to the task, having been a business journalist since 2007, when he joined Inc. magazine in order to write about startups and fast-growing small businesses across all industries.

He was most recently a reporter at Advertising Age, where he covered older digital media companies such as Yahoo and AOL, and upstarts such as BuzzFeed and Gawker Media.

Del Rey has also worked as the executive editor of Open Forum, a Web publication for small business owners and entrepreneurs. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The entire AllThingsD staff is thrilled to welcome Jason, who will be starting in two weeks.

So, of course, there’s a Birchbox — the subscription service that delivers a monthly package of makeup samples — for people who like dogs, too.

It’s called BarkBox, obviously. It’s a bit more than a year old and has 35,000 customers paying at least $19 a month. And now it has $5 million in venture money, via a round led by RRE Ventures.

The new money comes on top of $1.7 million the startup raised last year, from all of the same investors in the new round, including Lerer Ventures, Polaris Ventures, 500 Startups and Bertelsmann.

The New York-based company is using the money to build out other canine-related businesses, including BarkPost, which CEO Matt Meeker describes as a dog-specific version of BuzzFeed’s “animals” site, and BarkCare, a $199-a-year service that gives dog owners 24/7 access to vets for consultations online and over the phone. The company is also rebranding as Bark & Co.

In the old days, it was easy to dismiss this kind of narrow, this-version-of-that-thing concept as a symptom of a bubble. But we’re (seemingly) past that now — if it works in one vertical, there’s no reason it can’t in another. And some dog-owners really, really like their dogs.

“One thing that surprised us was that there’s just a ton of room for innovation in the space,” says Meeker, who created the company while he was running the New York location of startup incubator Dogpatch Labs for Polaris, and also co-founded community organizing site Meetup.

One difference between BarkBox and Birchbox,  Meeker says, is that BarkBox doesn’t give subscribers samples, but full-sized deliveries of stuff they’d like their dogs to have, like toys and treats.

Okay. So why not at least broaden the business out to attract cat-lovers, too? Not happening, says Meeker. “We’re all-in on dogs, and dogs only.”

Image copyright Norm Hall | Getty Images Sport

It’s a stark contrast from the glory days, where distribution was fixed and scarce, and all we had to do was put a great product out there. At the time, all content had found its own native distribution outlet — a channel on the dial, a spot on the newsstand, a movie theater, video store — that delivered it to the bulk of its audience. That distribution was beautifully limited — there’s only room for 12 channels on the old VHF dial, 16 movies at a multiplex and maybe several thousand titles at video rental stores.

But today, distribution and consumption are in constant flux. Look at TV. To be truly “Everywhere” these days, a TV show has to be on network, cable, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Facebook and Amazon, have its own native app in Apple and Android stores — at a minimum — and a presence in Google’s mighty search index.

To succeed today, digital media companies need to get control of their distribution. The opportunity for savvy media companies is to abandon the outdated if-we-build-it-they-will-come mentality, and master the craft and science of programming.

Programming is the skill of matching content to audience. Programming is what built the global TV and film industry from $200 billion to $300 billion in the last decade. If you want to succeed in digital media going forward, programming is everything.

I spent time recently with a friend from CBS and told him about what my company Wetpaint does to program social as a channel: In short, we deterministically deliver the right content to each audience at the right time. That might mean, for example, a recap of yesterday’s news timed for the morning bus ride, a short-form video clip posted to coincide with a mid-morning coffee break, a gossipy tidbit just as lunch begins. “That may work in entertainment,” he said. “But it would never work in breaking news. In news, everything needs to go out immediately.”

So I did some research, and it turns out he’s wrong. When you look at what our editors consider breaking news within the entertainment category, the vast majority of stories — more than 75 percent — perform better when they’re packaged and presented at another time of day, and not when they first break.

While immediacy became the mandate in the ages of CNN and Google, smart programming is far superior in an age of multiple distribution outlets.

The expertise of digital programming is in its infancy, but some of the secrets for success have emerged. Here are a few:

• You don’t have one big audience.
  Digital media companies need to know who their audience is and what they like, and then customize their product and pitch accordingly. But convention on the Web has been to serve everyone the same thing — and the folly of that is a massive missed opportunity. Instead, understand your value to all your major audience segments. After all, each person you reach thinks of herself as an audience of one. Meet her where she’s at, and you’ll find your resonance — and performance — will be much greater.

  For decades, the National Football League operated on the basic assumption that football is for guys. That conventional wisdom was upended in 2010 when research by the NFL and Nielsen found that more than 40 percent of the league’s fans were women. (It’s upward of 44 percent now.) Of course, football fans (both male and female), segment along many lines — and NFL marketers will have to find ways to speak to, sell to and grow all those demographics. But acknowledging women was a huge and lucrative step to grow the league’s opportunity massively.

• Learn what will resonate. (Hint: In the battle for consumer hearts and minds, heart wins every time.)
  Once you know who your customers really are and can group them by their common interests, the world opens up. You have the freedom to design new content and experiences to delight them. It doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all any longer; your brand doesn’t have to be watered down to its most basic and neutral. Many brands and publishers struggle for relevance — but once you articulate who your audiences are and understand what they’re interested in, the door is open to all kinds of new conversations. Research, feedback and analytics can all help you become expert in each of your audience segments. Then use those insights to grow your brand.

  Sticking with the NFL as an example, when the league learned about its popularity with women, it took that finding and ran with it, introducing a new website, ad campaign and product lines — all aimed at the now 80 million women who tune into NFL games each weekend. Female fans rewarded the new attention by dropping millions on NFL apparel, jewelry, nail polish, yoga mats, etc. The league went further and partnered with the American Cancer Society to raise awareness about breast cancer, which explains all the pink flourishes (gloves, socks, wristbands, etc.) on the field and the sidelines these days. This overdue — and heartfelt — outreach strengthened the bond between the NFL and its huge female fan base. The league’s bottom line smiled. In 2012, NFL fans spent $3.2 billion on consumer products.

• Timing is everything.
  Of course, the most basic element of the art of content programming, one that has been mastered by the TV networks, is knowing what performs when. Prime-time shows don’t work in the mornings, and re-runs would squander the huge opportunity of evening viewing. There’s a time for opinion and a slot for hard news, and reversing them tanks performance and tunes out audiences.

  But on the Web, well, somehow the only rule of thumb our industry seems to know is “the best time to post is now.” And that’s preposterous.

  In terms of social, the state of the art sounds better, at least at first: There are lots of generalizations out there about when to post content: Mornings are better than evenings, Facebook sharing spikes on weekends, tweeting peaks on Fridays. Well, that’s all great in theory, since it documents average behavior of average audiences. But the point isn’t to get it right for someone else’s average consumer. Whether we’re talking about work or play, we all develop our own individual routines and habits. Discovering the personal quirks of your particular audience is a goldmine for programmers.

  How powerful is it? Several years ago, a U.K. content agency called Collective Content was helping a small management firm develop its programming strategy. Traffic to the client’s website waned on weekends. Nothing surprising there. But Collective Content began to notice an uptick in Sunday visits. “Sunday evenings had become the new Monday morning,” wrote Collective Content founder Tony Hallett. “Execs and other managers were getting a jump on the working week. This was a great time to feed their need for information.”

  At Wetpaint, we try to time content delivery to the distinct habits of our audiences, which vary from show to show. The very young (13-24) “Pretty Little Liars” audience likes a fast-paced, high volume content diet, so we serve them fresh stuff all day long. Older (55 percent are over 24) “Grey’s Anatomy” fans catch up on new content in the evening, just before they get into TV-viewing mode. So we freshen our “Grey’s Anatomy” pages late in the day. If you program according to someone else’s guidelines, all your best shots will miss your target. Instead, know your audience and you will hit the mark.

• Like it or not, people judge books by their covers. Design your packaging to resonate.
  In pre-digital days, content packaging discussions went like this: How long is the story? Do we need photos or illustrations? Today, fuhgeddaboutit. Digital editors have lots more arrows in the quiver. They can trot out old packaging chestnuts like long-form profiles or Q&As, or they can present content in slideshows, video, audio, polls, quizzes, clickable infographics, Spotify playlists, etc. The packaging options just keep growing — and so does the menu of social media megaphones you can use to trumpet the final product.

  Working all those levers in a way that engages your audience and exploits the strengths of each packaging and delivery option is an art and a science. BuzzFeed is one of its master practitioners. In its self-proclaimed rules for “How to Go Viral” (an infographic, of course), Buzzfeed recommends making lists (“9 out of ten Internet lists go viral”), using quizzes to appeal to user vanity (“People online love talking about themselves”) and staying relevant. We won’t quibble with the BuzzFeed rulebook. But in our own experience, packaging — like timing and just about everything else — is audience-specific. Fans of “Vampire Diaries” like to vote, for example; so we give them polls. And it works — to the tune of thousands of Facebook ballots click-cast for star Nina Dobrev in our sexiest legs poll.

• Test, test, test, for insights you can use.
  If you follow my Digital Quarters blog and Media Success newsletter you know I’m a nut for data. I firmly believe that the only way you can truly know your audience in all its wondrous eccentricity is to embrace testing with a gusto that borders on obsession. (Yes, I am seeing somebody about this.) Every shred of content you produce, from the glossy video to the tiniest tweet, is an opportunity to learn something about the consumers who visit your site. Don’t waste it.

  As you generate (via surveys, focus groups or, our favorite, A/B testing) and then sift through the mounds of data, trends will unfailingly emerge. These insights into user preferences help drive programming decisions at Wetpaint.

  Testing tells us that our “Bachelor” and “Bachelorette” fans revel in relationship gossip. Stories about dating, cheating, break-ups, pregnancy rumors, etc., perform four times better than episode-related news like recaps or sneak peeks. But within that relationship news subcategory, the two audiences diverge: Bachelorette watchers are scandalmongers. Bachelor fans are sentimentalists. We tailor our content accordingly. Testing has also made us smarter about social media. Facebook posts with photos work best when we’re promoting content for scripted (“Grey’s Anatomy”) or reality (“Bachelor”) shows. For breaking news, text-only posts do just fine. If the news is big, words are enough to catch the eye.

• The News Feed is the new EPG, and you must be present to win.
  The greatest opportunity of all in digital media is the chance to be relevant to your audience — not once a day, not on an appointment basis once a week, but minute by minute. To do that means being where your users are at all hours of the day — with exactly the right content at the ready. For consumers, it would be like the “Electronic Program Guide” that we’ve had on TV for the last 20 years — only it would be completely personalized and constantly refreshed. Quel fantasme, n’est-ce pas?

  Lo, there’s an app for that — and it’s the No.1 app on every smartphone. Yes, Facebook is the new Electronic Program Guide. Consumers check Facebook many times a day — usually just briefly, sometimes longer — to see “what’s on” in their lives. In fact, 23 percent of all time spent on smartphones is spent on Facebook mobile apps.

  For media companies, the great opportunity here is to cement your relationship with your audience by getting in their network — and then turning up the content they’ll enjoy to whatever frequency interests them. Do it right — with great audience targeting, insight, timing, packaging and testing — and you earn a position at the top of the News Feed hour after hour, day after day.

  Who understands this well in media? Of late, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer has been talking about building a “daily habit” with consumers. Why not twice a day, or more? That is the power of presence in the feed. And it comes from meeting each member of your audience where she is.

Smart programming is like a good relationship. It requires paying attention, being responsive, trying new things. It’s hard work, but the rewards are enduring — a loyal, ongoing relationship with a growing audience. And that surely makes it worth the effort.

This is a guest post by Ben Elowitz (@elowitz). Elowitz is the co-founder and CEO of next-generation media company Wetpaint, and the author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile.

College roommate’s boyfriend’s dad. (he knows)

– No. 18 on a list of 32 answers to an informal survey of whose HBO Go accounts people in the BuzzFeed office use

Hearst Ventures, the investment arm of media giant Hearst Corporation, said it was making a minority equity investment in Science, the Los Angeles area tech “studio.”

Privately held Hearst is the sole investor in the new funding, although the company declined to reveal financial terms of the investment.

But sources with awareness of the deal said it was close to $30 million for a stake above 20 percent.

Somewhat akin to a startup accelerator, Science is attempting to quickly create and scale a number of promising companies in a variety of areas, and has launched 13 so far.

Among the Santa Monica, Calif., tech studio’s recent efforts: Dollar Shave Club, a subscription-based products company aimed at men; Ellie, which sells high-end activewear for women; and Wittlebee, a clothes club for kids.

Hearst Ventures is operated by Hearst’s Entertainment and Syndication unit, which is run by Scott Sassa and George Kliavkoff. Kliavkoff will join Science’s board of directors.

“It’s clear to us that, while we have these brands that resonate with consumers, we think there are some learnings we can get from these guys that are hard to get in a big company,” said Sassa. “Being able to be nimble with insight and guidance is important for us.”

Kliavkoff also noted that this was a way to get immediate ownership in a range of promising companies. “We are writing one check and will have an immediate stake in more than a dozen great startups,” he said. “[Science] has been very thoughtful in starting companies in smart areas.”

In a statement, Hearst CEO Frank Bennack said: “Hearst is continually looking for smart investments that bring value and intelligence to the company — our investment in Science does both. We’re excited to partner with Science to continue its trajectory of success, gain meaningful industry knowledge and utilize Science’s platforms for current and future Hearst investments.”

Though quieter than most, Hearst Ventures have made many successful investments over 15 years, including in Netscape and Broadcast.com. More recently, it has funded such companies as Brightcove and Pandora, as well as HootSuite and BuzzFeed.

Science was founded in late 2011 — with $10 million funding from big-name investors including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners and White Star Capital. Its CEO is well-regarded entrepreneur Mike Jones, who was most recently CEO of Myspace. Prior to Myspace, he had started and sold Userplane to AOL in 2006. In addition, well-known entrepreneur Peter Pham is chief business officer at Science.

“I am very proud of work that the Science team has accomplished since launching,” said Jones, in a quick interview tonight (short enough so that his wife would not get angry at me for ruining Valentine’s Day). “I am extremely excited about opportunities for Science companies going forward.”

More to come, but here is the very clever viral video that Dollar Shave Club did on its launch:

@MsAmandaBynes_! You are my favorite actress! You are so genuine and funny and you love your fans! Thanks for being you :)

– From a bug on Twitter.com that displayed messages to users scrolling through certain celebrity profiles that appeared to be written by those users and retweeted by the celebs in question

Then you had to get a new job. So Ashley Arenson moved from Chicago, where she spent a year-plus as Obama for America’s “Director of Integration and Innovation,” to New York, where she’s now general manager at Soho Tech Labs.

Soho Tech Labs is Lerer Ventures’ in-house incubator; the notion is that the investment firm will use it to play with ideas that could become companies at some point, using a limited amount of capital.

So far, Labs has hatched Rebel Mouse, a buzzy publishing system that lets people and brands create a “social front page”; CasaHop, a social travel company that shuttered yesterday; and Emogo, which hasn’t launched yet but has something to do with avatars (that’s Arenson’s Emogo up right).

Arenson says Labs is working on several other projects, and her task is to help would-be entrepreneurs get their projects in shape to ship, and raise a bona fide seed round. And to help connect them with the incubator’s resources, like a board that includes BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti and a tech team that’s scattered around the world.

The role is similar to the one she had at the campaign, she says, where she worked as a conduit between its technologists and veteran politicos. “Day in and day out, the job was to identify challenges, and identify people who could help me solve them,” Arenson says. That’s a nice summary of startup life, too.

I get “native ads.” Those are ads that give Web publishers a chance to say they’re not selling ads, because they’re selling stuff that people want to look at, at least theoretically. I think that can work in some formats — especially with video.

But these things never seem to work when it comes to print, or print-like Web publications. Not because they fool readers into thinking they’re reading “real” content. But because they seem like lousy imitations of “real” content.

I can’t figure out why that is. Making “real” content, that readers would find inherently interesting, is a specific skill, but not a rarefied one. For whatever reason, though, these things just don’t work as ads, or as anything else.

That held true for magazines and newspapers in the olden days, and it holds true now. For instance: Check out the “sponsor content” that the Atlantic is still running, after apologizing for its Scientology blunder — this stuff from IBM is unreadable. Ditto for Huffpo’s work for Prilosec (I think? The URL seems to be the only hint on this one).

Even the sharp minds at BuzzFeed, blessed with a spooky ability to make click-worthy stuff, end up falling flat when asked to create fake content for clients like the Nevada Commission on Tourism.

Still, I’m all for ad revenue, because it helps foot the bill for typers like me. And we’re still in frontier times when it comes to Web ad rules, so we’re going to see lots of experiments for a long time.

So here’s one easy ground rule for Web publishers and advertisers to keep in mind as they draft their next advertorial campaign: If the fake article you’re going to write can be easily, mercilessly parodied with a couple keystrokes and some nifty Photoshop work, try something else.

So here’s a good person to ask for advice: Former MTV boss Judy McGrath, who has signed on as an adviser for the video start-up.

McGrath gets a lot of credit for turning MTV, and later MTV Networks, into a cultural and commercial powerhouse for Viacom. But she left the cable giant in 2011, after a 30-year career. So she had some time available when NowThisNews backer Ken Lerer asked her to take a look at his new project this fall.

Now McGrath will offer her advice on a more formal basis. She says she’ll weigh in on stuff like on-air talent and presentation. “I find the whole project kind of relevant and compelling,” she said.

Meanwhile, you can play armchair adviser, without getting paid: NowThisNews is up and running, and you can watch the start-up try to find its footing in real time, as it produces 10 one-minute clips a day.

For the last month or so, the start-up, which has a couple dozen employees, has been all over the map with the stuff it produces — sometimes it sends a camera crew out to document destruction in the Rockaways; often it uses a gum-snapping, OMG! tone to summarize both hard news and click-bait ephemera.

So far, the stuff that seems the most successful, both editorially and in terms of views, is stuff like this Petraeus scandal explainer:

The other interesting note so far from NTN’s early efforts is about where you’re likely to find them. While the company has a bare-bones Web site — it’s produced via Rebel Mouse, another Lerer-backed start-up — it really wants users to watch the show on iPhones, via a dedicated app. Or on the Web, when it’s embedded/distributed on other sites, like Facebook or BuzzFeed (yes, another Lerer project).

For the time being, at least, they’re even forgoing YouTube, which seems like an odd choice for anyone who wants people to watch their video. But the NTN guys insist that there’s a method to this, so we’ll see.

Instagram user @luch313

Tons of great Sandy coverage on the Web last night and this morning. Largely absent from the conversation, though, are three New York-based news/aggregation sites: BuzzFeed, Gawker and the Huffington Post.

All three publishers relied on Datagram, a Manhattan-based ISP, according to a BuzzFeed post published late last night. When that went down, so did their sites.

This morning, all three are making do with temporary fixes.

Huffington Post is running a bare-bones homepage (as Bruce Upbin notes, no nip-slip slideshows this morning); Gawker has reverted to its pre-redesign form; and BuzzFeed is relying on individual Tumblr accounts (see John Herrman’s excellent thumbsucker on instaTruth).

And all three sites, of course, are making excellent use of Twitter, which really had its moment last night: Best place to get the most information on the Web.

Over the next few weeks, the post drew 2,000 Facebook ”likes” and about 330,000 views. But most of those views weren’t on BuzzFeed’s home page. Instead, they were from people sharing the post on social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Stories go viral every day. But what made the post unusual is that it was an ad for Virgin Mobile, which was promoting more entertainment for sharing on the Virgin Mobile Live website.

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Web video tracker/ad network Visible Measures says that excerpts from the chat, and responses to the chat, have generated two million views in the last day. As BuzzFeed explains this morning, elements of the speech have floated around the Web for months. But it didn’t break big until it got a push from Mother Jones.

From the muckraking magazine, here’s the money clip, which has generated 1.6 million views:

[Image: MittRomney.com]

Here’s the source material, by the way, from the Science Channel:

Together they’re going to try to figure out modern-day YouTube.

Buzzfeed has bought Ze Frank’s games/video start-up, which means it has “acqhired” Frank and two of his three employees. Frank’s job is to help Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti break into Google’s video giant.

“Facebook and Twitter have been huge for the growth of BuzzFeed so far and YouTube has been the missing piece,” Peretti says. “Ze will lead the YouTube charge for us.”

Frank is building and staffing a BuzzFeed studio in Los Angeles, but he’s already been generating some video for Peretti and company, by creating some clips based on BuzzFeed posts.

Here’s his breakout hit to date, which has generated more than 4 million views and is more popular than its source material.

But Frank says the stuff he’ll be doing as a full-time BuzzFeed employee won’t be limited to recreating the site’s posts. “That’s just one approach,” he says. His guiding principles: “The thing that has always struck me is that there has always been a bit of a hole at YouTube when it comes to authenticity, human emotion, fun and play.”

Frank has been monkeying around on the Web since 2001, but made his name with a video series he launched in 2006. Frank didn’t actually use YouTube to host the daily show, but the style and content — Frank, close-up, riffing straight into a camera, with some very fast cuts and a confessional style — is now a YouTube template.

Frank started a new show this year, backed by a Kickstarter campaign, and that’s going to continue.

In 2010, Frank started a games company that eventually raised $700,000 from backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Ventures, which is also backing BuzzFeed. He’s one of two acquisitions the company has made this week — it also picked up Facebook ad start-up Kingfish Labs, another Lerer Ventures project.

Here’s a TED talk Frank gave in 2010. Well worth 20 minutes if you have it.

You start, apparently, with pros from brand-name media outlets.

That’s what Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer has been doing as he builds up a supposedly stealthy video news service, which has been steadily dripping details about its plans. Here come more:

• The company, which had been using Planet Daily as a placeholder name, now has a real one: NowThisNews.
• It has a general manager: Lerer has hired Eason Jordan, who put in 23 years at CNN and was the cable pioneer’s chief news executive when he left in 2005.
• It has a strategic tie-up with BuzzFeed, the click-generating viral Web site that Lerer also happens to back. BuzzFeed will help distribute the service’s clips, and will help create them, as well.

Lerer and his team are most excited about Jordan, who fills out a management troika of veteran media people. Former ABC News Digital boss Ed O’Keefe is the service’s editor in chief; Katharine Zaleski, who headed up digital news at the Washington Post (and before that worked for Lerer at HuffPo) is managing editor. Implied message: We have Serious News Chops.

Jordan’s hire may also excite corners of the Internet that remember his departure from CNN, after he made remarks at the Davos conference suggesting that U.S. troops had intentionally killed journalists in Iraq. Jordan resigned after the ensuing firestorm, but remains a flashpoint for some conservative bloggers. Ask Michelle Malkin.

That said, if NowThisNews works, I doubt that its target audience will care much about seven-year-old inside-baseball-and-the-Beltway stories.

Meanwhile: How is NowThisNews supposed to work?

Here, Lerer, the former PR pro, has a few more details, as well. The service, backed by $5 million in funding, has a studio in Manhattan and a staff of 16. (One of them is Drake Martinet, who used to be AllThingsD’s social editor.)  Rather than produce hours of streaming content a day, it is supposed to produce a handful of daily news reports, and plans to distribute them via mobile phones and social media.

That’s a different take than the conventional way new media has been tackling video news so far. Most Web news outlets, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal (which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.), and Lerer’s old colleagues at HuffPo, have been aping cable news by placing reporters near a newsroom and asking them to talk about the day’s events.

There are good reasons to do that. For one, it works for cable TV. For another, it can be done on a small budget.

But Lerer says he wants to do something else: “It makes no sense for me, at all, to produce what’s already on TV,” he says. Instead, “we’re going to produce short video pieces that will hopefully be very viral and very social, one at a time.” Jordan’s take: “There’s an abundance of talk. We intend to report the news.”

Okay. So, still kind of vague. But it’s also difficult to describe video news that doesn’t exist yet. Lerer had originally hoped to be up in time to cover the presidential conventions; he’s now aiming for mid-October, for the last few weeks of the election.

Here’s the story in Team Lerer’s words, including a longer list of hires:

NowThis News (“Formerly Known as Planet Daily”) Announces Executive Team and Strategic Partnership with BuzzFeed

New Mobile, Social Video News Network Names Eason Jordan, Former CNN Chief News Executive, General Manager; Ed O’Keefe,
Former ABC News Digital Executive Producer, Editor-in-Chief; and Katharine Zaleski, Former Washington Post Executive Director of Digital News, Managing Editor

September 10, 2012, New York – NowThis News, a digital video news network, today announced its executive team and a strategic partnership with BuzzFeed, the popular, fast-growing social news site. NowThis News, code-named Planet Daily during development, will offer video news for mobile and social news consumers.

NowThis News also announced that Eason Jordan, former CNN Chief News Executive, is General Manager; Ed O’Keefe, former ABC News Digital Executive Producer, is Editor-in-Chief; and Katharine Zaleski, former Washington Post Executive Director of Digital News, is Managing Editor.

Kenneth Lerer, Partner of Lerer Ventures, co-founder of NowThis News along with Lerer Ventures Partner Eric Hippeau, said: “We’re creating NowThis News to meet straight on the inevitable and rapid changes happening in news consumption: digital, mobile, social and video – that’s what NowThis News is about. We’re thrilled to have Eason as General Manager, Ed as Editor-in-Chief, and Katharine as Managing Editor, along with the rest of the executive team, as we launch the company.”

NowThis News’s leadership team also includes veterans from a wide range of leading news outlets, including: Head of Production Steven Belser, former Head of Production of VICE Media; Chief Technology Officer Theo Burry, former Technical Director of The Huffington Post; and Social Editor Drake Martinet, former Social/Multimedia Editor of AllThingsD. The NowThis News team also includes veterans of NBC News, The New York Times, Newsweek/Daily Beast, Fox News, PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera, Slate, MTV, and HBO.

Said Eason Jordan: “As more and more people turn to mobile and social outlets for their news, now is the perfect time to launch a video news network built for the digital generation. I’m excited to be working with such a talented, experienced, and impressive team.”

Said Ed O’Keefe: “Our goal is to create a socially relevant, buzzy, and creative approach to news. And BuzzFeed, with its remarkable success and reach, is a dream partner.”

NowThis News will be a video partner of BuzzFeed, with a dedicated vertical within the social news site’s platform. NowThis News will produce content that complements BuzzFeed editorial while producing its own original video news stories.

NowThis News is backed by Lerer Ventures, Bedrocket Media Ventures, and Oak Ventures.

84 Things That Aren’t On An Everything Bagel … 50 Photos of Bill Clinton’s Forehead … 25 Numbers Bigger Than 2

– Three of the fake BuzzFeed headlines suggested by humor site McSweeney’s, which BuzzFeed has now turned into real articles

The primary reason to publish slideshows, as far as I can tell, is to juice page views and banner ad impressions. Slideshows are super annoying and lists are awesome so we do lists!

– Jonah Peretti, on part of how BuzzFeed respects its readers, from an email to employers and investors

Of course, because Americans now have a wide range of tools to express themselves online, the historic and surprising Supreme Court decision that has upheld the Obama administration’s controversial health care overhaul has been a perfect medium for the escalating debate.

There is already a Tumblr created today, with all kinds of funny captions and graphics about the Affordable Care Act — which includes the requirement that most Americans have health insurance — called, “When SCOTUS Upheld Obamacare.”

It entails a lot of interactive dancing and snapping of fingers, including by President Obama.

Meanwhile, culling the reaction on Twitter, BuzzFeed assembled a compilation of tweets called: “People Who Say They’re Moving To Canada Because Of ObamaCare.”

Like so:

Thats it! I’m moving to Canada! #Obamacare

— Amber Rose (@EmberrRose) June 28, 2012

While some who posted seemed to be kidding, most who tweeted were soon inundated by responses that, um, pointed out that Canada funds a public health care system for all its citizens.

Instant education in political science and a good roiling Web goat rodeo is #ExactlyWhyILovetheInternet.

More, of course, to come.