BuzzFeed Launching Morning Show On Twitter

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Shani Hilton, head of U.S. news for BuzzFeed, thinks the morning show format that's been a staple of broadcast television for decades is stale and a little too predictable. "You know what's going to happen," she said. "It doesn't jive with the Internet."

So, Hilton is now overseeing an hourlong morning show that BuzzFeed brass thinks will be a more authentic, modern version of the television classic. The show, AM to DM, will stream live on Twitter starting on Monday.

Rather than airing at the crack of dawn like most TV morning shows, BuzzFeed's show will start at 10 a.m. ET, which editor Ben Smith said is quite intentional. Millennials are a bit less likely than their parents to be interested in watching something that starts so early, he reasoned.

In some sense, though, the show is not that far from a traditional morning show, particularly the more modern ones that aim to fold in feedback from social media and to operate more in "Internet time."

Putting on a daily streaming news show is an extremely complicated and expensive endeavor, and the well-funded digital media company is seemingly taking no short cuts.  The show has a staff of 22, including a talent booker hired away from NBC, and both Jones and Fitzgerald left their day jobs at BuzzFeed to work on it.

BuzzFeed is doing the show in partnership with Twitter. According to person familiar with the arrangement, BuzzFeed is paying for the costs of production and the two companies are splitting the revenue from advertising.