Victoria Sanusi is truly a journalist of the modern age. While most journalists have had theirs defined by the digital age and followed the digital journalism trends, producing click bait article after click bait article, Victoria Sanusi has been one of the rare journalists that has shaped and influenced modern journalism. Her interview with the Chicken Connoisseur was a standout, as she is the only journalist to find out his name and age. She has reported on black women breaking barriers in the publishing industry and interviewed millennials who still live at home with their parents. In her role as a Buzzfeed reporter, Victoria has become one the leading reporters on black British popular culture and has recently (and deservedly so) landed herself a new job at the iPaper as their digital culture editor. We interviewed her recently and she spoke about her working day at Buzzfeed, how she got her job and why she would like to be an Instagram babe...

Victoria, 24 lives in Essex with her parents and three brothers. 

BB: In your own words Victoria, what do you do?

VS: I am a news reporter for BuzzFeed, I write predominately about young people, the Black community, Black British women, internet culture (this is something that I write about a lot). There have been times where I have had to write about breaking news, such as the Grenfell disaster. I also delve into politics a little bit, like during the general election. 

BB: Can you tell us a little bit of how you laned your first journalism job at BuzzFeed?

VS: I applied through the BuzzFeed Fellowship, which is like an internship but so much better. You’re basically trained on how to be a reporter, I was the first ever News Fellow. One of the senior reporters at the time trained me and taught me how to be a news reporter. Mainly giving me skills around how to find news from the internet, which is kind of something I knew how to do anyway, because we’ve grown up in the internet age, and it is something I have been quite passionate about. 

With the Fellowship, I always encourage people to do it. Even now, we’ve got the Buzz Fellowship, so that is on the other side of the office from me, it is the more traditional BuzzFeed, with the quizzes and things like that. So, the advert for that has come out and I have just been DM’ing so many people to apply for it. Especially black women, actually, it’s mainly black women that I have DM’ed. It's just because a lot of Black women will think that they don’t have enough qualifications for it.

BB: So, tell us more about your decision to move on from Buzzfeed?

VS: Obviously, I really love working for BuzzFeed, but I just felt it was time to move on and when the opportunity came, I thought you don’t get hit with those kinds of opportunities that often unless you are like middle class and white. So I just thought I would be a fool not to take it. So that is how that came about and I am really excited, because I think I’d be able to do some really special things over [at iPaper].