BuzzFeed and HuffPost, formerly separate, are now one, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Verizon — which previously owned HuffPost, née The Huffington Post — has dumped the powerhouse digital media brand in an all-stock deal.
The pairing makes sense. Jonah Peretti, now CEO of BuzzFeed, was a co-founder of what was then called The Huffington Post. In fact, BuzzFeed, which started its life as a company that abused young people to “curate” viral content for ad dollars and hoovered up tons of venture capital in the process, was founded by Peretti in his free time while he was working at The Huffington Post. (The name was changed in 2017 as part of a company-wide rebranding led by former editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen, who’s now…