He’d left the meeting with Iger on a high, believing that his longtime dream was coming true. ![]() Steinberg was shocked we’d consider saying no. I told him that we were building something great at BuzzFeed, that we were just getting started, that Disney’s corporate culture would stifle us. Steinberg had finagled a prescription for legal marijuana, then a novelty, and while we smoked, Peretti solicited our input. We drove back from the lot to Palihotel, a slick-looking but inexpensive spot on Melrose, where Peretti’s room had a balcony over an alley. A half dozen Disney executives sat on the other. (He didn’t mention he’d been meeting with President Barack Obama.) I sat on one side of the long table with Peretti, BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg, and Ze Frank, Peretti’s old internet friend who had started BuzzFeed’s fast-growing video arm. Iger had just gotten back from Washington, he mentioned, and was so grateful we’d been able to make time for him. The event had the false informality of all contemporary business meetings. Peretti was wearing a button-down shirt with three shades of brown checks, crisp but not tucked in. He was alone, relaxed, wearing a sweater, and acting like an uncle who was thrilled you’d made it in time for Thanksgiving dinner. Iger met us at the top of the elevator in the softly lit executive floor. But the real point of the trip was the meeting at Disney’s studios in Burbank, a set of old Hollywood buildings designed by Walt himself. We traveled to Los Angeles with a pretext: BuzzFeed was opening a cavernous new office, a former soap factory on Beverly Boulevard. Through the fall of 2013, Iger talked to Peretti and Lerer as Disney accountants and strategists quietly examined BuzzFeed’s books, and on October 24, we were invited to the House of Mouse. He proposed developing a “new cast of online only Disney characters in collaboration with Disney team.… One of them should be gay, all of them should be inspiring, have good values, and a contemporary, positive style.” Plus, he would insist on “continued editorial independence for Ben Smith.” He and I were in the middle of recruiting a star investigative editor, Mark Schoofs, from the nonprofit ProPublica, and he had an inkling of how hard it would be to make money in that line of work, so he proposed asking for $5 million a year for investigative journalism. “I want to chase Yahoo and MSN in scale and the NYT in quality,” Peretti wrote. Peretti huddled with Lerer and, on September 30, emailed him a long list of the things that would make him want to do the deal-at a price, he proposed, of $600 million. I was tasked with building a news operation propelled by the social web, and as the Twitter-fueled 2012 election got going, we were competing with legacy media stalwarts and newcomers like my former employer, Politico, and getting on the radar of behemoths like Disney. When I joined BuzzFeed as editor-in-chief in 2011, it was a popular destination for videos of cuddly critters and viral memes. Sherwood explained that ABC News, in his view, had fallen dangerously out of sync with the times as corporate media lumbered toward what would be referred to in conference room PowerPoints as “digital transformation.” What the place really needed, he said, was a DNA transfer.īuzzFeed was the mid-aughts brainchild of Jonah Peretti, an online culture jammer turned business operator who had already cofounded left-leaning juggernaut The Huffington Post with Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and the late Andrew Breitbart. Iger said he had but hadn’t really looked deeply into it. And in that frothy moment, it seemed to make sense for America’s best media company, and its safest brand, to buy us.ĭisney, to the degree it had been aware of BuzzFeed at all, had noticed the rather generous interpretation of fair use of its copyrights in items like “Which Disney Princess Are You?” But Disney was also scrambling to figure out how it fit into a rapidly changing digital world, and in the spring of 2013, Ben Sherwood, the former wunderkind producer turned president of ABC News, which Disney owned, sat with the company’s chief executive, Bob Iger, at the Coral Tree Café in Brentwood and asked him if he’d ever heard of BuzzFeed. In Silicon Valley, an ambitious former Goldman Sachs banker named Carlos Watson persuaded an old friend, Laurene Powell Jobs, to finance a website called Ozy that would aim to be a smarter, slicker, more socially conscious BuzzFeed. Others promised to do the same thing we were, but without the embarrassing memes. Some of our competitors had begun to imitate everything we did, which mostly amounted to making lists. ![]() ![]() Our traffic hit 130 million unique visitors a month, riding Facebook’s relentless growth. By the end of 2013, BuzzFeed was having it all.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |