By Jon Allsop @ CJR.org, Nov. 20

YESTERDAY [...] of the Wall Street Journal, broke a huge media-business story: BuzzFeed is buying HuffPost in a stock deal, part of a broader package that will see Verizon Media, HuffPost’s current owner, take a minority stake and make a cash investment in BuzzFeed. The two companies will also collaborate in areas including content sharing and advertising. Online, media-watchers made variations on the same joke: HuffFeed, BuzzPost, HuffingBuzz, BuffPeed. [....] Meanwhile, staff at HuffPost were reportedly finding out about the deal the same way as the rest of us. “Reading a copy-and-pasted version of the story about my media company being acquired because I couldn’t get past the WSJ paywall,” Christopher Mathias, who covers the far right for HuffPost, tweeted. “2020 media babyyyyy.”

As Mathias also noted, news of the acquisition came two years to the day since a New York Times interview with Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s CEO (and a founder of both BuzzFeed and HuffPost), made a splash in the media word: Peretti mused about a possible mega-merger involving a bevy of digital publishers who would, in his conception, consolidate to demand better financial terms from Facebook and Google, and namechecked Vice Media, Vox Media, Group Nine Media, and Refinery29 as examples of competitors doing “interesting work.” Since then, all those companies have been involved in acquisitions— [....]