Janine Gibson, a Former Guardian Editor, Will Head BuzzFeed’s British Operation
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Version 0 of 1. Janine Gibson, a former senior editor at The Guardian who left the newspaper recently after being passed over for its top editor’s post, will join BuzzFeed as the editor in chief of its British operation. Ms. Gibson, 42, said in an interview that she would start at the end of summer and would oversee an expansion of BuzzFeed’s news staff in Britain, adding more than a dozen employees to a newsroom that now has about 45. Ms. Gibson had been at The Guardian for 17 years. She oversaw the start of its American news operation and supervised its articles based on leaked material from the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, which secured the newspaper its first Pulitzer Prize. But in March she was overlooked for the position of editor in chief of The Guardian and she announced last month that she would leave. She did not have a plan, she said, but met with BuzzFeed’s editor in chief, Ben Smith, shortly afterward. He outlined the site’s ambitions for Britain, which, she said, seemed “like the vital combination of possible and exciting.” BuzzFeed, which attracted nearly 13 million unique visitors from Britain in March, according to its own most recent figures, started a British operation in 2012, Mr. Smith said. As of now, Ms. Gibson said, “it is top second tier” and has room to grow. She said she would focus on “serious news, quite a lot of innovation,” while retaining the site’s “sense of humor and liveliness.” Mr. Smith said the aim “is to compete, to break news.” As news and narrative stories travel through social networks with little regard for international borders, a number of media companies, including BuzzFeed, are making global expansion a significant part of their growth plans. The Huffington Post recently started sites in various locations around the world. Politico, the news organization that began as a website covering Washington, has expanded to cover Europe, with help from the German publisher Axel Springer, which is also making deals in America. Britain, Mr. Smith said, is in the midst of a shift in its media market, which had long been dominated by a robust group of newspapers competing for front-page scoops, known as “splashes.” It has, he said, “this incredibly vibrant and aggressive media that is also at a moment of dramatic change.” It presents a paradox, Mr. Smith said. A site that is popular in Britain must be “totally, completely British.” Posts on BuzzFeed UK are copy-edited with British spellings, he said. “But at the same time, we have assets like reporters in Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, foreign correspondents, and a really aggressive 24-hour news operation.” Ms. Gibson said she would draw on her experiences with The Guardian, of starting an American outpost of a British publication. To gain traction, she said, “you have to sort of radically assimilate while the thing that you are, the core of you, stays the same.” |