Gigaom - The online media business got a surprise on Monday, when the news broke that Politico correspondent Ben Smith was joining BuzzFeed, the pop-culture meme generator whose current offerings trend more towards funny cat videos than in-depth political coverage. But Smith isn’t giving up reporting for a beat trolling 4chan for new memes — he is becoming editor-in-chief and said he will be hiring at least a dozen reporters to break news of all kinds, including political. Can BuzzFeed become a new Huffington Post? Why not? If the rise of Arianna’s media empire has shown us anything, it’s that new media entities can spring from the most unlikely sources.
