This is Recode Media and Peter Kafka.

That is me.

This is a special kind of emergency, not really emergency edition of Recode Media because I'm

interviewing Jonah Peretti, who is the CEO of BuzzFeed.

He is also the co-founder of Huffington Post, which is now HuffPost, which is now part of BuzzFeed.

Welcome, Jonah.

Good to be here.

Good to be in California,

talking to me out of Zoom. So you've had a busy day. You announced you were acquiring HuffPost.

We can talk about the right verb. You met with the HuffPost staff. You met with the BuzzFeed staff.

Now you're talking to me. What's the question between the BuzzFeed staff and the HuffPost staff you've heard most often today? I feel like there's a general feeling of excitement from everyone so far. Of course,

I think it's more wanting to digest the news first, and then I think I'll get a lot more,

a lot more questions. But so far, so far I think people are excited about it.

It was this kind of a shocking morning for a lot of people. There was only a small team that

knew about the deal and we were working on it for a long time late into the night and, you know,

just got it finished in the morning in time for these all hands.

So I'm reading in the Wall Street Journal, this is actually one of these deals that came about

that started at CES at the Consumer Electronics Show.

So you've been working on this in some form or others since January this year?

That's a long gestating deal.

We just had a regular business meeting at CES. And in that meeting, I said, you know,

what about huffing in post? You know, like you have huff post and, you know, I have, of course,

...