Politico | Business Insider
Jon Steinberg, BuzzFeed’s president and chief operating officer, will step down, Dylan Byers reported Monday in Politico. From the internal memo by Steinberg and founder and CEO Jonah Peretti:
Jon has decided after four years of being President and COO of BuzzFeed, it’s time for him to move on to new ventures and challenges and will be moving into an advisor role at BuzzFeed.
In September of last year, Steinberg spoke about the future of content at a NewsCred conference, Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon wrote. Here’s part of that speech:
The average television viewer right now, for right now, for network television, late 40s, early 50s. When you look at certain cable news networks it goes even higher. So you have one of two possibilities: Either at 47 years old, everybody starts watching television. Unlikely. Or there’s no new newspaper subscribers being born, for print. And there’s no new television viewers being born. I think that’s probably the likely choice. However, people love great content. There are shows on those networks people love to watch. There’s the Netflix content that people undeniably love to watch. And what that means is you can never fight the consumer, you can never fight a trend like this, so you’re going to see these things totally decoupled. What that means for brand marketers in the audience is that you will literally be on the same footing as anyone creating television programming, anyone creating video programming, anyone creating content programming of any kind.
On Monday, Steve Kovach also wrote about Steinberg’s departure for Business Insider, with the full internal memo.
Both of us believe we have all built something special here, and the company is in spectacular shape and primed for even greater things in the future.
We’re so thankful for Jon’s leadership that helped get us here. He will always be family to us. We are growing and continuing our mission of building a media company that is anchored around social, and a business that is transforming the advertising industry.
We think the best days are ahead for BuzzFeed. Thank you all for your hard work and we’re excited about pressing forward to continue to do huge things! Jon will say his own good-byes to you over the next few weeks but even after that he will be available to us.
