Ex-Nieman Labber Megan Garber has the story at The Atlantic:
The outfit is bringing on a News Director who will manage its breaking-news coverage on a day-to-day (and, if situations call for it, night-to-night) basis. To fill the role, Buzzfeed has made yet another big hire from The New York Times: Lisa Tozzi, an editor on the paper’s news desk. Tozzi, Smith says, is that Buzzfeed-ideal combination of hard-boiled news reporter (“she’s covered murders,” he points out) and savvy social-media user. She is also, to extrapolate from Buzzfeed’s News Director job description, “an experienced, fast, obsessive, and Twitter-savvy player-coach.”
At Buzzfeed, starting mid-May, Tozzi will supervise a team of ten reporters. Her role, though it’s new and still somewhat to-be-determined, will be to oversee a mix of what Smith calls “straight-ahead news stories” and more image-focused, list-friendly, generally Buzzfeed-y fare. Though Tozzi will assign and write stories, her job will also be strategic: to figure out how best to use social platforms as both reporting and delivery tools, and to determine Buzzfeed’s particular role to play in an environment where news is fast and furious and, at first, not always factual.
