This means a thing, and it’s different from recent hires like “Tina Brown offering people oodles of money” or “Bloomberg View offering people oodles of money,” but I can’t put my finger on just what. In part, it’s that there’s no longer what was once so clearly a “pyramid” of desirable media jobs, with the Times right on top like the eye on the pyramid.

Indeed, the way Adam Clark Estes explains it, Buzzfeed’s co-founder enticed Smith by selling the notion that “content is moving towards the social web.”

In a number of ways, the burgeoning BuzzFeed model for journalism doesn’t sound too different than HuffPost. After he starts on January 1, Ben Smith will continue to scoop up talented young reporters … and start to roll out content verticals specific to what the new breed of BuzzFeed journalists will be covering. Like HuffPost, the BuzzFeed approach to journalism aims to break the mold. Instead of just reporting on a major story, Peretti explained, BuzzFeed’s new editorial team will “refract that story in a lot of different ways.” Instead of just reporting that a teenager won the Siemens prize for developing a potential cure for cancer, we’d imagine, BuzzFeed would cover the news as well as the Internet memes that the story spawns as well as other fun, shareable reactions.

What I couldn’t appreciate about e-publishing until we were near to closing was just how much other information we could weave into and around the piece. While I was doing what I normally do—reporting, writing and rewriting—[Evan] Ratliff and Atavist producer Olivia Koski had been scheming ways to enliven the reader experience. They commissioned a graphic artist to draw the scene of a tense meeting that occurs in the opening section. They pinpointed places mentioned in the story on a Google map of Cairo, which readers can jump to with a click. They embedded a video clip of the protests and sprinkled some of my photographs from Cairo and Alexandria into the text. They commissioned an infographics wizard to put together an elaborate timeline of events, and we also decided to pay for an Arabic translation, which we give away for free.

And for journalists considering writing a book, electronic or otherwise, here are a few cautionary tips to consider before making the jump from writing 3,000-word stories to 300-page stories.