As Re/Code has reported, BuzzFeed named its vice-president of growth, Dao Nguyen, to the newly created position of publisher — but founder and CEO Jonah Peretti points out in an internal memo that this job is not at all like the traditional newspaper job with the same name. And the differences in the way most mainstream media outlets look at the position and the way BuzzFeed does say a lot about how the company thinks about media.

At most newspaper and magazine companies, the title of publisher either goes to a senior executive with a long career in publishing — in many cases, someone who has worked their way up over decades as an editor at smaller publications or is related to the owner, or both — or to someone with an MBA or business background unrelated to media. Peretti mentions this explicitly in his memo:

We are redefining…