Paczkowski rocks: Buzzfeed’s star Apple reporter is earning his keep

Fortune

448579797709I don’t know what it took to lure John Paczkowski from Re/code — a prestigious spin-off, once removed, from the Wall Street Journal — to click-happy BuzzFeed, but he seems to be earning his keep.

Re/code’s top Apple reporter was hired at the end of February by Mat Honan, a former Wired editor, to manage a rapidly assembled San Francisco bureau. (Among the new hires: reporters poached from the New York Times and the Nieman Lab.)

He’s also been feeding Buzzfeed’s insatiable maw with Apple scoops, real and conceptual, at the rate of one a week.

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Today’s item, the one about Apple’s new TV set top box, is the top story on the closely watched Techmeme news aggregator.

I did mental spit-take when Stratechery’s Ben Thompson called BuzzFeed the world’s most important news organization. Now I’m wondering how Paczkowski’s journalism is going to fit with headlines like this, ripped from Friday’s front page:

Touching Someone’s Junk “How do you know what you’re touching half the time, anyway?”

Ex VentureBeat: When Re/code founder Kara Swisher reported on Honan’s new editorial role at BuzzFeed, she also noted that the media outlet was looking to poach certain Re/code reporters — a challenge she said she welcomed.

Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple (AAPL) coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.

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