• Whitney Snyder, who has worked at HuffPost his whole adult life, is the site's new top editor.
• Snyder's predecessor left in January amid layoffs.
• Snyder says the audience at his left-leaning site shrank after the election but is bouncing back.

HuffPost has been around for nearly 20 years. Whitney Snyder has been around for almost all of it: He joined right out of college in 2008, as an assistant to cofounder Arianna Huffington, and never left. Now he's running the place.

HuffPost has named Snyder, 39, the site's newest editor in chief. He fills the slot vacated by Danielle Belton, who left last month as part of a round of layoffs. Huffington originally conceived of the site as a place for her famous friends to publish blog posts. But it has gone through several owners and iterations since then, and the lefty, populist site is now one of the remaining pieces of the BuzzFeed publishing business.

I talked to Snyder about working for BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, gauging his audience's interest in Trump, and how it ended up with office space at the Pentagon. Here's an edited excerpt of our conversation.

Business Insider: Your boss Jonah Peretti just put out a memo explaining that he wants to fight back against something he calls SNARF online — that's "Stakes, Novelty, Anger, Retention, Fear." But then he also said that he wants HuffPost to use "SNARF for good.'" I'm looking at your homepage. Can you show me examples where you're using SNARF for good?

Whitney Snyder: I think that what we do is totally consistent with that memo. We have tabloid roots. We want to be journalistically responsible, but tabloids try to appeal to people in a lot of different ways, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I think what Jonah's memo gets to is that doing that at the scale of these platforms that are using machine learning, along with an endless supply of content to optimize to an unhealthy extent — that's where it becomes a problem. But we want people to come to us.

You've had a lot of experience covering Trump, and satisfying an audience that wanted to read a lot of Trump news during his first administration. What is surprising you now, a month into his second term?

When we were planning last fall for the year ahead, we thought about a scenario where Trump wins and it's total chaos and, in some ways, kind of a replay of his first term. And then we also thought there's a scenario where he wins, and people are thinking, "You know what? I just don't want to be a part of this. I can't be in this headspace every day."

Anecdotally, I hear from a lot of people in that group.

Same here. But what's interesting is I feel like we've already gone from one scenario to the other.

We definitely did see, after the election, a lot of people checked out. We did see a drop-off in our audience. We felt confident it would come back. But it came back more quickly than I expected. I think that is in parallel with what's happening in the country.

The thing is, I still think there are people that are in that other place. That are sort of like "You know what? I'm not ready to read about this stuff every day." But from the numbers we look at, that's already a smaller number of our readers than we would have expected.

One surprising thing the Trump administration did is give you guys office space at the Pentagon, alongside some right-wing/conservative outlets. How did that come about?

I would love to have been in the room when that list was drawn up because it was news to us when it came out. We have credentialed Pentagon reporters, and we cover the Pentagon, but we didn't ask to have that space. We had no plans to use that space. Our assumption is that the Pentagon leadership wanted to punish a number of the mainstream media outlets that really do have a long history of in-depth on-the-ground everyday Pentagon coverage.

Did you accept the slot?

Our attitude is that if they want us there, we're ready to deliver and we have a reporter who's been there several times already. We're gonna rotate in some other reporters as well. We aren't planning on having daily news broadcasts from the Pentagon, as NBC might have. But we're happy to be there if that's what's asked of us.

Given that you didn't ask for it, and that you don't have a full-time Pentagon correspondent, did you consider handing the space back to an outlet that does do that coverage?

Our assumption is that if we did that, then they would just take it away.

You've worked at HuffPost for a long time, under several different owners: It was independent, then it was owned by AOL, then by Verizon, now by BuzzFeed. I don't want to ask you to comment on different owners …

I am kind of happy to cover the different owners. I think that different eras have had their own strengths and weaknesses.

I really like being owned by BuzzFeed. Because when we were at Verizon, for instance, we were a rounding error on a rounding error. And I think that really showed in some of the sort of investment and care that was put into what we do.

For instance, our front page really, really languished from a product perspective. Not that it just didn't get better — it actually got worse in our time at Verizon. Because we were just an afterthought. Understandably. The great thing about being at BuzzFeed is that we're actually a strategically important part of the whole business.