ben smith thought that he would spend the end of April doing interviews about his book due out next week. It’s not working that way. Instead, the celebrated news pundit, who broke scoops on Politico, launched BuzzFeed News, covered the media for He New York Timesand is now a co-founder of the news start-up Semafor, he found himself speaking on television and podcasts about the firing of Tucker Carlson from Fox News and CNN’s Don Lemon, icons of a 40-year-old cable news industry that predates the Internet. In other appearances, he was asked to weigh in on his creation BuzzFeed News, whose plug was pulled so recently that its pixels are still ghosting on the screen. The irony is not lost on him. “Here I am on CBS talking about the disappearance of BuzzFeed News,” she says, drinking coffee with me after making a mornings hit. “CBS is still standing!” (Actually, the hosts didn’t ask about BuzzFeed.)
Smith is con man enough to understand that any exposure is an opportunity. Hey, CBS anchor, Gayle King. did say I couldn’t wait to read your book, but the experience was somewhat sobering. Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Deceit in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is an account of what once seemed like an optimistic development in a news industry that has been hampered since the Internet defeated it two decades ago. In the eyes of its protagonists, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti and Gawker boss Nick Denton, the era of viral content presented an opportunity for a less picky and aggressive approach to journalism that would remove the barriers between publications and readers.
As the first editor of BuzzFeed News, Smith himself acknowledges that he was one of those who naively championed this dream, which is not very good for a reporter whose work benefits more from a well-functioning lie detector. Fortunately, Smith took off his rose-colored glasses as he wrote. Traffic, which wittily sketches the rise and fall of a movement whose decline is embodied in the troubles at BuzzFeed and the death of Gawker. (When talking about his new company, traffic lighthowever, the rose-tinted glasses are very much in place).
Smith had never thought of himself as an author; his normal impulse is to hit the publish button as often as a carnival chicken. But he embarked on the year-long project motivated as much by pandemic boredom as by a desire to tell the story of two men who saw the rise of social media as an opportunity to boost content distribution and sidestep legacy gatekeepers. While reporting on the book, Smith also uncovered an unreported problem: The leftists behind the viral news movement were aided and abetted by radical conservatives who ended up using those lessons to build a far-right establishment that rose to the bottom. to the White House.
Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart were key figures at the Huffington Post, which Peretti helped run even during the launch of BuzzFeed. Smith himself hired a right-winger benny johnson. Another early BuzzFeeder, a meme fighter known as baked alaska, was among those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Digital power was once celebrated as a force behind the rise of Barack Obama. Who knew that the viral juice of dumb lists and exploding watermelons would be an effective weapon by Donald Trump and the MAGA, right?
Still, Smith’s story about two East Coast news organizations is just one part of a larger phenomenon: the power of Silicon Valley-based tech platforms. The geeks, not the news, were the true engineers of virality. In the final pages of TrafficSmith admits his well-founded fears that his storytelling, despite its appealing characters and its capture of a moment when journalists began chasing traffic with the fervor once devoted to chasing scoops, could be like the handiwork of Tom Stoppard theater on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which focused on peripheral characters from Shakespeare’s masterpiece who were prisoners of forces beyond their control. In that sense Mark Zuckerberg is traffic Hamlet, glimpsed only fleetingly, but firmly in control of the fate of the media that depended on his ties.
BuzzFeed and Gawker, and much of the news industry, became addicted to the boards whose numbers increased as Facebook and other platforms pushed their stories. (Nick Denton even tied his writers’ paychecks to page views.) But those stratospheric numbers were entirely dependent on social links, which skyrocketed or crashed at the whims of tech companies.
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