thought Ben Smith that he would conduct bank interviews at the end of April about his book going on sale next week. That’s not how it works. Instead, the celebrated news magnate – who hurled scoops at Politico, launched BuzzFeed News, covered media for The New York Times, and is now a co-founder of the buzzing Semafor news startup – found himself gorying on television and podcasts about the firings of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and CNN’s Don Lemon, icons of a 40-year-old cable news industry that predates then internet. In other appearances, he’s been asked to weigh in on his BuzzFeed News creation, which was unplugged so recently that the pixels still haunt the screen. The irony does not escape him. “Here I am on CBS talking about the demise of BuzzFeed News,” he says, having coffee with me after doing a mornings hit. “CBS is still standing!” (Actually, the hosts didn’t ask him about BuzzFeed.)
Smith is enough of a con artist to understand that every exposure is an opportunity – hey, CBS host Gayle King did saying she couldn’t wait to read his book – but the experience was sobering in a way. Traffic: genius, rivalry and delusion in the billion-dollar race to go viral is an account of what once seemed like a gleeful development in a news industry that has come to its knees since the Internet two decades ago. In the eyes of its protagonists, Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO, and Gawker chief Nick Denton, the era of viral content presented an opportunity for a spirited, less choosy approach to journalism that would remove barriers between publications and readers.
As BuzzFeed News’ first editor, Smith himself admits he was one of those who naively championed this dream, which is not a good look for a reporter whose work more typically benefits from a properly functioning nonsense detector. Fortunately, Smith took off his rose-colored glasses as he wrote Traffic, which artfully traces the rise and fall of a movement whose decline is epitomized in BuzzFeed’s woes and Gawker’s death. (However, when discussing his new venture, Semafor, rose colored glasses are in order.)
Smith had never considered himself an author – his normal impulse is to hit the publish button with the frequency of a carnival chicken. But he undertook the year-long project motivated by both pandemic boredom and a desire to tell the story of two men who saw the rise of social media as an opportunity to boost content distribution and bypass old gatekeepers. While reporting the book, Smith also discovered an underreported wrinkle: The leftists behind the viral news movement were aided and encouraged by radical conservatives who eventually used those lessons to build an alt-right establishment that took off all the way. to the White House.
Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart were key figures in the Huffington Post, which Peretti helped run even during BuzzFeed’s launch. Smith himself hired right winger Benny Johnson. Another early BuzzFeeder, a meme wrangler 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 the viral juice of silly lists and exploding watermelons would be effectively weaponized by Donald Trump and the MAGA right?
Nevertheless, Smith’s story about two East Coast news organizations is only part of a larger phenomenon: about the power of technology platforms in Silicon Valley. Geeks, not newsreaders, were the actual engineers of virality. On the closing pages of TrafficSmith admits he has well-founded fears that his story—despite its compelling characters and capturing a moment when journalists chased traffic with the fervor once devoted to scoop-hunting—might resemble Tom Stoppard’s play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which focused on peripheral characters in Shakespeare’s masterpiece who were imprisoned by forces beyond their control. In that sense, Mark Zuckerberg is Traffic Hamlet, caught only fleetingly, but firmly in control of the fate of the news outlets that depended on his tapes.
BuzzFeed and Gawker – and far too much of the news industry – became addicted to dashboards, the number of which increased as Facebook and other platforms boosted their stories. (Nick Denton even linked his writers’ pay to page views.) But those stratospheric numbers depended entirely on social ties, which went up or down depending on the whims of the tech companies.
