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That is the economic story of publishing in the age of Web traffic, but Smiths insights concern mostly the editorial story, about the way that traffic-chasing changed media coverage. He had come to BuzzFeed from Politico, a magazine that made its digital name with lively, first-rate, fire-hose reporting aimed at political junkies. He seems to have recognized earlier than his bosses that many of these junkies were drinking from his Twitter feed at least as much as from the magazine, and that knowledge changed his working methods: My brain had been pretty well rewired. I spent my distracted days only half listening to the people I was talking to, or the politicians I was covering. What was happening on Twitter often felt more real than the person in front of me.

When Peretti courted Smith about a BuzzFeed job, they parted in a state of mutual incomprehension. Smith understood the value of buzz-feeding, but not Perettis fascination with the machine aspects of traffic. He declined the job. Everyone, including his wife, told him that this was a mistake. The opportunity, it was explained to him, was about big stories, and scoops, spreading around the internet, using that sites tools. Smith backpedalled and pitched himself for the position hed turned down.

BuzzFeed has the structure and the tone of a website that could be central to peoples lives, he wrote Peretti. But its built on sharing everything BUT the big stuff. Load the trailer with valuable cargo instead of chintzy toys and you could do real business. Their collaboration put medias editing and distribution operations together again.

When Smith created BuzzFeed News, he took the form from his Politico blog: a mere repository for things I hoped would go viral on Twitter. The little scoops that insiders would share and the articles with more cultural resonance, all chewed up into Twitter-size, context-free fragments. He hired eager young whippersnappers and accelerated his news-gathering operations to a blur. When, during the election year of 2012, Smith called a reporter to tell her she was now on the Rick Santorum beat, she pulled her car over to the side of the road, visited Wikipedia to see who Santorum was, and changed direction. He explains:

As older news organizations wrung their hands about whether they should allow journalists to waste their paid time and energy typing on someone elses platform, we dived into it gleefully. I told my reporters, a group of hungry kids excited at the opportunity to compete with their pompous elders, that I didnt want a story that didnt live on Twitter. One reporter, Zeke Miller, was simply the fastest tweeter on the draw, which was actually enough to get attention back then, copying and pasting a press release headline before anyone else.

Everything fast had to get faster. Value emerged only on Twitter. A person doing serious political coverage at an outlet known for which-Disney-character-are-you quizzes is presumably in the business of making distinctions, and Smith doesnt shy from reminding his readers how his fiefdom was different from Perettis prankish domain. (When Smith published his first post, on January 1, 2012, the Web-page formatting went awry: BuzzFeed had never printed a full paragraph before.) But the marriage wasnt just one of convenience. BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News shared a conviction that winning the attention game was a media companys first priority, and went to bat for each other. In 2015, when BuzzFeed posted what became its best-known viral feata photograph of a dress that looked blue and black to some viewers and gold and white to othersSmith abandoned his son mid-fairy tale to frantically assign more stories to capture what I knew would be a flood of traffic.

The speed and volume made a lot of intersections dangerous. In October, 2012, one of Dentons sites posted a sex tape of the former professional wrestler known as Hulk Hogan, accompanied by a thousand-word rumination on the proceedings. (Smith, possibly typing in a fugue state, likens it to the work of Ernest Hemingway.) When Hogan sued, the litigation dragged on; at trial, in 2016, he was awarded a hundred and forty million dollars, driving Gawker Media into bankruptcy and forcing Denton to sell. Peter Thiel revealed himself as the funder of Hogans suit. By then, the weather of the blogosphere had changed. Perettis craving for the quick viral fix will not be satisfied by the nourishing fare, Denton had predicted of BuzzFeed News, but it was his approach that faltered first.

I told yousome people are lost without the rehearsal.

Cartoon by Drew Dernavich

BuzzFeeds rise is the crucial turn in Smiths account of the traffic chase. It is also when, more than a third of the way into the book, our previously cool, omniscient narrator suddenly shows up as a character with his hands on the wheel. The effect is jarring, prompting questions about perspective in the narrative to that point, especially because Smiths storytelling is buffed and upbeat. Young outsiders here glow with ambition and set off in junky cars: Denton drives his blue Mazda across the border to cover the violent Romanian revolution; Drudge builds his empire while driving a shitty little red Geo Metro; Peretti, following a windfall, treats himself to a new Honda Odyssey. The vehicles allude to a certain leadership canonJeff Bezos likes to talk about driving his Chevy Blazer across the country to found Amazon; much has been made of Mark Zuckerbergs Honda Fitand are a genre giveaway. What Smith has written is a Builder Bio: a story of scrappy oddball heroes with one weird business idea who gather the gang, suffer the slings and midnight crises of entrepreneurship, and, to the chagrin of the stuffed shirts, emerge powerful and rich and mysteriously well groomed. (Drudge in full bloom is said to be almost absurdly fit.) Chris Poole, who founded 4chan, a platform that has hosted bomb threats, child pornography, and snuff photography, is described in just one paragraph as sweet, handsome, productive, and hot. In Smiths telling, it is Dentons loss of the killer instinctnot his exercise of that instinct in the first placethat caused his empire to fall.

The villains are exactly where youd expect to find them, and, when they show up, farty tuba music plays. Andrew Breitbart, the longtime Drudge Report deputy who simultaneously worked behind the scenes at the Huffington Post, is variously described as fat and stressed, a pudgy fire starter, a frenetic, overweight fleabag of a man, a hyperkinetic embodiment of attention deficit disorder, and a hyperactive pigpen of a right-wing lunatic, whose belly hung out from underneath his ratty T-shirt. Breitbart died in 2012, before his eponymous Web site of conspiracy and defamation experienced its flytrap efflorescence, so he is not in a position to respond, but it is safe to say that most people, no matter where their pitchforks point, will find what they want here. A cynic could posit that Smiths approach to narrativethe crosscutting chronological march, the relatability of the principals, the greasepaint on the easy villainsis prepackaged for a streaming-media series, as everything now seems to be. But I suspect a more organic route. Figuring out what gets people going, and providing more of it than they asked for, is at the heart of what successful journalism in the age of traffic is about.

Perhaps the keenest insight in this book concerns the way that traffic-chasing helped create the MAGA right. In Smiths telling, it is not coincidental that Andrew Breitbart spent three months working with Peretti at the Huffington Post, a publication that, in 2008, got behind Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton partly because Peretti had identified Obama as a traffic booster. The extraordinary digital success that Obamas campaign went on to enjoy, Smith suggests, rose in part from the new way of thinking about people that came when you saw them as trafficmeasuring interest and intent, and channeling it into action. Or, to put it more directly, traffic wasnt just business; it was politics.

The opportunity was not lost on Breitbart, and it was not lost on Steve Bannon, who surveyed the left-wing media landscape for things to copy and marked Peretti as a genius. In 2012, Smith himself hired an ultraconservative writer named Benny Johnson because he represented an untapped new well of traffic, a new identity to plumb. Johnson (handsome, clean-shaven, and earnest) had distinguished himself with a post about a National Rifle Association convention which, in Smiths view, took the BuzzFeed formulaa list of fun, emotionally resonant imagesto gun culture. He was eventually fired for plagiarism, but not before settling into a proto-MAGA formula built around the idea that the media were dangerously liberal and couldnt be trusted.

When one of BuzzFeeds famous quizzes went buggy and complaints went viral, Facebooknow more BuzzFeedy than BuzzFeedliked what it saw. If we saw good-natured complaints on our Facebook page, Facebook saw something else: engagement, Smith writes. It didnt really matter what people were saying. What mattered was that they were talking at all. The engagement doctrine, in his view, changed the political climate. Trump wasnt doing anything to game Facebook, he writes. He simply was what Facebook liked. In the midst of the 2016 campaign, Smith had a chat with Bannon:

Breitbart hadnt just chosen Trump, he told me, based on the candidates political views. Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement hed driven, and attached themselves to it. BuzzFeed, in Bannons view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement. Why hadnt we gone all in for Bernie?

Peretti asked him the same thing. Smith responded by invoking BuzzFeed Newss journalistic scruples.

Smith is a reporter of rare talent, but self-examination has not emerged as his superpower. In the case of Benny Johnson, Smiths error, in his eyes, was not hiring a guy who made fun, emotionally resonant images from a gun convention but letting his eyes skate over plainly racist Johnson posts, such as Dont Miss the Connection: Obama Delivered to Office by Black Panthers, Holder Owes Them Some Favors. As for the unverified Steele dossier, he suggests that he would publish it again. He has no patience with the idea that the responsible thing for a news organization to do with salacious information of unconfirmed veracity is frequently nothing. His great regret, he writes, is publishing the dossier as a PDF. That let it travel on its own, without BuzzFeeds caveats, and without bringing his site all the traffic it pulled in.

The long story that Smith traces, from the open Internet of Perettis early high jinks to todays atomized and factionalized splinternet, was shaped by the demands of business strategy. At BuzzFeeds height, at the start of the twenty-tens, the traffic rush was a gold rush; Disney made an offer to buy the outlet for as much as six hundred and fifty million dollars, and was spurned. By the end of the decade, traffic had become most powerful as a tool to form political identity, knocking BuzzFeeds ideological hodgepodge of emotion-stirring posts from the Zeitgeist. In 2018, the site spent three hundred and eighty-six million dollars to earn revenue of three hundred and seven million dollars, and started laying off employees. To live in traffic is to live under the rules of the platforms that run traffic, and though this revelation seems to have come astonishingly late to Smithperhaps Jonah and I, thinking of ourselves as protagonists, had been passing through someone elses story, he remarksits the biggest moral of the tale that he tells. Two weeks ago, Peretti announced that he was shutting down BuzzFeed News, which by then had won a Pulitzer Prize and nurtured a generation of fine journalists, the luckiest of whom had begun, like Smith himself, to scatter to the Times and other places.

I say that these journalists were lucky, because the Times and an ever-shrinking number of other institutional outlets have flourished with a broad-church approach; their cooking and puzzle franchises, for example, help to subsidize costly foreign reporting. (Smith wrote an excellent media column for the Times for two years, before moving on again, in 2022, to co-found a new site, Semafor, which focusses on global news and audiences.) This has kept work and careers whole. Reading Traffic, I experienced a lot of whatever-happened-to moments; many stars of the early blogosphere have yet to find a worthy home elsewhere.

At the online magazine where I worked, the measure of success in traffic-seeking kept changing. The goal was at first to maximize the number of unique page views by publishing more material. Then instructions came down that what mattered was not volume but authority (other reliable sites linking to us), and we were instructed to reach out to eminent bloggers to promote our wares. After some months of this, it was decided that, in fact, the most valuable measure of traffic was engagement (how long readers spent reading our articles); our brief was to do work that was longer, better, and nearer the headlines of the day. When that approach, too, generated insufficient revenue, volume was summoned as the solution once again.

The media business has since made at least one more complete turn on this traffic roundabout in the hope of stabilizing its future. (The line is usually that the last model isnt how the Web works.) And the will to traffic is now everywhere: on your phone, in your ears, on your screen. In dreamy moods, I sometimes fantasize about journalism dropping out of the gamenot chasing traffic, not following this years wisdom, not offering audiences everything they could possibly want in hastiest form. Imagine producing as little as you could as best you could: it would be there Monday, when the week began, and there Friday, the tree standing after the storm. And imagine the audiences pleasure at finding it, tall and expansive and waiting for a sunny day. In an age of traffic, such deliberateness could be radical. It could be, I think, the next big thing.

See the rest here:
BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the Casualties of the Traffic Wars - The New Yorker