IN THE MID-2000s, the news media underwent rapid change, beginning a transformation from stodgy to spicy. Social media networks and trailblazing online-only news outlets changed the way everyone used the internet. Perhaps no one had a better view of the whole news landscape than Ben Smith.
Smith was the first editor in chief of the recently shuttered BuzzFeed News, a New York Times media columnist, and a cofounder of Semafor. In his new book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral, Smith charts the rise and fall of Gawker, HuffPost, Breitbart News, and BuzzFeed News.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, these sites dominated news cycles and pulled millions of eyeballs due to their unique abilities to shape media narratives in surprising and irresistible ways. It seemed they would define the new century while legacy outlets such as The New York Times would be lucky to survive in the new, massively online mediascape. But Donald Trump, revenge lawsuits, untimely deaths, and the vagaries of the internet ended up disrupting the disrupters.
In May, Reason’s Nick Gillespie interviewed Smith in New York City about the ever-changing media landscape. They discussed his controversial decision at BuzzFeed to publish the Steele dossier (which contained allegations about collaboration between Trump and Russia, along with other salacious details), what the firings of Fox’s Tucker Carlson and CNN’s Don Lemon mean for journalism, and the future of Semafor.
Reason: What is your book Traffic about?
Smith: How totally insane this particular media moment is with, sort of, social media flying apart, Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon getting fired, and these great platforms of the 2010s shutting down. I mean, in some sense, this is the origin story of all that and the story of all these kind of wild characters and outsiders downtown in Manhattan, 20 years ago, thinking that they were inventing a new media and that they had discovered these new kind of forces of the internet that they were going to channel and use to overturn everything that then existed.
What was Gawker, who was behind it, and what was its peculiar genius?
You have to put your head back into that moment when places like The New York Times, CBS, and Condé Nast seemed just incredibly vulnerable as businesses. They just weren’t on the internet. They were like emailing around PDFs of their stories three weeks later. They seemed fossilized.
We were
