![]() Smith said the birth of the internet led to a type of utopianism that took different forms.įor example, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti had a false belief that social media "would be this incredibly positive new public space", while those at Gawker likely thought the internet would "rip away the hypocrisy of the mainstream media" and that there was something positive about exposing things for their own sake, Smith said.Įarly in 2017 BuzzFeed decided to publish the Steele Dossier, which contained various lurid but unverified allegations about Donald Trump. "What the internet did was really turn those instruments on so that you could see clearly, with the lights on exactly who was reading you and why and at least feel the temptation to follow that traffic wherever it led." But in a way the old tabloid editors, the you know trashiest television producers, the most demagogic radio hosts, had in some ways been flying without instruments. ![]() "Of course the quest for audience, and often totally shameless and insane dystopian quest for audience, the internet didn't invent that. Mainstream media had discredited itself with its audiences during the Iraq war and was technologically out of step with its audience at the point that sites like BuzzFeed came into play, he said. There was a false nostalgia for 20th century media, he said. He told Kim Hill that around 2016 the tide turned for businesses such as BuzzFeed that were built to be native to the web and social media platforms when they started to be viewed by the public as "increasingly toxic". His book tells the inside story of how rivals Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed and Nick Denton of Gawker Media started the race for virility blamed for the rise of disinformation. Smith is the editor in chief of Semafor, a new global news company and a former media columnist for The New York Times and was founding editor-in-chief of recently deceased digital news site BuzzFeed News, which along with HuffPost, Breitbart and Gawker Media represented a new world of online media in the early 2000s. ![]() ![]() Photo: FacebookJournalist Ben Smith tells the story of how digital media organisations became addicted to "going viral" in his new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. ![]()
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