That is the economic story of publishing in the age of Web traffic, but Smith’s 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 Peretti’s 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 site’s tools. Smith backpedalled and pitched himself for the position he’d turned down.
“BuzzFeed has the structure and the tone of a website that could be central to people’s lives,” he wrote Peretti. “But it’s 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 media’s 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:
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 doesn’t shy from reminding his readers how his fiefdom was different from Peretti’s 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 wasn’t just one of convenience. BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News shared a conviction that winning the attention game was a media company’s first priority, and went to bat for each other. In 2015, when BuzzFeed posted what became its best-known viral feat—a photograph of a dress that looked blue and black to some viewers and gold and white to others—Smith 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 Denton’s 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 Hogan’s suit. By then, the weather of the blogosphere had changed. “Peretti’s 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 you—some people are lost without the rehearsal.”
Cartoon by Drew Dernavich
BuzzFeed’s rise is the crucial turn in Smith’s 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 Smith’s 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 canon—Jeff Bezos likes to talk about driving his Chevy Blazer across the country to found Amazon; much has been made of Mark Zuckerberg’s Honda Fit—and 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 Smith’s telling, it is Denton’s loss of the killer instinct—not his exercise of that instinct in the first place—that caused his empire to fall.
The villains are exactly where you’d 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 Smith’s approach to narrative—the crosscutting chronological march, the relatability of the principals, the greasepaint on the easy villains—is 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 Smith’s 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 Obama’s 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 traffic—measuring interest and intent, and channeling it into action.” Or, to put it more directly, traffic wasn’t 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 Smith’s view, “took the BuzzFeed formula—a list of fun, emotionally resonant images—to 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 couldn’t be trusted.
When one of BuzzFeed’s famous quizzes went buggy and complaints went viral, Facebook—now more BuzzFeedy than BuzzFeed—liked what it saw. “If we saw good-natured complaints on our Facebook page, Facebook saw something else: engagement,” Smith writes. “It didn’t 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 wasn’t 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:
Peretti asked him the same thing. Smith responded by invoking BuzzFeed News’s “journalistic scruples.”
Smith is a reporter of rare talent, but self-examination has not emerged as his superpower. In the case of Benny Johnson, Smith’s 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 “Don’t 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 BuzzFeed’s caveats, and without bringing his site all the traffic it pulled in.
The long story that Smith traces, from the open Internet of Peretti’s early high jinks to today’s atomized and factionalized splinternet, was shaped by the demands of business strategy. At BuzzFeed’s 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 BuzzFeed’s 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 Smith—“perhaps Jonah and I, thinking of ourselves as protagonists, had been passing through someone else’s story,” he remarks—it’s 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 “isn’t 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 game—not chasing traffic, not following this year’s 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 audience’s 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. ♦
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