Writes Nathan Heller in "BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the Casualties of the Traffic Wars/Ben Smith’s new book shows how the race for clicks spawned—then strangled—the new media" (The New Yorker).
So Smith had a temporary grip on clickbait, but can the man write a book? I see the hardcover, released last Tuesday, is #2,216 at Amazon. But who'd buy that in hardcover? Anyone interested in Smith's musings on virality would go with the Kindle, don't you think? I know I would, because I'd want to be able to cut and paste, using my own skill for presenting something you'd find delectable. But the Kindle version is at #5,107. I'm not interested in reading Smith's insights. Who wants the deeper thoughts of someone who figured out how to ride the moment for thrills?
So I'm sticking with The New Yorker, which operates in the middle ground between clickbait and books. Nathan Heller pulls some quotation from the book:
"[BuzzFeed News was created as] 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.... I told my reporters, a group of hungry kids excited at the opportunity to compete with their pompous elders, that I didn’t want a story that didn’t 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."
Some commentary from Nathan Heller:
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....
Smith calls Matt Drudge “almost absurdly fit" and Chris Poole — the 4chan founder — “sweet,” “handsome,” “productive,” and “hot.” He calls Andrew Breitbart “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.”
Heller concludes with a dream... of what?
[T]he 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.
A dream of what? Of The New Yorker!
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14 comments:
Are we now entering the Hoffman/Redford phase, whereby the grungy and compromised reporters now give glowing accounts of themselves, how they heroically broke the Big Story? As I remember it, the dossier was shopped around to quite a few outlets, all of whom still clung to their reputational shreds and refused to print such obvious tripe. Not the 'Big Buzz', though. And it was critical to the Clinton political operatives / intelligence officials, that the story be published somewhere, anywhere so that they could now claim it was 'published news' and build on its legacy through repetition. Are they covering that, too?
His site wanted the traffic. And, when the CNN anchor Jake Tapper summarized the contents on air one day, Smith knew that viewers would be Googling for the goods. He and his colleagues, snatching the keyboard back and forth, composed a brief introduction that noted the dossier’s 'specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations' then posted the document itself, in PDF form.
Bullshit. They had the intro composed before Tapper mentioned the dossier and were just waiting for the right moment to post it. Or perhaps he's telling the truth, but it would have been dumb not to be ready. I don't think they were concerned with if they would post it, just when.
So BuzzFeed did what Matt Drudge did in '98, when the mainstream outlets were holding the Lewinsky BJ out of old-fashioned caution. Drudge ran with it, establishing his site and brand.
The difference, of course, was that the Lewinsky story was true.
Ben Smith screwed the pooch for everybody. The entire press corps was actively HIDING the actual dossier.
In that way, they could characterize its contents in ways that would be convincing. Since they refused to give you access to the source material, you had to just take them on their word what it contained.
He has become an outcast because he screwed it up for everybody. Once he released the document, it became plain to see it as what it was: A Hillary Clinton production, paid for by US taxpayers, directed by the CIA and FBI to execute a bloodless coup.
"Did it work?" - Harry Reid
They should all be paying very, very large fines for their smears.
And just how does this narcissistic self justification improve mankind except as a bad example?
He wasn't a quarter the man Breitbart was. Such sour grapes even 11 years later.
I can appreciate the lack of interest in reading the account of an established liar.
Steel Dossier = Influencer Dylan Mulvaney
Ben Smith = Bud Light marketer Alissa Heinerscheid
News Business = Anheuser-Busch
Talk about copying and pasting.
People seem to care more about the marketing of their beer than the veracity of the news.
News is a behavior modification operation at scale.
Stories are highlighted or suppressed not on their truth, nor even on their clickbait value but on whether or not they advance The Narrative. It was always thus but its appearance was most stark during COVID when the attempts were so obvious....I bet Ben Bradlee could have written a big best seller if he had told all the stories he knew about JFK. Most of such stories went to the grave with the people who knew them. By way of contrast, there's not a single damaging story about Nixon that is unknown. About Trump, we know all the damaging stories plus a great deal more that are fabricated.
"someone who figured out how to ride the moment for thrills?"
That's how it may have looked and felt, but in fact he was a willing tool in the Clinton campaign's Russia hoax, which effectively used old and new media to disseminate the lie and then let it simmer through most of Trump's presidency.
So the New Yorker is jealous of Buzzfeed.
It’s a business. Jealousy is a character flaw.
Did JournoLists empathize with Steele? Was he pregnant at the time?
"We have the list of fifteen Russian hookers that pissed on Trump's bed.
Wait until you see number twelve."
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