More on the death (and resurrection) of journalism
On Ben Smith's Traffic, Rob Burley's Lying Bastards and, again, the CBC
Ben Smith’s Traffic has been getting a lot of attention since it came out – I know at least three journalists who are reading it right now, and his appearance on The Fifth Column podcast is worth a listen, chiefly because Welch and Moynihan know how to make the most of that exchange. Smith was BuzzFeed’s political reporter when BuzzFeed was supposed to be The Future of Journalism: a traffic- and engagement-tailored media company which developed a traditional journalistic newsroom as an awkward addendum. The awkwardness around the time-consuming reporting on important topics with some semblance of fairness and impartiality was supposed to be ironed out and journalism eventually blend in with the content that brought in all the traffic: Ten Reasons Why Olives Are Awful, A Quiz on What State You Should Really Be Living In, and Is This Dress Gold or Blue (that one broke the internet… different times, eh?). After BuzzFeed, Smith moved on to become the media critic at the NYT and now works for a media startu… sorry, a “global news platform”, Semafor. Since his earliest job in journalism was with Politico, Ben is an unusual Gen-X-er who’s almost consistently worked for online outlets.
The book tells the story of how the pursuit of traffic became the business model for American journalism in late naughts to late teens of the twenty-first-century – which also shook the surviving legacy media to the core – by following the careers of some of the key figures of the traffic era: Nick Denton who ran Gawker, Jezebel, Gizmodo, Valleywag etc, and A. J. Daulerio who was the Gawker editor who decided to publish the Hulk Hogan sex tape that eventually brought Gawker down; people behind The Huffington Post (Arianna etc); and the trajectory of Jonah Peretti, who became the CEO of BuzzFeed. Andrew Breitbart, as the Traffic and Engagement’s early dark knight, gets deservedly a lot of airtime, and not only as “Matt Drudge’s bitch” (Drudge apparently treated Breitbart, his main site management guy, appallingly and Breitbart would occasionally admit as much in public.) A number of writers who made their names and thrived in the traffic era also feature. While people who ran things have almost uniformly been male, there are a number of women among the writing and editorial stars of the age: Jessica Coen, Elisabeth Spiers, Jezebel’s EiC Anna Holmes, who ignored Nick Denton’s requests to turn Jezebel into a cosmetics-reviewing outlet – but also, flip coin, the many women on the confessional essay beat which exploded and led to the publications such as JaneXo and Babe.net. Canada had people like Scaachi Koul - if you haven’t read Sarmishta Subramanian’s piece of why Koul’s early career took shape the way it did, you should. The path of overexposure is one well trod career path for women writers in this century, and Canada has never lagged behind the US in the SATC-type columnizing.