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“Engrossing and suspenseful." —The New York Times “Expertly pulls readers in.” —The Guardian
“Smith sharply chronicles the revolutionary moment.” — Financial Times
The origin story of the post-truth age: the candid inside tale of two online media rivals, Nick Denton of Gawker Media and Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed, whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society If attention is the new oil, Traffic is the story of the time between the first gusher and the perceptible impact of climate change. The curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000s, after the first dot-com crash but before Google, Apple, and Facebook exploded, when it seemed that New York City, rather than Silicon Valley, might become tech’s center of gravity. There, Nick Denton’s merry band of nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah Peretti’s sunnier team at HuffPost and BuzzFeed were building the foundations of viral internet media. Ben Smith, who would go on to earn a controversial reputation as BuzzFeed News’s editor in chief, was there to see it, and he chronicles it all with marvelous lucidity underscored by dark wit.
Traffic explores one of the great ironies of our time: The internet, which was going to help the left remake the world in its image, has become the motive force of right populism. People like Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart initially seemed like minor characters in the narrative in which Nick and Jonah were the stars. But today, anyone might wonder if the opposite wasn’t the case. To understand how we got here, Traffic is essential and enthralling reading.
“Engrossing and suspenseful." —The New York Times “Expertly pulls readers in.” —The Guardian
“Smith sharply chronicles the revolutionary moment.” — Financial Times
The origin story of the post-truth age: the candid inside tale of two online media rivals, Nick Denton of Gawker Media and Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed, whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society If attention is the new oil, Traffic is the story of the time between the first gusher and the perceptible impact of climate change. The curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000s, after the first dot-com crash but before Google, Apple, and Facebook exploded, when it seemed that New York City, rather than Silicon Valley, might become tech’s center of gravity. There, Nick Denton’s merry band of nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah Peretti’s sunnier team at HuffPost and BuzzFeed were building the foundations of viral internet media. Ben Smith, who would go on to earn a controversial reputation as BuzzFeed News’s editor in chief, was there to see it, and he chronicles it all with marvelous lucidity underscored by dark wit.
Traffic explores one of the great ironies of our time: The internet, which was going to help the left remake the world in its image, has become the motive force of right populism. People like Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart initially seemed like minor characters in the narrative in which Nick and Jonah were the stars. But today, anyone might wonder if the opposite wasn’t the case. To understand how we got here, Traffic is essential and enthralling reading.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the cover
1
The Bet
Jonah Peretti and his best friend at grad school, Cameron Marlow, bet on everything. The sum was always two dollars. They'd bet on the winner of a basketball game, or whether Jonah could jump up on top of a chest-high wall in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their patter was objectively kind of annoying, these two skinny graduate students with their floppy brown hair, marching around the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they'd met in the fall of 1999, trying to one-up each other. Cameron, fresh out of college at twenty-two, was one of the youngest in the new class at the MIT Media Lab, and he wore that chip on his shoulder. Jonah was twenty-five. His left-wing politics and laughing California calm failed to conceal his intense competitiveness.
So it made sense that when Jonah went viral, truly viral, for the first time, on January 5, 2001, his friend and rival wouldn't let him bask in his glory. Cameron said it was a fluke. The internet was too random, culture too unpredictable, to pull something like that off again. "Two-dollar bet," Jonah suggested automatically. He'd spend the next twenty years trying to win that bet.
January 5, 2001, was a Friday, a freezing day in Cambridge. It was the last year of the American Century, when public intellectuals were spending their time worrying about the ennui at the end of history. The question was what young Americans, having conquered the Soviet Union and dominated the world, were supposed to do next. Jonah, whose lean height and bouncy gait gave you the sense that he was about to take flight, had turned twenty-seven on New Year's Day. He and Cameron were charting the digital future from their offices looking into the Cube, the glass box at the center of the Media Lab. Cameron was working on turning old issues of Time magazine into digital visualizations. In the next office, Jonah was supposed to be completing the research project on education that had gotten him admitted to MIT from his position running a high school computer lab in New Orleans. But, in fact, Jonah was on nike.com, looking at sneakers.
The company was letting shoppers customize shoes. Jonah chose a pair of size 10 Zoom XC USA running shoes and typed "fuck" into the white box where you could put a word of your choice. The site blocked it. To test how sophisticated the system was, he tried a different word: "sweatshop." It went through, so he charged the fifty dollars to his credit card and waited for his sneakers.
Instead, he got an email from Nike. His submission violated their policies-in particular, one against "inappropriate slang."
Jonah wrote back, noting that "sweatshop" "is in fact part of standard English," defined by Webster's dictionary as a "factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions."
He received another polite rejection. He didn't mind being a little annoying, obviously, and kept writing back. And after seven emails from Nike, Jonah made one final request: "Could you please send me a color snapshot of the ten-year-old Vietnamese girl who makes my shoes?"
That was the end of his correspondence with polite Nike customer service representatives. Jonah was pleased with his prank and, in particular, the line about the Vietnamese girl, so he put all the emails in order and submitted the exchange to Harper's Magazine, hoping he could reach what was then the pinnacle of success and attention for something like that: the Harper's Readings section, a monthly-print!-compilation of odd and timely documents. The magazine declined, so on January 15, he forwarded the email to ten friends. Some forwarded...
Reviews-
December 1, 2022
With King, the New York Times best-selling Eig ( Ali), a former senior writer for the Wall Street Journal, draws on recently declassified FBI files to create a bold new study of Martin Luther King Jr. (100,000-copy first printing). Drafted by the FBI as a trilingual counterterrorism researcher, Billy Reilly went to Russia when it first invaded Ukraine's Donbas region and promptly cut off all communication; it was unclear whether the FBI actually sent him, but Reilly's parents asked Wall Street Journal reporter Forrest to find their Lost Son (100,000-copy first printing). AsSlate staff writer Grabar clarifies in Paved Paradise, parking matters; we've distorted our landscape to find cheap and easy ways to store our cars, with much valuable real estate devoted to vehicles sitting empty when space for affordable housing is desperately needed; at least Grabar proposes solutions. Following This Is Not a T-Shirt, a memoir about his clothing brand, Hundreds (aka Bobby Kim) limns his venture into NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), Web3, and the Metaverse in NFTs Are a Scam / NFTs Are the Future (75,000-copy first printing). Former secretary of the Treasury and cochair of Goldman Sachs, Rubin draws on six decades' worth of experience in business and politics to explain how to make smart decisions in an uncertain world; it all begins with sketching out the possibilities on a simple Yellow Pad (or now an iPad). In Traffic, former BuzzFeed editor in chief Smith shows how Nick Denton's Gawker and Jonah Peretti's HuffPost and BuzzFeed fatefully duked it out for control of internet media in the early 2000s, arguing that the unintended consequence was a rightward shift in the internet's orientation. Windham-Campbell Award-winning South African writer Steinberg shows how the marriage of Winnie and Nelson Mandela reflects the course of South African history and tensions within the antiapartheid movement, as Winnie moved toward supporting armed insurrection while Nelson was jailed.
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from January 23, 2023 Smith, former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News and New York Times media columnist, debuts with a riveting insider’s look at the history of online news media. He chronicles the rise in the early 2000s of online outlets that measured success by the amount of traffic individual articles generated, starting with Gawker’s decision in 2003 to start selling advertising space. The incentive to publish salacious content to attract clicks eventually led to the site’s shuttering in 2016, however, when wrestler Hulk Hogan won a lawsuit against Gawker for publishing his sex tape. Positing that there was always a darker side to the quest for clicks, Smith details how Andrew Breitbart applied what he learned as a junior partner at the Huffington Post to his extremist right-wing news outlet, Breitbart. Smith is critical of online media’s obsession with breaking news first, and he offers a candid reflection on his decision while at BuzzFeed News to publish the Steele dossier, conceding he should have anticipated it would be republished without the caveats BuzzFeed included. Smith’s rigorous journalism and proximity to his subject imbue this with abounding insight, and the author’s sharp eye for character gives it the feel of a novel. Sobering and captivating, this is an essential take on the 21st-century media landscape.
Starred review from April 1, 2023 The founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News recounts life in the tech-startup trenches. Jonah Peretti, co-founder of BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, began his media career on a fluke note, engaging in what used to be called "culture jamming" with Nike, goofing on its labor practices by requesting a bespoke pair of shoes emblazoned with the word sweatshop. In 2001, he ignited what became one of the first instances of something going viral on the internet. That culture jamming of two decades ago would become the flame-war-scorched social media of today. So it was with the man who would become Peretti's "nemesis, his archrival, and his polar opposite," British immigrant Nick Denton, who obsessively gathered page views that could in turn be monetized in ad sales, yielding the Gawker website. By Smith's account, although Denton was more businesslike, he was also wedded to click-bait gossip, if sometimes with a social purpose: "The Gawker scoop of his dreams had always been to out a gay, Christian Republican senator, and thus reveal right-wing hypocrisy in its most naked form." Alas, he ran up against right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel instead, "a schemer who believed in revenge served cold," who took years and spent a fortune to lay Gawker to waste. The author gives a detailed, smart account of the foibles of those early days, when no one knew how to conduct decent journalism and make money at the same time. His discussion of the Huffington Post is especially telling as a study in haplessness. Along the way, he tells entertaining out-of-school tales of the early Facebook, the Drudge Report, Breitbart, and Twitter. Self-aware and self-critical, Smith allows that while all these entities helped create today's digital culture, it was often not for the better, even if Denton today voices hope for "a Talmudic internet still to be made." There's no better history of the Wild West days of early social media than this one.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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