What followed for both men was, in Smith’s absorbing account, both an extraordinary success story and a profound cautionary tale.
Gawker, a hub of gunslinging bloggers, was his attempt to “bring the news revolution to New York”. Specifically, he would apply the techniques that the British tabloid press had applied to Hollywood – cruelty, intrusion, comedy – to the young plutocrats of the internet age. He decided he would trade in that most lucrative of 21st-century commodities, gossip. A decade later, his findings were valued in the hundreds of millions.ĭenton’s interest in the new possibilities of global sharing was a little different.
#Gawker verdict how to#
Peretti bet his college friend $2 that he could work out precisely how to do that again. He tried to sell his email exchange with Nike corporate affairs to Harper’s magazine when it refused, he posted it on a blog and then watched, amazed, as it spread across his friendship network and then the world. Peretti had his first taste of internet fame in 2001 when he responded to a Nike promotion to customise sneakers by asking for the word “sweatshop” to be emblazoned on them. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Imagesīoth men were instinctive disruptors. The two pioneers of this discovery, he suggests, were Jonah Peretti, back then a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, and Nick Denton, a British journalist who had reported for the Financial Times in California during the dotcom boom.īen Smith in the BuzzFeed newsroom in 2018. In his book he argues that the key moment in that ancient history of 2003 was the realisation that news stories could not only be actively spread across the internet like viruses, but also that the attention they received – traffic – might be measured in real time. Speaking via Zoom from his home in New York last week, Smith agreed that it was now a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, but also one that had changed our world for ever. Traffic: Genius, Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is an eyewitness account of that social media revolution in news, a rise and fall of the always-on empire. It was also a perfect moment for Smith to launch a book – that stubborn printed “legacy format” that refuses to go away. Jonah Peretti developed tools that showed what made people share content: basically stuff that reflected well on them In April, having gone through successive waves of cuts and redundancies, BuzzFeed finally shut down its news operation. Having been political blogger at the website Politico in the early days of that turmoil, he launched the newsroom of BuzzFeed in 2011 and established it as a credible and groundbreaking source of internet-only news, before leaving in 2020 to take up a role as media columnist of the New York Times. This imagined paradise was a place in which no one had yet heard of cat memes and dick pics and Andrew Tate where anti-vaxxers and anonymous “patriots” still just wrote furious letters to editors in green ink in their bedsits where likes and follows and trolls and gifs and pile-ons were not yet the stuff of life.īen Smith was in his mid-20s when the first wave of that revolution was breaking – “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” – making his way as a political journalist in Washington and feeling the media landscape shift beneath his feet. For social media, that moment was just over 20 years ago, when to digital evangelists it felt like a new generation of “citizen journalists” – bloggers – might create a connected utopia of transparency, sweeping away those crusty media “gatekeepers” who had – the theory went – so long kept us all in the dark. I n any technological advance there is a golden age in which, for pioneers and believers, remaking the world seems within their grasp.
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