MixedThe BafflerSmith is a smart guy, a good reporter, and exudes an endearing—and enduring—earnestness about the media ... In Traffic, oddly, he recounts the industry-reshaping history of viral journalism—mostly at BuzzFeed and Gawker—from a removed perspective, as if he’s convinced he’s a neutral reporter rather than a central protagonist ... I didn’t quite expect this book to be funny...but at least that it would be juicy. The untold number of illegal stimulants that went into building the viral internet, the scads of interoffice dick pics, the terrible pay. It’s not, which is disappointing. The lack of juice, however, means that the book doesn’t truly engage with the dirty business of how all this traffic got created in the first place, and who created it ... And so we get a narrative that reads at once like a plea for David Fincher to option it and a benign mea culpa. Was writing this an act of bravery, or self-delusion? At times I feel like Ben is almost being genuinely contrite, but he ultimately emerges as a cipher, and one who now walks through the world a richer man, seemingly unencumbered by the wrath traffic wrought ... I wonder if our author knows how he is coming off here. Journalism, at its core, is incompatible with traffic; pursuing both at once is a fool’s errand. Peretti may have supported Smith’s obsequiousness to the god of objectivity, but imagining these two in a room talking about media ethics with Steve Bannon—well, that says a lot about who was in charge of things.
Mary Karr
PanThe Barnes & Noble ReviewKarr, like Tobias Wolff, Mary McCarthy, and Frank Conroy, had great material and greater talents. The rest of us, the divas we may be, likely do not, and will not glean them from this book.
