Smith attempts to tell the entire 21st-century story of online media, and quite a bit of that story ends up in the book. Smith’s particularly good when he close-reads a particular publication in its ephemeral context ... Smith identifies what felt new about the site’s merging of intersectional identity with journalism, and shrewdly points out how it paved the way for the mainstreaming of new ways of thinking about feminism—and, not incidentally, laid the groundwork for #MeToo ... It’s a shame that Smith’s book, so focused on its two mad scientists turned CEOs, spends so little time really digging into what it was like for the writers and—perhaps more importantly—the readers of that era.
Engrossing and suspenseful ... Picaresque ... Even as Smith refuses to canonize his protagonists, Nick Denton (the founder of Gawker Media) and Jonah Peretti (the co-founder of HuffPost and BuzzFeed), they occasionally alight on the odd eureka moment that a more earnest writer could have styled as world-changing. Sometimes Smith even becomes that earnest write ... Moral seriousness is what lifts Traffic above other accounts of adventures in start-up land.
There is lots of delusion in this book. There is also a little bit of rivalry. But I have to be honest. I do not think there are any geniuses ... The rivalry, and the intensity of feeling that spawned both it and the anonymous letter to the Awl, never really comes alive on the page. Maybe this is a function of Smith’s puree-smooth business prose, or of the overfamiliarity of the stories Traffic tells ... Of the many delusions in the book, the grandest is the idea that digital publishers could build sustainable businesses by chasing immense audiences with free content ... It’s hard not to feel like Traffic is making an inadvertent but compelling case that Gawker and BuzzFeed were, in the grand scheme of things, not particularly important. Smith acknowledges this possibility toward the end.
Through the stories of BuzzFeed and Gawker, Smith aims to show how the media, high on the early internet’s spirit of creative adventure and freedom, got hooked on traffic ... Deft ... All history is selective, but the focus on Gawker and BuzzFeed means that Smith’s account of the societywide race to go viral necessarily omits and underemphasizes important players ... In place of analysis, Smith gives us a whirlwind nostalgia trip ... Traffic is less interesting as a history of digital media—much of the book’s raw material comes from other historical accounts, a debt acknowledged in an endnote on sourcing—than as a record of its author’s evolving thinking on the role of journalism online ... As both witness and participant, Smith occupies an unusual role in the story of the digital media revolution. If he feels any doubt about the objectivity of his account—if he feels that his ability to reliably chronicle the rivalry between BuzzFeed and Gawker is in any way compromised by his longtime employment by the former—he does not show it in the pages of Traffic ... These might seem like small criticisms, but they go to the heart of what it takes to tell a story that people can trust, to be a credible reporter—the essence of journalism, and the mission to which Smith’s new venture is supposedly directed. In truth, what Smith does these days is less journalism than journapreneurialism, a hybrid activity that involves reporting on power while aspiring to wield it.
Illuminating ... BuzzFeed’s rise is the crucial turn in Smith’s account of the traffic chase. It is also when, more than a third of the way into the book, our previously cool, omniscient narrator suddenly shows up as a character with his hands on the wheel. The effect is jarring, prompting questions about perspective in the narrative to that point, especially because Smith’s storytelling is buffed and upbeat ... A cynic could posit that Smith’s approach to narrative—the crosscutting chronological march, the relatability of the principals, the greasepaint on the easy villains—is prepackaged for a streaming-media series, as everything now seems to be. But I suspect a more organic route. Figuring out what gets people going, and providing more of it than they asked for, is at the heart of what successful journalism in the age of traffic is about ... Smith is a reporter of rare talent, but self-examination has not emerged as his superpower.
Smith 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.
Ben Smith, former editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, lands on his promise to chronicle the rise of digital media through the story of a snowballing, head-to-head competition — between characters like Peretti and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, between the right and the left and, eventually, between the new found power of social networks and the institutions they helped create.
he 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 ... 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 ... There’s no better history of the Wild West days of early social media than this one.
Riveting ... 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.
