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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Well, everyone talks a lot these days about the effects of social media. Mostly, the ill effects of disinformation and standards of beauty and things like that that go viral online, causing harm to individuals and society. If we are in one era of content that goes viral online, we're at the end of another, according to a new book by Ben Smith, who has seen it and been a central participant.

Ben Smith, as some of you know, is a former New York Times media columnist, now editor-in-chief of the news site Semafor, and he helped us start BuzzFeed, which has now hit hard times and recently closed down its once-influential news operation entirely. Now, Ben has a book about the rise and fall of several early viral media giants, mostly Gawker and BuzzFeed, launched when the very idea of something going viral online was new.

The book is called Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. Maybe you've seen Ben's related guest essay already in The New York Times. It's out today called, We're Watching the End of a Digital Media Age. It All Started with Jezebel. Ben, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Ben Smith: Thanks so much for having me, Brian. What a delight to be on.

Brian Lehrer: Your lead in The Times essay mentioned several news organizations in the group that your book is about. Vice, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, and BuzzFeed News, as well as Jezebel. What are they as a group or what were they at their founding that ties them together?

Ben Smith: They were a group of outlets that started in the early 2000s, most of them in downtown Manhattan at a moment when the internet was exploding, when legacy outlets, television, newspapers, even radio, were struggling to figure out what this new internet was, and also when a lot of people were pretty disappointed with how mainstream media had covered the invasion of Iraq.

I think the cultural and technical moment meant people were very interested in these new outside voices, which had different ideologies, different theories, different characters driving them but were this little cauldron of innovation in the early aughts that led to-- as social media then grew, in particular, Facebook, suddenly, a few years later, were being seen by tens and hundreds of millions of people every day.

Brian Lehrer: Your book is largely about two guys who intentionally pushed the viral media era to the forefront. Jonah Peretti, who started Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, and Nick Denton, who started Gawker. Why is your premise in The Times article that it all started with the feminist site Jezebel?

Ben Smith: It's interesting, these two guys in the early aughts with these very different ideas about what media ought to be. Jonah thought it would be very optimistic, positive that social media would be almost utopian. Nick Denton, who created Gawker, thought it was the reverse that would expose hypocrisy. They were both very, very interested in getting traffic. Denton was in the business of selling advertising and thought that a women's site would sell makeup basically.

He was interested in that and recruited this very brilliant editor named Anna Holmes. Actually, she was cautioned not to use the word "feminist" in the memo she wrote for him. I think, in some ways, what she did, it's really an incredible year, 2007, just tapped into this new energy of both the way the internet could open up social movements, and then the way it could really turn on itself and create this firestorm of outraged culture that would later become familiar.

They launched in this hilarious way with a $10,000 bounty for an unretouched photo from a women's magazine. There was not the kind of public conversation about the Photoshop the way there is now. They actually got somebody to turn up with a before picture from Redbook of Faith Hill with smile lines and freckles that the magazine had removed. It forced this huge industry or the beauty industry and the women's fashion industry. This blog almost single-handedly really forced them to examine some of what they were doing.

The total absence of Black models was another big issue that they pushed on. The openness of the internet, the frankness of the conversations they had really moved the needle, but the women writing for it also found that they had developed this intense relationship with an audience that was new and that wasn't what you had in the old print culture. At times, if they stepped out of line, suddenly, they would face the fury of their own audience. I don't know. It was an interesting story to me because it was like what they lived in 2007 was both the promise and the peril of what a lot of journalists saw as the internet 10 years later.

Brian Lehrer: Now, this is going to sound quaint, but I have some clips here of Jonah Peretti, founder of Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, on this show in 2008. In this first clip, he's describing the first thing that I think made him really famous when he had a battle with Nike a few years earlier over his desire to have them write the word "sweatshop" on his sneakers. Here's Peretti on the show on July 21st, 2008 describing that.

Jonah Peretti: I was in graduate school at the MIT Media Lab and I was supposed to be writing my master's thesis. I was procrastinating. I went to Nike's website. They had this new service where you could customize your shoes with a word or a phrase. As a challenge to Nike and as a joke, I ordered a pair of shoes with the word "sweatshop" on the side. I just wanted to see. Would Nike send me a pair of shoes with the word "sweatshop" on it? They wrote back some evasive, bureaucratic responses, and we had it humorous back and forth. At the end of it, I said, "Oh, this is kind of funny."

I sent it to a few friends and then those friends passed it on to their friends and they passed it on to their friends. It started spreading like wildfire around the web. Eventually, it got to producers and to journalists. I ended up on the Today show debating sweatshop labor with a Nike executive. I didn't even really know that much about sweatshops. It was funny and it was something that was easy to share. It was something that people in their office felt like, "Oh, I can send this to everyone. It's funny and it has a political message and I want to make this spread." It reached millions of people because of that.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, sweatshop was a critique of how Nike was having some of its sneakers made. Ben, how seminal moment was that in the development of the idea of going viral online?

Ben Smith: I think that prompted Jonah in particular to see and develop this whole theory of how there would be a new media where you weren't just listening to something on the radio or watching it on TV, but you were getting it from your friends. That would later become social media. It's interesting because I went back and I watched. As he mentioned, he wound up on the Today show debating a Nike spokesman despite the fact that Jonah didn't really know anything about sweatshops as he says there. In the debate, the Nike spokesman also says something that feels prescient where, at some point, he says, "Well, I'm just glad everybody's talking about our products."

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that Nike actually benefited from that critical interaction and how much it spread online because, "Just say the name of my product and I'm going to win 90% of the time"?

Ben Smith: I don't know, but I do think that we took a much simpler-- I think, in general, it was a pretty utopian ideological moment back in the early aughts. I think a lot of us had a very clear sense of where the internet was going, how it would all work out. That was among other things really politically progressive. It was taken for granted that these outlets were helping Barack Obama.

Huffington Post very explicitly was there to help Democrats. Barack Obama visited Facebook. It was obvious that Facebook was like a Democratic institution. Of course, Obama visited the place that helped all the college kids vote. I think there was this moment, I guess, around the 2016 election where people realized, "Oh, the culmination of these media products wasn't the election of Barack Obama. It was the election of Donald Trump."

Brian Lehrer: Well, why do you think that happened? If we accept the premise that the far-right is not the majority in America and part of your premise is that they came to dominate viral online media, how did it become so unrepresented?

Ben Smith: I think that these tools were built and great at waging war on institutions and that they were this revolt-- First, this revolt inside the little New York media world against these stuffy and, in many ways, outmoded and problematic media institutions from Condé Nast to the New York Times. When I reported it out actually, to me, one of the most surprising things that I hadn't quite realized was that all the people who would create, or a lot of them, the far-right of the next decade, the founder of the Proud Boys also co-founded Vice.

Andrew Breitbart, who was a key promoter of Trump and his site became the central promoter of Trump, also co-founded Huffington Post. The creator of 4chan worked out of BuzzFeed's office. I think that the right-wing populism that they really drove and fully embraced was incredibly well-suited to these tools and better suited than, on the other hand, Obama liberalism.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your comments and questions or your own media diet over the last 15, 20 years, and how it relates to viral social media and viral actual professional media sites or anything that Ben Smith is talking about in the context of his new book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Here's another Jonah Peretti clip from that show of ours in 2008 describing how things go viral at all as a new concept for people, something he framed at the time as the "bored at work" network.

Jonah Peretti: It's an amazing thing that this network has emerged of millions of bored office workers. They all have a computer on their desk. They're connected to high-speed internet and then they spend their day IM-ing each other on Facebook, on social networks, blogging. Collectively, they create a network that can share media and spread media to more people than any of the major television networks or radio networks.

Brian Lehrer: Than any of the major radio-- You're saying the "bored at work" network is not just a funny name for the distractions for the bored at work. It's also becoming an influential information service or cultural force?

Jonah Peretti: Yes. Every time somebody sees something and they think, "I'm going to send this to 10 of my friends," they are distributing media just the way a network distributes media, but they're not really thinking about the fact that all these people together connected can spread things around the globe to hundreds of millions of people.

Brian Lehrer: What's your website, BuzzFeed? Is this a marketing tool?

Jonah Peretti: No, so BuzzFeed.com is a place to go to see what people are talking about, see what people are excited about, see what's getting shared, what's getting sent around. All of those little nuggets of things that people who are bored at work or people who are looking for a funny, interesting thing, or looking for something to share, they can go there and find that.

Brian Lehrer: Memories, Ben, right? 2008.

Ben Smith: Incredible. I think, in 2008, you guys must have sounded either totally incomprehensible or geniuses. One or the other.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] Well, what were you thinking as you listened to that clip? Just part of that exchange was about the new site he was launching then called BuzzFeed. Were you involved already in 2008?

Ben Smith: No, I'd never heard of it. I was off covering politics and writing blogs and getting links from The Huffington Post in a media ecosystem that I now think of as the in-between stage between the old media and the fully-blown social media explosion of the 2010s.

Brian Lehrer: The parts of the book that contrast what Nick Denton was after with Gawker versus what Jonah Peretti was after with BuzzFeed, it's complicated because it seems like Denton was more interested in content and Peretti was more interested in buzz for BuzzFeed's sake, and yet Denton's content on Gawker as you were starting to describe before was much darker and arguably malicious. Gawker was brought down by a defamation suit compared to Jonah Peretti, who had progressive tendencies like in hooking his viral eyeballs vision with Arianna Huffington's progressive content. How would you start to compare for our listeners what Peretti and Denton were each trying to accomplish?

Ben Smith: I think what's interesting is these two guys both really did see a bit of the future. Jonah saw this social distribution before other people. Nick Denton saw another facet of digital media, which was the extent to which it could peel the hypocrisy back. Whether you liked it or not, it was going to be a place where people said what they really thought. By the way, is that always a good thing? I don't know, but he thought so and just exposed whatever often their worst impulses were.

He published a porn site among other things and I think basically thought that the glossy media was both lying about what the journalists really thought. The journalists should just publish the same things they said to each other in bars, and then also that people were lying to themselves about what they really wanted. They didn't want to read this high-minded nonsense. They wanted things that were meaner and snarkier and darker than they would admit, and that this new social media and this new form of media could give them that.

I think it's a double-edged sword. I think, at times, stripping away the hypocrisy of the old media was a really valuable thing. There was a lot of hypocrisy. At other times, the logical conclusion of it was exposing things for exposure's sake. As you say, intimate videos were the most extreme logical extent of that. In fact, Gawker's demise, which was the result of, really, a conspiracy by a billionaire, Peter Thiel, against them. Thiel was mad because they'd written about him being gay when he wasn't fully out.

Denton had then added some mean comments about why he wasn't more out. Thiel then launched this crusade against Gawker. The tool he used, it wasn't defamation. It was invasion of privacy and the allegation, which the jury sided with Hulk Hogan on, that they invaded Hulk Hogan's privacy by publishing this intimate video. I think, today, that's just totally obvious. How could you publish something like that? There was a moment when that was vaguely within some of the norms of how digital media worked.

Brian Lehrer: Was there a special relationship between BuzzFeed, meaning Jonah Peretti, and Facebook or even between Peretti and Mark Zuckerberg as individuals that actually tweaked Facebook's algorithm to help promote BuzzFeed contents reach and maybe to diminish Gawker's? Did the rivalry get to that level?

Ben Smith: Well, Zuckerberg had tried to buy BuzzFeed in 2011. When I arrived at the office, Jonah was looking at the consolation prize, which was a gift card for not having said no to Facebook. They talked a lot and messaged a lot. To some degree, Jonah would be talking his book, but also they were together trying to figure out the relationship between media and the platform. Ultimately, I think Zuckerberg decided that the relationship between media and the platform was that there wouldn't really be one and that there was no space for professional media and no place for anybody to make a living on it. Ultimately, there were a lot of business mistakes along the way, but that's ultimately what did a lot of these sites in.

Brian Lehrer: My guest, if you're just joining us, is Ben Smith, these days' editor-in-chief of the new site, Semafor. He was the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, which recently shut down, and he's the author of the book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. Maybe you've seen Ben's related guest essay in The New York Times called, We’re Watching the End of a Digital Media Age. It All Started With Jezebel. Casey in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Casey.

Casey: Hi, Brian. You're a king. Ben, I wanted to ask you. During your time at The New York Times, you were holding stock in BuzzFeed. At the time the company went public, you sold it all. I wanted to ask how much money you made from it.

Ben Smith: That's a very Gawker-era question. It's funny. I don't have the millennial impulse or comfort with talking about that kind of stuff, so I think I'm not going to say.

Brian Lehrer: Casey, thank you very much. There's that. Why does that challenge you? I feel obligated to follow up on her impulse to reveal the money behind whatever may have contributed to the impulse to write this book.

Ben Smith: Oh, I think I don't totally understand the question. I had this disclosed conflict of interest at The Times. The media beat is a walking conflict of interest, but I did own shares in BuzzFeed and didn't write about BuzzFeed while I was at The Times, which I think is what she was referring to.

Brian Lehrer: I see. Right. I didn't even mention that in my reset here that you were a media columnist for The Times pretty recently. Part of the issue you identify in the book is the business model of trying to make money by offering free content that attracts a gazillion eyeballs, and then you can sell advertising around it. Trying to make a successful business out of that failed for Gawker, for BuzzFeed, for a number of other sites. Do I have that right?

Ben Smith: Yes, that's basically right.

Brian Lehrer: Isn't that though the model of the old media staples, newspapers that were sold for pennies to jack circulation, and then sell ads based on the number of readers and network TV, that juggernaut, which was free over the air in its early heyday and made so much money? I'm curious why you think if it worked for those--

Ben Smith: Commercial radio, podcasts.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, right, exactly. How come it didn't work in this case if it worked in those others?

Ben Smith: Well, the closest analogy is cable. We thought that the--

Brian Lehrer: Not free though. You got to pay for cable.

Ben Smith: Right, because it wasn't over the air. These cable operators had laid wires in the ground and then companies like MTV, ESPN came up and built great businesses. The key people who owned the cables knew that they needed people making content and those people needed to make a living. There was a real symbiotic relationship between ESPN and Comcast or whatever. We thought, "Okay, these social networks, Facebook, but also Twitter and Snap and Pinterest and a number of others, they are the new pipes."

They are going to want to encourage great, high-quality, professional journalism, great, high-quality, professional entertainment, and pay for it so that they compete with Netflix and The New York Times for your attention. I think there's an argument about whether they were right or not. It turned out that they were totally committed to relying basically solely on user-generated content, which is free for them. Obviously, everybody likes free. That was the decision they made that I think, to some degree, doomed this whole generation of companies.

Brian Lehrer: From your insiders and leadership seat, what was BuzzFeed at its height? To the central premise of your book, why has it all fallen so far along with the others in the group like Gawker and Vice?

Ben Smith: Also, maybe particularly about the news operation that I've helped build there, I did a lot of work that I'm really proud of, and after I left continued to. Our idea was that we were building a news organization for this new social media world. That meant that it would be distributed on social media, that it would cover things people on social media cared about, that it would cover the social media companies.

The things people on social media cared about broadly also included Donald Trump and what was happening in the world. At our best, we had a lot of readers and broke huge stories. The early stories about misinformation on Facebook and things like that and many others. We never developed a business model that worked. That's the boring truth of why these things are really in trouble now.

Brian Lehrer: Yet things continue to go viral online and have a tremendous impact. Do you see an evolution or maybe a devolution from the early digital age media sites to the hyper-combative politics of today in the way that we see them online?

Ben Smith: I think part of the reason that Facebook and other social-- particularly Facebook, walked away from news was how divisive it got and how divisive the arguments about news got. They're being hauled up in front of Congress. Everybody on their platform is screaming at each other. I think, broadly, that moment pushed Facebook. If you go to Facebook now, things do go viral, but less actually, much less. Twitter and Facebook will argue with you about whether they are numerically in decline but clearly have lost their cultural centrality that they had a few years ago. I think the way information travels is confusing now. I think it's much more splintered. I think people are feeling their way toward a new moment.

Brian Lehrer: Your Times article even references the firings of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon in the context of this history. Do you think a certain kind of combativeness might be going out of style even as these digital outlets that made things edgier fail as businesses?

Ben Smith: Maybe that was a stretch, but doesn't it feel like we're entering a different cultural moment? Those were both decisions by the giant corporations that own those media companies. Ultimately, Fox News, Fox Corp., and Rupert Murdoch for whatever reason, and there have been a lot of them, including The Times today, has this incredible story on this text message he sent that if you didn't watch his show, it would've been pretty shocking, that they were trying to reel things back in in some sense.

Don Lemon, a totally different personality and character but was the best-known or one of the best-known faces of a very combative anti-Trump CNN. It seems like Discovery, the Warner Bros. Discovery, the conglomerate that owns that is trying to reel it back in. Again, those are decisions made because they could buy corporate, see executives who want to please advertisers who have a lot of different motives, not just that that's their intuition of the audience, that's what the audience wants. The effect is to pull these outlets a bit back toward the center.

Brian Lehrer: Ashley in Stamford, you're on WNYC with Ben Smith. Hi, Ashley.

Ashley: Hi, Brian. Thank you. I just wanted to ask a little bit about the infrastructure and the operations of running these media organizations. My experience is that there's a huge technology deficit both in the archive systems and supporting the producers that are making the work while pushing and underpaying producers to constantly make the next viral thing instead of making a system that is sustainable and support the producers to explore what will be creative. I wanted to hear what your comments or why was there such underfunding in the operation's systems.

Ben Smith: I think that's a great question. I think it's true of old media sometimes as well as new that people feel and are really overworked. I would say in that new media world, you could certainly over-interpret the traffic data. It's like, suddenly, everyone was flying without instruments. Suddenly, we had instruments. You could get addicted to them. In some sense, both the management, but then also just the flow of data itself would sometimes, I think, create these really unhealthy pressures on people too. Sometimes to do really bad work, sometimes just to work themselves into the ground. I think that was certainly a feature of this moment.

Brian Lehrer: Joel in Newark, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joel.

Joel: Good morning. I would like to understand, I think it's Section 530 that shields the internet companies from liability lawsuits. I would like to understand what the purpose of that is nowadays and how, if at all, it can be either eliminated or amended to try to tame down some of the nastiest stuff that it goes on. That's my question.

Brian Lehrer: Joel, thank you very much. Maybe, Ben, in that context, it's worth making a distinction that the news organizations that you're writing about that, by and large, have now passed like Gawker and BuzzFeed, they were content makers not subject to that exemption, right? It's the platforms that your and everybody else's content would appear on like Twitter and Facebook that are exempt from liability, right?

Ben Smith: Right. Section 230 undergirds a huge amount of the internet as we know it. It basically says that if you defame someone in a video, you say something about somebody that isn't true and is damaging, they can't sue YouTube. They can sue you, but they can't sue YouTube. If you pin something to the wall of the internet, somebody can sue you over it, but they can't sue the guy who owns the bulletin board.

The idea was to open these vast tracks and new kinds of businesses from Reddit to YouTube to the comment section of websites. I think the internet as we know it relies on this. I think if you said, "Okay, we're repealing it," a lot of these companies will go out of business tomorrow, which may be what some people want. There is a question of like, "What are the limits?" You have legal liability for permitting some things to be posted.

The exception that passed recently was around sex trafficking saying, "You know what? We're going to carve that out. You can sue a platform. You can sue YouTube. You can sue Facebook if they, in some way, participate in that." I think you could imagine other places where it'll get chipped away, I think in this political environment where it's incredibly polarized, where each party is looking for political advantage on these platforms. It's very hard to figure out where you would find a consensus when everyone seems to be, right now, a very firm advocate for their own free speech and finding all sorts of complicated theories on which their enemy's speech ought to be deleted from the internet.

Brian Lehrer: Last question. If those sites like Gawker and BuzzFeed offered an alternative to what you call stuffy mainstream media in ways that got millions of views every day then, is anything providing that now?

Ben Smith: Well, I think stuffy mainstream media had a pretty tough decade and learned a lot. In some ways, less stuffy and more interesting, I hope, than it was. Also, I think what people want now is different. I think people are looking for transparent, trusted voices. I think it's why radio and podcasts are doing well actually, including this show. They're looking for people who can synthesize this huge diverse flood of information that's coming in. Those are the things we're trying to do at Semafor. I do think it's this different moment where the problem you're trying to solve actually is the problem that the last reaction created.

Brian Lehrer: I'll let you promote Semafor on the way out the door. This is the new news organization that you're now editor-in-chief of. For people who haven't heard of it, what's Semafor?

Ben Smith: We're trying to do what I just described to provide transparent news from journalists who are going to tell you, who know what they're talking about, who are going to break news, and also separate the news from their opinion and bring in views from all over, including ones we disagree with so that we're trying to talk to you like human beings and rebuild some trust.

Brian Lehrer: Ben Smith's book is called Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. Thanks for sharing it with us, Ben. Thanks a lot.

Ben Smith: Thank you.

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