With Vice facing down bankruptcy, BuzzFeed News going up in smoke and too many digital media companies to count in the media graveyard, it’s clear that an era has ended. Ben Smith has been handmaiden to and chronicler of the digital media revolution in this century. The rise of the Huffington Post, Breitbart.com, Drudge and most importantly BuzzFeed, where he was editor in chief, led to his book out this week, “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.” He’s now also the editor-in-chief of Semafor, a new digital media company focused on global politics and financial news.
“You could feel that moment coming to an end,” he said of the pioneering days of digital media and his impulse to write “Traffic.” At his heart, he remains a media junkie, and talked to WaxWord about it all, including what he calls what “will be looked upon as like the dumbest decision in the history of digital media” — not selling BuzzFeed to the Walt Disney Company for $600 million.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
For me, this book is total catnip — the behind-the-scenes of how sites like BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Breitbart came to be. Let’s start with why you wrote this.
After I left BuzzFeed, I went and became the media columnist at the New York Times. I was writing a column a week, but it was during the pandemic, and I guess that gave me a