The rise and fall of digital pioneers
Ben Smith is making the rounds to promote his new book, “Traffic.” The proprieter of the shuttering BuzzFeed News told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tuesday night he did not aniticpate, in its infancy, what digital media would do to legacy media and politics. The pursuit of clicks contained in the BuzzFeed name came to define the goal of social media.
That business model was the digital equivalent of “if it bleeds, it leads.” I recall once sitting in a packed Netroots Nation workshop on writing clickbait headlines to attract eyeballs before clickbait was a word and swiftly became a four-letter one.
Smith did not forsee in those days what the lefties’ tech tools that gave rise to Jezebel or Huffington Post would become in the hands of the radical right. I recall, too, that Right Online, the onetime conservative shadow to Netroots, was thought a joke by our younger attendees. Right Online seemed a collection or hopelessly unhip retirees in the digital age trying still learning to turn on a computer and manipulate a cursor.
That was then. Smith writes in the New York Times:
The media is still grappling with what Jezebel’s creators helped unleash, for good and ill. The era opened opportunities for journalists and creative people who, by instinct or practice, could blend their identities with the stories they told. The new generation of millennial writers at the Gawker sites, BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital projects challenged stuffy, insular and occasionally deceitful institutions that deserved challenging, but it also lacked, in retrospect, a sense of the value of having trusted institutions at all.
And those of us who came up in the internet media may have missed the biggest story of all. We took it for granted that this was a progressive medium, populated by young people who loved Barack Obama and culminating in some way in his election in 2008. We didn’t expect the true apogee of the new media to come with the election of Donald Trump eight years later.
Nathan Heller of The New Yorker recalls encountering Jonah Peretti, one of Huffington Post’s creators, and having the same unsettling feeling I had in that Netroots workshop:
I was a junior employee at a Web magazine at that point, and I recall being summoned one morning to an editorial meeting where Peretti was to be our guest. Peretti, a tall, moist-haired young man, gave a spiel about optimizing pages for “viral lift,” about trying many different wordings and running with whatever drove traffic the most. I remember having the powerful feeling that this was not what I’d got into the writing business to do. But I also remember that, after his visit, many things at our magazine changed. Keywords now had to be packaged with articles. Hyperlinking became antic, and headlines, the clever composition of which had been an intramural sport among editors (a storied favorite, for a dispatch from the Michael Jackson trial: “He Never Laid a Glove on Me!”), became things like “The Haunting, Unexpected Revelations from the Third Day of the Michael Jackson Trial (Video).” For a while, this Perettian tinkering was our special knowledge, our competitive advantage. Then it was everywhere.
I’ve seen the same phenomenon over and over: activists trying to make their passions pay the rent. Capitalism is a cruel mistress.
Heller observes:
Perhaps the keenest insight in this book concerns the way that traffic-chasing helped create the MAGA right. In Smith’s telling, it is not coincidental that Andrew Breitbart spent three months working with Peretti at the Huffington Post, a publication that, in 2008, got behind Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton partly because Peretti had identified Obama as a traffic booster. The extraordinary digital success that Obama’s campaign went on to enjoy, Smith suggests, rose in part from “the new way of thinking about people that came when you saw them as traffic—measuring interest and intent, and channeling it into action.” Or, to put it more directly, traffic wasn’t just business; it was politics.
See what politics has become. The Greenes and the Jordans and the Boeberts arrive on Capitol Hill not to govern but to generate clicks, to go viral and become right-wing media celebrities. Clicks equal dollars and fame.
Sometimes small is beautiful. It’s an irony that smallish sites such as Hullabaloo have endured while big ones fueled by venture capitalists fail. Also ironic is the level of hucksterism spawned when chasing clicks and advertising dollars supercedes chasing truth, justice, and the American Way, etc.
And here we are.