Jonas: Digital media gives people what they actually want. He says legacy media feed people what they wish they wanted, but it worked because options were limited. Jonas' character John O'Paretti had this totally different sense of what this future would be like. Jonah's takeaway in the end was just that sense of wait, what just happened to me? What was that?
Have clicks, likes, and shares driven media and democracy to the point of disrepair? Sean Illing is joined by Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor and the author of "Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral." Together, they discuss how newsrooms were transformed by social media and the pursuit of traffic, and what the future of the industry might look like.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Ben Smith (@semaforben), editor-in-chief of Semafor, author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
References:
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This episode was made by:
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Engineer: Patrick Boyd
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Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall
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