"It's not physics, it's psychology. And I think that's what he understood," she says of BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti. "He was just always focused on why would someone share this? What's your motivation for sharing this thing?" She didn't want the job but could see her audience moving from politico.com and blogs to Twitter.
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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Engineer: Patrick Boyd
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Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall
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