The founder of 4chan worked out a BuzzFeed's office. Andrew Breitbart co-founded Huffington Post with Jonah Peretti. The founder of The Proud Boys was a co-founder of Vice. This is actually a good bridge to I think one of the more interesting and probably consequential storylines in the book.
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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