Gawker was a media blog, and it covered the deskbound realm of editors and assistants the way tabloids covered the British Royal Family, in a preposterous yet aggrandizing narrative of batty choices and bad parties. What made the Gawker Media sites influential was partly the distinctive register of their writing-which practically invented the funny, histrionically jaded brand of irony then known as snark-and partly the way they assembled scattered subcultures into cohesive worlds. “Traffic, after all, was basically money,” Smith writes. In 2007, Denton began paying his bloggers bonuses based on their posts’ page views. This was, Smith writes, in the name of knocking the rich and powerful off their steeds-a mission that Denton pursued with zeal long after he was rich and powerful himself. His sites publicly outed executives, including Peter Thiel, as gay, and published sex tapes, nude selfies, and other specimens of dubious news value. He launched the Gawker Stalker feature, which revealed the whereabouts of well-known people. Aubyn character with an ethernet cable who pushed those blogs to cruel extremes of disclosure. Denton, a deracinated Brit who had drifted from a foreign-correspondent posting to the first tech boom, had earned a reputation both as an editorial pioneer, who had brought witty writing to the young world of blogs, and as a venal misanthrope, a St. ![]() The other figure is Nick Denton, the founder of the online Gawker Media network, which across the two-thousands grew to include the feminist site Jezebel, the Beltway site Wonkette, and the sports site Deadspin, among others. In 2006, this side project mounted its own Web site, as a kind of showroom, and went on to produce a widget on the Huffington Post, under the name BuzzFeed. When the Huffington Post had traffic troubles, Peretti set up a Skunk Works laboratory for the study of online viral behavior. It also left him, Smith writes, fascinated by the “tides of human attention.” Peretti stumbled into a job building the nascent Huffington Post, a site founded as a liberal riposte to Matt Drudge’s conservative news aggregator, the Drudge Report. (It was 2001 his viral moment began with forwarded e-mails.) The experience gave him a taste for the power of “direct action” online. One is Jonah Peretti, a dyslexic kid with a “laughing California calm,” who, studying advertising from an anti-consumerist perspective in grad school, at M.I.T., inadvertently went viral with a prank in protest of Nike’s sweatshop policies. Smith’s story grows from the rise of two figures, whom he presents as consummate outsiders eager to uncover traffic’s social secrets. Tapper, Smith notes, “was furious at me, but his decision to report on the existence of the Dossier made our choice both inevitable and easier to explain.” In the twenty-first century, the laws of traffic make demands, and we just follow. That many of the dossier’s lurid claims were indeed unconfirmable and, after a litigation storm that boosted Trump’s position, got dismissed from serious discussion (if not from serious nightmares) only shows the high stakes of the transformation under way. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. A new one, such as BuzzFeed News, won largely by being linkable and first. An old news outlet held its authority by retaining a fixed audience and standing on its record of success. In Smith’s telling, the laws of Web traffic, shaped by social media and their ability to disseminate material at exponential, “viral” rates, unseated old power structures. The decision to publish the Steele dossier originated with the reporter Ben Smith, then the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News and now the author of an illuminating book, “ Traffic” (Penguin Press), about the rise of online traffic-chasing as a twenty-first-century media norm. Its publication, in January, 2017, planted the unsettling suggestion that the next President of the United States lived under the thumb of a foreign government. The file referenced other points of purported Russian influence. The so-called “pee tape” was said to show Donald Trump’s berth being widdled on by sex workers at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow, and its alleged existence had come to light in a thirty-five-page dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former M.I.6 officer, who suggested that the Kremlin held the tape as kompromat against the man with curious hair. According to a media report, there existed a video of the President-elect instructing well-hydrated strangers to urinate onto his hotel bed. Millions of people posted videos in which they doused themselves with ice-cold water to raise funds for motor-neuron disease.ģ.
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