Book Review: ‘Traffic,’ by Ben Smith
Denton came to New York from San Francisco in 2002 with an air of what Smith calls “casual cruelty” and a conviction that “blogging was the future.” Joining forces with the journalist Elizabeth Spiers, Denton swept up astute writers like Jessica Coen and Emily Gould and tasked them with zinging the rich and famous on his new platform, Gawker. For years, the site smote its enemies with an energy both sporting and bloodthirsty only to find itself defeated in the 2010s by two formidable forces: the right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, and love.
Thiel, who, according to Smith’s account, despised Denton for once calling him “strange” and “paranoid,” secretly bankrolled a lawsuit over Gawker’s publication of a celebrity sex tape that pushed the website into bankruptcy. But in Smith’s amused telling, what really drained the battery of the Gawker project was that Denton fell in love with Derrence Washington, now his husband. The romance, Smith suggests, dampened his personal spikiness and his taste for unalloyed snark.
Peretti, for his part, joined Arianna Huffington, Andrew Breitbart and Kenneth Lerer to start The Huffington Post, which was first conceived as a progressive alternative to The Drudge Report. Fresh out of the M.I.T. Media Lab, Peretti deployed his wizardry in conjuring traffic to drive a hodgepodge website to box-office glory. It was sold to A.O.L. for $315 million in 2011.
Peretti then jumped to full time at the other company he’d helped start, BuzzFeed,just as Smith took over as editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. By the time the Wyoming quiz hit peak virality, Peretti was in close contact with Facebook while Smith, who had come to BuzzFeed from Politico, was brooding about how to attract traffic to political reporting.
The showdown between BuzzFeed and Gawker is best understood as a contest of attitudes. BuzzFeed in its early years was all Disney princesses, cute pets and toxic positivity, while Gawker had put its chips on tabloid-style exposés and spite. Politico recorded a much-discussed war of “snark versus smarm.” And unlike New York literary battles past — Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, anyone? — this one could be decisively won. By the numbers. Gawker would sneer, Buzzfeed would coo and the winner would be the post to attract the most clicks, views, likes, shares, comments and, of course, complaints.
