Did Clickbait Kill Buzzfeed and the Digital Media Era?

Offline with Jon Favreau

Crooked Media

Society & Culture, News

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2023

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ben Smith, Semafor founder and former Editor-in-Chief of Buzzfeed News, joins Offline to discuss what the shuttering of newsrooms at Buzzfeed and Vice means for the future of journalism. Ben’s new book, Traffic, traces the rise and fall of the digital media era. He and Jon talk about the personalities and publications that caused this phenomenon, the value of clickbait, and how the race to go viral was doomed from the start. Then, Jon and Max Fisher reunite to recap their week without iPhones and introduce next week’s Unplug Challenge.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you have a vision of a new internet?
0:02.1	I mean, I just think the internet itself
0:03.6	is clearly sort of falling apart.
0:04.8	Like, I mean, just, I mean, I think
0:06.3	it were in a very, very weird moment
0:07.9	where people are splintering.
0:09.7	I mean, people, I think in reaction
0:11.4	to all the things we're talking about
0:13.1	are not looking for these huge public spaces
0:15.2	or looking for voices they trust.
0:16.8	Often, there's a lot of medium, really successful,
0:20.1	kind of, I would say medium-sized media companies.
0:22.0	This one included some of it podcast,
0:24.3	some of it newsletters, a lot that's going
0:26.1	kind of directly to people who are interested in,
0:29.4	you know, in new information and in sorting
0:31.6	through everything that's out there.
0:33.0	I mean, I think internet is a funny word for it.
0:34.7	Like, I don't not sure it's all happening
0:35.9	on the worldwide web, I think.
0:37.8	Yeah, I think it's a much more splintered landscape
0:40.3	in a way that we're not used to.
	...

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