Ben Smith is that rare creature: a first-rate journalist and a serial entrepreneur. As editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, he labored so hard he himself became known as BuzzFeed Ben. As a columnist for The New York Times, he wrote week after week easily the best stuff about the media world, breaking a few careers along the way. And now as co-founder of Semafor, he is back at a start-up whose ambition is nothing less than to be your indispensable digital guide to what is happening globally every day. (Try Semafor Flagship, its morning rundown, and you might well be hooked.) And now comes his book about the early days of digital news, aptly called Traffic, a smart and highly entertaining chronicle of an era that burned fizzy and bright until the hangovers began. It is pure coincidence that BuzzFeed News was shut down on the eve of Traffic’s publication. Unless, of course, God is Smith’s book publicist …
JIM KELLY: In 1926, H. L. Mencken wrote that “no one in this world … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” That quote kept coming back to me as I read your compelling book, starting with the fake site that promoted something called Forget-Me-Not Panties, a G.P.S.-enabled product that supposedly allowed husbands and fathers to track a woman’s location and body temperature. Plenty of outraged people did not get the joke, showing just how gullible folks can be. Is it fair to draw a line between Forget-Me-Not panties and QAnon, which promotes the belief that the government is run by Satan-worshiping pedophiles, with the difference, of course, being in this case that the gullible gleefully embraced that absurdity?
