Ben Smith writes a first draft of the history of online media.

Andrew Sullivan

May 5, 2023

When an entirely new, revolutionary technology came along and transformed the very meaning of the word “media,” it was always going to be interesting to watch how journalism would adapt.

I dimly recall a staff meeting at The New Republic in the early 1990s when the publisher (not Marty) gave a little speech about what was about to hit. How would we respond to the Internet? What was the future for a weekly, long-form, high/low-brow print magazine, mailed out to over 100,000 subscribers? As was my wont, I offered a grimly counter-intuitive view: if this new media is real, and as you describe it, then the answer is none. Reading, as we understand it, will disappear. At some point, media will probably just be images and videos passed back and forth with some bare words attached — and our ability to get tens of thousands of people to sit down each week, concentrate and absorb pages of gray print, will evaporate into thin air.

I’m not saying I was laughed at — we were all making wild guesses and, as usual, I picked the most catastrophic one — but what followed was a series of huffs and puffs. How could magazines — the central, long-form forum for our national debate, the form around which all of our careers had been shaped — be doomed? Unimaginable.

Until it almost happened. (We are all TikTokers now — with some Substack thrown in for the serious-minded.) I say “almost” because magazines still exist as they once did, kind of. The endless, erudite book reviews of the old TNR can now be found in an often excellent quarterly journal Leon Wieseltier now edits, but with just a tiny fraction of its former readership, and an even tinier fraction of its former influence.

Or think of another legendary American magazine, The Atlantic, once famous for its monthly selection of what needed to be read — idiosyncratic, somewhat aloof from its readers, indifferent to advertisers, subsidized by some plutocrat, convening the discussions among the elite. It too still exists in the old-form — and even has covers designed by Bono! But it’s a sideshow to an online content factory, churning out thousands of pieces a month, hour by hour, day by day. A magazine was once defined as much by what it didn’t publish as by what it did — in the zero-sum game of a limited number of physical pages attached by staplers. Now it simply publishes as much as it can.

Ben Smith’s new book, Traffic, is billed as a first draft of this media history. Here’s how Kirkus boils it down: “The author gives a detailed, smart account of the foibles of those early days, when no one knew how to conduct decent journalism and make money at the same time.” In fact, the book is entirely focused on the fateful attempt to turn online journalism into a quick cash-cow, fueled by virality. So it’s the story of Gawker’s Nick Denton and Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti.

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