May 25, 2023
You've all heard the term "clickbait" before, uttered derisively, and not always deservedly, toward online content designed to prioritize earning a click or view or listen, over everything else, including the truth.
But how did things get this way? What's the history of clickbait?
Ben Smith, one of the founders of a new news venture called Semafor, joined this episode of Plain Talk to talk about it. He's a pioneer of early blogging, a veteran of Politico and the New York Times, and he was the editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, a position from which he made the decision to publish the now-infamous Steele Dossier.
Smith is also the author of a book called 'Traffic: Genius, rivalry, and delusion in the billion-dollar race to go viral.' It's a history book, of sources, spanning roughly the last two decades of internet journalism, from the Drudge Report to the Huffington Post, from Breitbart to Gawker, and how it was all shaped by a relentless drive for traffic. Attention. Clicks.
If you want to buy Ben's book, you can do so here.
If you want to subscribe to Semafor (I do), click here.
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