BuzzFeed News, the behemoth of yesteryear’s viral reporting and the entity that published the infamous Steele Dossier on Donald Trump, announced it’s shutting down for good.
On Monday, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, their top-rated host. Within an hour, Don Lemon announced he was retiring from CNN, where he had worked for 17 years.
Vice News, another struggling digital news pioneer of the 21st century, on Thursday became the latest media company to lay off some of its best-known reporters.
These are all isolated events with specific circumstances for each newsroom. But in an excellent new book called “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral,” Ben Smith argues that we are indeed at the end of a media age, but that what’s next might be something to look forward to. to watch.
That’s a powerful prediction from Ben, who was a longtime reporter for POLITICO, the top editor at BuzzFeed News, a New York Times media columnist and now editor-in-chief of Semafor. He is also this week’s Playbook Deep Dive guest.
Ben’s book and this interview with Deep Dive host and Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza do their best to answer the questions we all have about why our political culture is so fragmented, and whether there is any hope that we can return to a place where Americans agree on simple things, like facts.