Traffic

December 1, 2022

With King, the New York Times best-selling Eig ( Ali), a former senior writer for the Wall Street Journal, draws on recently declassified FBI files to create a bold new study of Martin Luther King Jr. (100,000-copy first printing). Drafted by the FBI as a trilingual counterterrorism researcher, Billy Reilly went to Russia when it first invaded Ukraine's Donbas region and promptly cut off all communication; it was unclear whether the FBI actually sent him, but Reilly's parents asked Wall Street Journal reporter Forrest to find their Lost Son (100,000-copy first printing). AsSlate staff writer Grabar clarifies in Paved Paradise, parking matters; we've distorted our landscape to find cheap and easy ways to store our cars, with much valuable real estate devoted to vehicles sitting empty when space for affordable housing is desperately needed; at least Grabar proposes solutions. Following This Is Not a T-Shirt, a memoir about his clothing brand, Hundreds (aka Bobby Kim) limns his venture into NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), Web3, and the Metaverse in NFTs Are a Scam / NFTs Are the Future (75,000-copy first printing). Former secretary of the Treasury and cochair of Goldman Sachs, Rubin draws on six decades' worth of experience in business and politics to explain how to make smart decisions in an uncertain world; it all begins with sketching out the possibilities on a simple Yellow Pad (or now an iPad). In Traffic, former BuzzFeed editor in chief Smith shows how Nick Denton's Gawker and Jonah Peretti's HuffPost and BuzzFeed fatefully duked it out for control of internet media in the early 2000s, arguing that the unintended consequence was a rightward shift in the internet's orientation. Windham-Campbell Award-winning South African writer Steinberg shows how the marriage of Winnie and Nelson Mandela reflects the course of South African history and tensions within the antiapartheid movement, as Winnie moved toward supporting armed insurrection while Nelson was jailed.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 23, 2023
Smith, former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News and New York Times media columnist, debuts with a riveting insider’s look at the history of online news media. He chronicles the rise in the early 2000s of online outlets that measured success by the amount of traffic individual articles generated, starting with Gawker’s decision in 2003 to start selling advertising space. The incentive to publish salacious content to attract clicks eventually led to the site’s shuttering in 2016, however, when wrestler Hulk Hogan won a lawsuit against Gawker for publishing his sex tape. Positing that there was always a darker side to the quest for clicks, Smith details how Andrew Breitbart applied what he learned as a junior partner at the Huffington Post to his extremist right-wing news outlet, Breitbart. Smith is critical of online media’s obsession with breaking news first, and he offers a candid reflection on his decision while at BuzzFeed News to publish the Steele dossier, conceding he should have anticipated it would be republished without the caveats BuzzFeed included. Smith’s rigorous journalism and proximity to his subject imbue this with abounding insight, and the author’s sharp eye for character gives it the feel of a novel. Sobering and captivating, this is an essential take on the 21st-century media landscape.

Starred review from April 1, 2023
The founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News recounts life in the tech-startup trenches. Jonah Peretti, co-founder of BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, began his media career on a fluke note, engaging in what used to be called "culture jamming" with Nike, goofing on its labor practices by requesting a bespoke pair of shoes emblazoned with the word sweatshop. In 2001, he ignited what became one of the first instances of something going viral on the internet. That culture jamming of two decades ago would become the flame-war-scorched social media of today. So it was with the man who would become Peretti's "nemesis, his archrival, and his polar opposite," British immigrant Nick Denton, who obsessively gathered page views that could in turn be monetized in ad sales, yielding the Gawker website. By Smith's account, although Denton was more businesslike, he was also wedded to click-bait gossip, if sometimes with a social purpose: "The Gawker scoop of his dreams had always been to out a gay, Christian Republican senator, and thus reveal right-wing hypocrisy in its most naked form." Alas, he ran up against right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel instead, "a schemer who believed in revenge served cold," who took years and spent a fortune to lay Gawker to waste. 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. His discussion of the Huffington Post is especially telling as a study in haplessness. Along the way, he tells entertaining out-of-school tales of the early Facebook, the Drudge Report, Breitbart, and Twitter. Self-aware and self-critical, Smith allows that while all these entities helped create today's digital culture, it was often not for the better, even if Denton today voices hope for "a Talmudic internet still to be made." There's no better history of the Wild West days of early social media than this one.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.