Ben Smith: How clicks, likes and shares ruined digital news

Journalist Ben Smith tells the story of how digital media organisations became addicted to "going viral" in his new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. He was founding editor-in-chief of recently deceased digital news site BuzzFeed News, which along with HuffPost, Breitbart and Gawker Media represented a new world of online media in the early 2000s. His book tells the inside story of how rivals Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed. and Nick Denton of Gawker Media started the race for virality blamed for the rise of disinformation. Ben Smith is the Editor in Chief of Semafor, a new global news company and a former media columnist for The New York Times.