In 2023, Buzzfeed and Vice announced that they were shutting down the news sections of their websites. In its short life, Buzzfeed news made the Steele Dossier available and its reporting on the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang received a Pulitzer Prize. At one point upstart social media news companies like Buzzfeed seemed poised to devour the New York Times, now the clear winner of the web news wars. How and why did Buzzfeed (and others, such as the Huffington Post) rise so spectacularly and recede with little notice? This is the story Ben Smith tells in Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.
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