Merchants of Truth

The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

Jill Abramson

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501123221
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Industria dei media e delle comunicazioni

Former executive editor of The New York Times and one of our most eminent journalists Jill Abramson provides a "valuable and insightful" ( The Boston Globe ) report on the disruption of the news media over the last decade, as shown via two legacy ( The New York Times and The Washington Post ) and two upstart ( BuzzFeed and VICE ) companies as they plow through a revolution that pits old vs. new media. "A marvelous book" ( The New York Times Book Review ), Merchants of Truth is the groundbreaking and gripping story of the precarious state of the news business.The new digital reality nearly kills two venerable newspapers with an aging readership while creating two media behemoths with a ballooning and fickle audience of millennials. "Abramson provides this deeply reported insider account of an industry fighting for survival. With a keen eye for detail and a willingness to interrogate her own profession, Abramson takes readers into the newsrooms and boardrooms of the legacy newspapers and the digital upstarts that seek to challenge their dominance" ( Vanity Fair ). We get to know the defenders of the legacy presses as well as the outsized characters who are creating the new speed-driven media competitors. The players include Jeff Bezos and Marty Baron ( The Washington Post ), Arthur Sulzberger and Dean Baquet ( The New York Times ), Jonah Peretti ( BuzzFeed ), and Shane Smith ( VICE ) as well as their reporters and anxious readers. Merchants of Truth raises crucial questions that concern the well-being of our society. We are facing a crisis in trust that threatens the free press. "One of the best takes yet on journalism's changing fortunes" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review), Abramson's book points us to the future.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

BUZZFEED I

Jonah Peretti, who would upend the news business by injecting the data science of virality into it, was born into a world in which people still knew how to fold a newspaper, and grew up just a short distance from the garage where two guys named Steve were tinkering with what became the first Apple computer. His mother and father, a schoolteacher and lawyer in Oakland, California, were perplexed by a child who loved to talk to the life-size monsters he molded out of clay. His creations were so fantastical and compelling that a local art gallery put them on display. But he couldn’t make sense of books.

His younger sister, Chelsea, who went on to establish herself as a successful actress and stand-up comic, remembers her rail-thin brother as relentlessly chatty and precocious. Their parents divorced when he was six. As they grew up, the siblings had their own private world. But for Jonah each day of elementary school was what he later described as seven hours of punishment that left him feeling “invisible and insignificant.” He spent class time confounded, “alone in a room full of strange children who pass the time transfixed by incomprehensible symbols,” he once wrote. He shrank from his teachers and spent recess hiding in a bathroom stall, crying. When he entered third grade and still couldn’t read, his mother took him to a psychologist and received the verdict she had long suspected: her son was dyslexic.

Peretti’s stepmother and father took consolation in the possibility that their son’s brain was no less capable, just wired differently. In art class, while the other kids produced banal little pots, teachers marveled at the anatomical complexity of the sculptures the practically illiterate boy had concocted. “The goal of cognition was not to be right, but to make something interesting, provocative, and original,” he wrote. “When I played the game of right and wrong at school, I always lost. But when I built something evocative in the studio, adults would stare in wonder and admiration.”

Eventually he did learn to read, and at that point he gave up clay but never lost his interest in the connection between art and technology. In high school he became fascinated by philosophy and economics. Computing came to him intuitively. His mother’s friend let him play around on an early-model Macintosh, and Peretti became transfixed. “I loved it because you could create with it,” he recalled. He struck a deal with his parents to do extra yard work for a modest stipend and used the money to buy a Mac of his own from a secondhand store.

During his high school summers, he taught at day camps and fixed computers to earn some money. He supplemented screen time with a self-guided tour of the philosophical canon, rode his bike, and established a small community garden near home. His sister recalls these years as his “crunchy period.”

Peretti finished high school in 1992 and matriculated at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he balanced his major in environmental studies with Foucault, Barthes, Marx, JavaScript, and HTML. His senior thesis, published in the British quarterly Environmental Values, was on an emerging environmental doctrine called mixoecology.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with little clue of what he wanted to do next. He looked at a couple of tech start-ups in the area but found cubicle culture off-putting. For the time being, he decided to follow in his mother’s footsteps and become a teacher. He filled out an application form and took it to the teacher placement service, telling them, “I’ll go anywhere.” They sent him to the Isidore Newman School, an exclusive private institution in uptown New Orleans dually distinguished by its brainy student body and storied football program, whose alumni included the writers Walter Isaacson and Michael Lewis, and the football legends Peyton and Eli Manning.

He taught four different classes, from kindergarteners to seniors, in addition to directing the computer department, where he had 15 teachers working under him, none of whom were too pleased to be answering to a man half their age, and who looked it. His rangy frame still hadn’t filled out. (It never would.) He decided to wear a tie.

As an entry-level teacher, he was earning just $24,000 a year, but the challenge of making the abstrusely technical field of computer science accessible to children proved satisfying. He taught students what probability was and how to gauge it, what constituted randomness as opposed to order. His students designed their own websites, learned to write programs that generated petitions to politicians, and supplemented their study of history with virtual role-playing. His classroom became a sort of R&D lab for him to test how these young minds grappled with high-flying concepts and processes and how to adapt them to real life. Sometimes he tailored his lessons to the special needs of a dyslexic sixth-grader, whom the principal had written off as a problem child. After a year with Mr. Peretti, the child might have developed an original version of Myst, the famous computer game.

Louisiana culture was a far cry from the liberal enclave he had grown up in. The funky pair of John Fluevog wingtips he wore and the indie songwriters he listened to stuck out against the backdrop of New Orleans jazz and pickup trucks. Peretti’s quirks attracted the brainier students, who signed up for the electives he taught on communist philosophers and postmodernism. He led one such class on a field trip to New York City, where three particularly admiring students went to Greenwich Village to buy Fluevogs to match his. One of them, Peggy Wang, would stay in touch with her teacher and become one of his first employees at BuzzFeed.

At night Peretti would reconvene with the philosophers he’d read in college and write erudite papers for little-known academic journals. One from his first year in New Orleans, titled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” lamented the disorienting effects wrought by the torrent of commercial images on the internet and TV, a trend that in 1996 was in its mere adolescence. Much later the topic was fodder for myriad books and studies about how the web was shortening people’s attention span.

“The increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities,” he wrote. “The viewing subject, ‘glued’ to the screen, mistakes himself or herself for an ideologically laden ‘image-repertoire’ ” in which “the images must have some content to create the possibility for a mirror stage identification.” The essay read like the last gasp of an idealist in the jaws of the capitalist machine. Ironic, then, that within a decade the author would build a billion-dollar company catering to the world’s largest brands by preying on these very same vulnerabilities in consumers’ collective subconscious. Years later, when a reporter found the paper and asked Peretti whether BuzzFeed subverted or capitalized upon the phenomena he once critiqued, he replied “lol.”

On the weekends he would travel to academic symposia to discuss the digital future. At one conference on social networking, held around the turn of the millennium, he met a Cornell graduate student named Duncan Watts, who was working out the math behind the six degrees of separation and investigating how chirps spread from cricket to cricket. The result was the Watts-Strogatz theorem, which describes the traits that characterize a “small world” network, one where, through a few short hops, you can get from one node to any other node. In college Peretti had been fascinated by the question of how things could catch on and spread from person to person, but until now he had not dared to believe there could be a scientific principle that explained it, let alone a means of replicating contagious phenomena in the lab.

In 2001, after five years in New Orleans, Peretti applied to study at the MIT Media Lab, where he could dedicate himself full time to his obsession with tech-powered creativity. The lab was founded and headed by Nicholas Negroponte, a digital optimist whose book Being Digital forecast a better, interconnected world. Peretti’s time at the Media Lab felt like the recess he had never been able to enjoy as a child. He described MIT as his playground, where “my goal is the same as everyone else’s: to build something interesting.” There he met Cameron Marlow, who became the head of data science at Facebook, then a Ph.D. candidate doing dissertation research on “media contagion.” Marlow’s conclusion contradicted Watts’s theory. He argued that viral content was impossible to engineer, replicate, or predict. But Peretti would soon prove him wrong.

• • •

In a sense, BuzzFeed was born as a prank. For an online promotion, Nike launched a website where shoppers could personalize their shoes by selecting the color patterns and appending a nickname or chosen phrase. The 27-year-old Peretti submitted his design for a pair of shoes emblazoned with the word “sweatshop,” an obvious reference to Nike’s reputation for manufacturing its products overseas with cheap labor. An email came from Nike informing him this constituted “inappropriate slang.” The real reason for the rejection, Peretti knew, was that Nike was defensive about its sweatshops.

“After consulting Webster’s Dictionary,” Peretti emailed back, “I discovered that ‘sweatshop’ is in fact part of standard English, and not slang. . . . Your web site advertises that the NIKEiD program is ‘about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are.’ I share Nike’s love of freedom and personal expression. The site also says that ‘If you want it done right . . . build it yourself.’ I was thrilled to be able to build my own shoes, and my personal iD was offered as a small token of appreciation for the sweatshop workers poised to help me realize my vision.” The exchange continued, with the Nike representative standing staunchly behind the rejection, and Peretti increasing his sarcasm. “I would like to make one small request. Could you please send me a color snapshot of the 10-year-old Vietnamese girl who makes my shoes?” He got no response.

He forwarded the email chain to a group of friends, who found it amusing enough to forward to some friends of their own, and before he knew it, a large online community was buzzing about the Nike Sweatshop Emails. Peretti had started a chain reaction organically and had seen it grow to reach millions of people, on all seven continents. He was getting calls from reporters morning, noon, and night. Katie Couric invited him onto the Today show to debate labor rights with Nike’s head of PR. Sitting in front of the cameras, Peretti wondered, “Why am I here instead of people who’ve dedicated their lives fighting for human rights?”

He described how what had started as a laugh among a circle of friends “began racing around the world like a virus.” As he watched all this play out, it struck him that the email chain behaved according to a framework he recognized from his college biology courses. “Without really trying,” he wrote, “I had released what biologist Richard Dawkins calls a meme. Dawkins describes the meme as a ‘unit of cultural transmission,’ such as ‘tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, fashions,’ ” that caught on with the public. “The most important thing about memes,” Peretti added, “is that they replicate themselves, ‘spreading from brain to brain.’ ” Peretti’s meme exhibited the very same phenomenon as the cricket chirps that had so captivated him about Watts’s work.

Back in the Media Lab, he pondered the circumstances of his celebrity ascent with his friend Marlow, who still thought it was impossible to do twice. He challenged Peretti to go viral again, and, with hardly a lull, he did. With his sister, Peretti dreamed up something he called “the rejection line,” a phone number for people to give out to unwanted suitors. When the number was called, an answering machine played the following message: “The person who gave you this number does not want to talk to you or see you again. We would like to take this opportunity to officially reject you.” The hotline quickly became inundated with callers taking up all eight of its lines while overflow callers waited to get on, day after day. The project earned Peretti more acclaim. One write-up heralded him as “the poster boy of guerrilla media.”

Within a year he would strike a third time, teaming up with his sister to create a parody website called Blackpeopleloveus.com that poked fun at white people’s affected claims of racial sensitivity. He had all but officially disproved Marlow’s theories. The buzz from the Nike emails had died off after six months, Rejection Line after three, Blackpeopleloveus after one month. Although his viral triumphs now had shorter lifespans, he was figuring out virality and, to Peretti, this signaled something about the direction online media was going. “The networks and the ability to share kept getting more and more tightly connected so that media would spread faster,” he observed. As the metabolism of internet audiences quickened, its appetite for content was growing. Peretti would adapt.

He created a new term for his experiments: “contagious media.” In a 23-point manifesto, he described its theses. “For the contagious media designer, all that matters is how other people see the work,” he wrote. “The audience is the network and the critic.” To be successful, “a contagious media project should represent the simplest form of an idea” and “must be explainable in one sentence or less.” For example, “a phone line for rejecting unwanted suitors” or “a technique to make bonsai kittens.”

Simplifying the content and ceding control of the distribution to the audience were the touchstones of Peretti’s contagious discovery. This line of work, he realized, did not require particular brilliance or originality. Rather it demanded above all a receptiveness to the whims and weaknesses of the masses. The internet was a burgeoning lifeline for people who otherwise lacked sufficient distractions from their daily toil. It was the perfect moment, Peretti determined, to introduce the opiate they longed for.

That contagious media appeared trivial and innocuous made it all the more catchy; like the ice-cream-truck melody, it worked by worming its way into your head. But Peretti knew full well that this was more than just a passing fad. Long before others were willing to admit it, he grasped the political dimension of this new form. When asked by the host of a CNN talk show whether his viral hits made him any money, he told her, “It is just sort of an experiment in democratic media.”

He knew his projects relied on an audience he characterized as the Bored at Work Network, which had arisen as “a by-product of alienated labor” and had already become, by his estimation, “the largest alternative to the corporate media,” with enough manpower for “building world class encyclopedias . . . vanquishing political leaders . . . finding life on other planets and curing cancer.” Their influence was vast—he appreciated this as much as anyone—but their ranks were decentralized and the network as a whole lacked discernible leadership. None of the mainstream outlets appeared to serve their interests or even grasp them, as far as Peretti could tell. And that vacuum provided opportunity.

During graduate school at the Media Lab, Peretti began working for Eyebeam, a tech lab, and moved in 2001 to New York City. He was thrilled to be working with a team of forward-thinking web developers and network scientists who tinkered away at futuristic-seeming inventions. The consortium was founded by John Johnson, whose great-grandfather had founded Johnson & Johnson and whose father, a bronze sculptor, had established an atelier where sculptors could study and produce works far bigger than most personal studios would have allowed. Eyebeam was the younger Johnson’s atelier, dedicated to the tools and technologies that would enable a new era of artistic production.

The team of creators were idealists who made their experiments open-sourced and free for other coders. “We were sort of activists, artists, hackers,” Peretti recalled. At Eyebeam, Johnson saw promise in the young techno-whiz. He invited Peretti to his gadget-filled Soho penthouse, where they had rousing brainstorm sessions while tinkering with Johnson’s high-tech gadgets and taking in the view of downtown Manhattan. The Eyebeam job came with a small stipend, which Peretti spent on treating his comrades to cheap meals. He called his clique of like-minded digital wonks the Pizza, Beer and Innovation Consortium. One member was Ze Frank, who early on saw the potential for connecting with digital audiences and would later take charge of BuzzFeed’s video and movie arm in Hollywood.

The online networks then in existence—MySpace, Friendster, and other now-extinct domains—would, within a few years, be glorified guinea pigs for the giants yet to launch. In 2003 Johnson hosted the Social Network Soiree, a glamorous evening that began with a panel featuring Peretti and Malcolm Gladwell, followed by a party sponsored by Moët Champagne. Guests were affixed with “meme tags,” bugging devices that collected and analyzed the content of their small talk. Piggybacking on this, Johnson rolled out a ...