Reason Speakeasy: Ben Smith on Rise & Fall of Gawker, Buzzfeed, HuffPost

The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas.

This month, Nick Gillespie talks with Ben Smith, the first editor in chief of Buzzfeed News, former New York Times media columnist, and founder of Semafor. In his new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral, Smith charts the rise and fall of Gawker, The Huffington Post, Breitbart, and his old employer Buzzfeed.

All of these sites once dominated news cycles and pulled millions of eyeballs due to unique abilities to shape media narratives in new, surprising, and irresistible ways. For a good part of the past 20 years, it seemed as if they would define the new century while legacy outlets such as The New York Times would be lucky to survive at all in the new, massively online mediascape. Yet the rise of Donald Trump, revenge lawsuits, untimely deaths, and the vagaries of the internet ended up disrupting the disrupters.

Smith will talk about all that, plus his controversial decision to publish the Steele Dossier, and his aims for his new media platform, Semafor.

Ticket includes buffet with beer, wine, soda, and appetizers and snacks—and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in New York City.