Take BuzzFeed’s most triumphant moment—the Dress, a photo of a striped frock whose color was debatable. Hundreds of millions viewed the post—at one point BuzzFeed’s servers handled 700,000 people simultaneously pondering the fabled schmatta. Smith describes it as “an unmitigated triumph.” Well, maybe not so unmitigated. He also reports that Facebook’s Adam Mosseri (then in charge of the News Feed) later told Peretti that the phenomenon troubled him. “To [Facebook] the Dress hadn’t been a goofy triumph: It had been kind of a bug, something that scared them,” Smith writes, because the company couldn’t control the repercussions. Ultimately, Facebook made algorithmic adjustments that blew up BuzzFeed’s business model. 

Live by the dashboard, die by the dashboard.

Given the cautionary nature of Smith’s tale, it’s surprising that he left The New York Times (an unexpected winner in Smith’s story that figured out how to build its revenues by subscriptions and crossword puzzles) to cofound a news startup. But, rosy goggles back in place, he insists that Semafor can negotiate a post-viral news industry by controlling costs and growing methodically. Its newsletter-style distribution makes it less dependent of platforms, he says, and it’s started a thriving events business. Smith also claims that disenchantment with Facebook and Twitter has led to a resurgence of people visiting news site homepages. If he’s lucky, Smith won’t find himself the subject of some future book with the word delusion in the subtitle.

I wrote about Nick Denton and his blog empire in June 2004, getting a firsthand look at the way he launched the various components of what would be known as the Gawker network. Sharp-eyed readers will find a prescient quote from my former Newsweek colleague Mickey Kaus, who said that a potential libel suit was Gawker’s Achilles’ heel. Here’s a glimpse of the origin story of Wonkette, a political gossip blog that burned hot and later burned out.

Denton's next blog was a Capital-ized version of Gawker that hinged on finding a writer who took to political gossip as wittily as Spiers had taken on New York. The solution was Ana Marie Cox, an acid-tongued redhead from Nebraska. She had worked for Suck before moving east with her husband. At The Chronicle of Higher Education, "I wasn't a good fit." And she was fired after six weeks at The American Prospect for, among other things, "not being civil to colleagues." She was working as "a content monkey" for AOL when Denton appeared in an instant message last October, wooing her to do the Gawker thing in DC. Denton, who is very hands-on in the early days of a new blog, described the project in his instant message: