Tag: Ben Smith

Mulling The Nick Denton App Mentioned in Ben Smith’s ‘Traffic’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, Nick Denton is tinkering with some sort of social media platform that would incorporate private text chains, according to Ben Smith’s book “Traffic.” I find myself thinking about how you would pull such a thing off. I think it boils down to privacy settings.

What you do is, you set the default of the network to private and only if everyone on the private text chain agrees, do you change the setting of whatever content you want to share to the broader service. Otherwise, the interface would be like a fusion of a texting app and Twitter.

I think that would be a pretty cool app.

Too bad all the money of VCs is going to AI. Oh well. What could have been.

A Brief Review of Ben Smith’s ‘Traffic’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The media book “Traffic” from Ben Smith is really good. I highly recommend it if you’re a media nerd like me. There was a minimum amount of eye-rolling on my part and maybe a little too much skipping on some chapters that I already had a very concrete opinion on.

One thing I did enjoy was the talk about Gawker founder Nick Denton (who has blocked me on Twitter because of my Gawker obsession.) It is very interesting that Smith skipped over some notable things in Gawker history — like when Denton published a gruesome picture of a guy with pruning sheers through his face on the blog’s front page without warning.

Anyway, it’s a good book. It’s very well written.

‘A Snarky Morning Zoo Podcast Devoted To NYC Media’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing I’ve noticed about a lot — A LOT — of podcasts is how somnambulistic they can be. It’s just two or more people talking in a very languid way that makes you want to go to sleep.

This is a really good book by Ben Smith.

So, my vision for a Gawker-like podcast (which you are free to steal!) would be something like this — you live stream a two hour podcast three times a week (if not more) then edit it down to an hour for the rest of the day for non-live listeners.

I would want the podcast to be snarky, fun and energetic. It would be a bunch of (hot?) young people talking about Emma Chamberlain, Julia Fox and the Dune 2 popcorn bucket that everyone wants to fuck. You know, the type of bullshit Gawker was ranting about in 2003-2004.

The key could be who your hosts — and guests — were. I would grab some hip, just-out-of-college neo-club kids and with great personalities and throw them together into the Thunderdome. I would try to have at least one more “conservative” person on a panel of three to mix things up. But they couldn’t be a knuckle dragging MAGA person, but someone who thinks SNL is too woke or something.

But it would have to be genuine and not forced. And that would be the hardest part of the whole thing — how to get the spark of people who had actual witty banter on the fly and who knew the zeitgeist well. In that respect, I guess you might need to find some young stand up to be one of your three?

The first guest for this podcast would need to be someone like Sarah Squirm of SNL. She would be the perfect person to establish what the podcast was going to be about.

We Need A New Gawker

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Reading Ben Smith’s book “Traffic” has really riled me up on a daydreaming basis. It seems like with the rise of Xinnals that the time is ripe for a online publication that would follow in the footsteps of the 80s Spy Magazine and the early aughts Gawker.

Something snarky that would take the “cool kids” of media, culture and entertainment down a notch every once in a while.

And, yet, there are a lot — A LOT — of problems with this idea.

One is, lulz, something like a Gawker is quaint and moot in the age of AI. We may all be talking to our Digital Personal Assistant in the metaverse using our Apple Vision Pros and the whole idea of “reading” will be cast aside like cursive.

So, I think this is it. We’re never going to get punk back. We’re never going to have another a late night TV talkshow host who is like a young David Letterman and we’re never going to have another Spy or Gawker.


The economics just aren’t there.

I can tell you one thing, though, if I had the means to at least attempt a startup that was meant to follow in the footsteps of Spy and Gawker, I would do it. But it wouldn’t be as much fun as Nick Denton back in the day, though, cause I would be 20 years older — or more — doing it.

I hate being old.