Afrigather Semafor founder Ben Smith’s ebook Visitors: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion within the Billion-Greenback Race to Go Viral, is ready to get the docuseries remedy.
Atlas Media Corp., the non-fiction manufacturing firm, has optioned the ebook for a docuseries.
Visitors chronicles the rise and heyday of digital media corporations like BuzzFeed and Gawker Media.
However Smith seems to be on the digital media manufacturers via the lens of the individuals who based them, particularly Gawker’s Nick Denton and HuffPost and BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti. That concentrate on ego and competitors between founders craving, effectively, site visitors, would naturally lend itself to the personality-driven docuseries remedy.
Smith, after all, sat on the center of that period. Smith wrote for Politico earlier than turning into the primary editor-in-chief for BuzzFeed, constructing out its information operation. he would go on to write down the media column for The New York Instances earlier than founding Semafor final yr.
Now, after all, lots of the digital media giants of the mid-aughts are in shambles. BuzzFeed, which as soon as raised cash at a $1.7 billion valuation (Peretti additionally turned down a $650 million acquisition supply by Disney), now trades at a market cap of $43 million, and is susceptible to being delisted from the Nasdaq. BuzzFeed Information was shut down, with the corporate’ information division transferring to HuffPost, which was acquired by BuzzFeed in 2021.
Gawker Media filed for chapter after Hulk Hogan’s notorious lawsuit (financed by Peter Thiel), and the present proprietor of what’s left of its property simply this week stated that it was shutting down the Jezebel model.
And Vice Media, which was as soon as valued at $5.7 billion, filed for bankruptcy earlier this yr.
The site visitors, it seems, was fleeting, which is why Smith’s new enterprise Semafor takes a extra centered method, constructed round focused newsletters and live events.
Atlas Media has produced documentary movies, docuseries and different non-fiction content material for the likes of HBO, Netflix the Warner Bros. Discovery networks and others. Their movies have included Meat Loaf: In Search of Paradise, and sequence have included Dr. G: Medical Examiner.
