News industry revolution that over the last decade that reshaped our world.

Merchant of Truth breaks the ultimate news story of our times.

What happens when Jill Abramson was fired from the executive editorship of The New York Times in May 2014, she thought she had enough freedom to figure out what she wanted to do. And wanted to start a long-form journalism site which failed.

Instead she used her freedom to report what the new media are doing to the society and produced a masterwork.

She wanted to trace how journalism developed through close focus on handful of media companies. But merchants of truth with vast appetite for social and political detail with sharper judge of the companies and their creators and what new digital kids such as Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti do, in a fit of absence of ethics, with the new business injecting data science of virality into it.

Reporters with the like of customers measured by the data smart kid entrepreneurs –Peretti and Shane Smith, main creator of Vice Media.

 

Their customers are serviced by the algorithms developed to discover their tastes till they are led to want things they are conscious of wanting. The content produced is simple on “whither hungary type analyses but loves lists such as “10 ways to Improve Your Day”. Their rise was accidental.Peretti saw an exchange he initiated with Nike over the use of sweatshops go viral and inspired by the possibilities of internet, progressed through co-founding the Huffington Post to the creation of BuzzFeed.

Abramson describes the site “driven by the values of advertising and technology for the purpose of spreading buzzy titbits, it later , through the hiring of Ben Smith , build a news division –which ate rather than made money but which has memorable scoops as presently contested but hotely defended report that Trump directed Michael Cohen, his then lawyer to lie to Congress.

Shane Smith was a Canadian dropout who described his youth as one where he would get “wasted , get into fights and screw and smash things”, with others he started a magazine called Voice of Montreal with stories such as “Was Jesus a Fag”. After a name change and several large investments from people who saw laddish anarchism as being part of a generational Zeitgeist, Vice became an empire of mainly video based publishing, making short films, ads, together with news that had veered from straight to ridiculous, but also insightful.

 

Abramson’s mainstream news media are neither profitable nor have political power that Halberstam’s four CBS, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and Time Magazine. Her two newspapers The `New `york Times and The Washington Post descended into a near crisis in the 2000s: The Times survived with an investment of $250m from Carlos slim, The Mexican from time to time the world’s richest man. The Post in deeper trouble was bought in 2013 by WRM ( Jeff Bezos, creator and boss of Amazon).

 

Merchants of Truth: Inside the News Revolution by Jill Abramson Simon & Schuster $30/Bodley Head £25, 544 pages.