Viral success flattened the distinction between trivia and serious journalism

Evidence

BuzzFeed won the internet for a day with “the Dress,” an optical illusion that sparked debate over its colors: Was it blue and black or white and gold? There was no additional depth to the story, yet as former BuzzFeed News editor in chief Ben Smith recalled, “The Dress was an unmitigated triumph for BuzzFeed and for Jonah. The kind of social content he’d hoped would define us.” A year later, BuzzFeed again captured the zeitgeist by live-streaming two employees placing rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded. BuzzFeed’s last major viral moment came in 2017 with the News team’s release of the Steele dossier, filled with unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia. Smith recalled, “I loved the traffic…. My news operation, always jealously eyeing the clicks that came from silly lists and quizzes, finally had its version of the Dress.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 518

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The Dress-vs-Steele dossier equivalence is vivid evidence of the flat taste-collapse supporting the omnivore monoculture claim.
• CANDY: The watermelon rubber-band live stream is a fun, self-contained fact for cocktail conversation about internet culture.