From Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth pg 281
While the new-media pioneers at BuzzFeed and Upworthy produced LOLs and cultivated trumped-up umbrage over the killing of poor Cecil, a second guard of new-media publishers set out to capture the loyalty of another psychographic swath of America whose disaffection far surpassed mere boredom. The new wave would employ the methods BuzzFeed had pioneered, but used partisan anger as their way of hot-wiring readers’ emotional responses.
From pg 283:
Breitbart, meanwhile, fixated on a more violent and direct overthrow of the mainstream media, a coup d’état more than a reformation. His aspirations were colored by the chip on his shoulder, and his approach was adversarial. “The idea,” 39 he told Wired , “is that I have to screw with media, and I have to screw with the Left, in order to give legitimate stories the ability to reach their natural watermark.” It was a lucrative idea. “When the entire media is structured to attack conservatives and Republicans, there is a huge business model to come in and counterbalance that.”
Mark Carrigan 