A LARGER AUDIENCE WAS CLEARLY within reach. That was the lesson that journalism was absorbing. We could even reduce the lesson to a mathematical equation. Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed and the William Randolph Hearst of our era, has expressed it this way: R = ζ.* The formula supposedly illustrates how a piece of editorial content could go viral—how it could travel through the social networks to quickly reach a massive audience, as rapidly as smallpox ripped its way across North America. Peretti’s formula, in fact, came from epidemiology. The nod to science was intentional. With
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