If you’re curious to know what it was like to work at BuzzFeed News in the salad days of the mid-2010s, here is a representative anecdote: I was sitting in my desk one morning, dreadfully hungover and editing a story titled “The Definitive Oral History of the Wikipedia Photo for ‘Grinding,’” when the sounds of a screaming man broke my trance. I looked up to see Tracy Morgan three feet away, surrounded by a small entourage of handlers.

Morgan was barreling through the office, lifting his shirt up, smacking his belly, and cracking jokes about how pale all of us internet writers looked. I remember our lone investigative reporter, Alex Campbell, scurrying away from his desk a row away from mine to continue his reporting call in silence. A few months later, the story he’d been working on would help free an innocent woman from prison. Morgan’s chattering faded, and the newsroom returned to its ambient humming of frenetic keyboard clacking—the sound of the internet being made. Hardly anyone had batted an eye.

I worked at BuzzFeed News for nearly six years—from March 2013 until January 2019. For most of that time, it felt a bit like standing in the eye of the hurricane that is the internet. Glorious chaos was everywhere around you, yet it felt like the perfect vantage to observe the commercial web grow up. I don’t mean to sound self-aggrandizing, but it is legitimately hard to capture the cultural relevance of BuzzFeed to the media landscape of the mid-2010s, and the excitement and centrality of the organization’s approach to news. There was “The Dress,” a bit of internet ephemera that went so viral, we joked that that day might have been the last good one on the internet. There was the Facebook Live experiment in which two bored staffers got 800,000 people to concurrently watch them put rubber bands on a watermelon until it exploded—a piece of content that will live in “pivot to video” infamy.

And for an offshoot of a place (somewhat unfairly known) as a listicle and cat-video factory, BuzzFeed News had an outsize political influence. It published a Donald Trump profile so scathing that it very well may have goaded him into running for president. We got Barack Obama to use a selfie stick and also published the Steele Dossier. Once, I got assigned to follow exotic dancers around at a predawn chicken-wing-eating contest. During Trump’s first press conference as president-elect, I stood next to our editor in chief and watched the soon-to-be leader of the free world single us out as a “failing pile of garbage.” Within an hour, we were selling shirts plastered with the phrase. BuzzFeed News contained multitudes.

I ran into Ben Smith's office to make calls. I couldn't hear a damn thing. Nemtsov's friends were crying to me over the phone about his brutal murder. Everyone else in the office was chanting, "DRESS! DRESS! DRESS!"

— max seddon (@maxseddon) April 20, 2023

One can attribute the site’s cultural relevance, the industry enthusiasm around the work, and even the rivalries and haters, to BuzzFeed News’s unofficial mission: to report on the internet like it was a real place, and to tell stories in the honest, casual tone of the web. At the time I joined, this was, if not a new kind of journalism, certainly an updated model for seeking out stories—one that’s now been fully absorbed by the mainstream. At its simplest, it might have meant mining a viral tweet or Reddit thread for ideas, but more often than not, it meant bearing witness to the joy, chaos, and horrors that would pour across our timelines every day and using them as a starting point for real reporting. It meant realizing, as I and my colleagues did, during the on- and offline manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, that a new culture of internet vigilantism was beginning to take hold in digital communities and that the media no longer unilaterally shaped broad news narratives.

Reporting on the internet like it was a real place led some of my colleagues to peer around corners of our politics and culture. In 2015, Joseph Bernstein outlined the way that “various reactionary forces have coalesced into a larger, coherent counterculture”—a phenomenon bubbling up in message boards such as 4chan that he called a “Chanterculture.” To read the piece now is to see the following half decade—reactionary MAGA politics, Trump’s troll armies, our current digital culture warring—laid out plainly. The Chanterculture story is a BuzzFeed News archetype: Movements like this weren’t hard to see if you were spending time in these communities and taking the people in them seriously. Most news organizations, however, weren’t doing that.

People afflicted with Business School Brain who didn’t understand BuzzFeed News (including one of the company’s lead investors) often described it like a tech start-up. This was true only in the sense that the company had an amazing, dynamic publishing platform—a content-management system that updated almost daily with new features based on writer input. But the secret behind BuzzFeed News had nothing to do with technology (or even moving fast). The secret was cultural. Despite the site’s constant bad reputation as a click farm, I was never once told to chase traffic. No editor ever discussed referrals or clicks. The emphasis was on doing the old-fashioned thing: finding an original story that told people something new, held people to account, or simply delighted. The traffic would come.

The place was obsessed with story, not prestige, and its ambition was nearly boundless. It wasn’t afraid of devoting considerable resources to being silly as long as the narrative was good. (The company enabled me to spend weeks reporting an oral history of one day on the internet, sent me to cover political campaigns and rallies, agreed to let me stay in the guest room of a porn producer’s New Hampshire BDSM cabin, and allowed me fly to Sweden to get a microchip implanted in my hand). And the company supported hard, serious journalism around the world. As one of my colleagues reminded me today, a common refrain during the BuzzFeed News heyday was that it felt like a fake job. Not because it wasn’t serious work, but because getting paid to work there often felt like getting away with something.

The legacy of BuzzFeed News has two components. The first I described above. This legacy lives on in the stories, as well as the alumni network of brilliant writers, reporters, editors, and artists, who now work in every newsroom on the planet. (There are five of us here at The Atlantic.) The second part is, sadly, much more familiar: It is the tragic story of the digital media industry writ large. It is a familiar tale of mismanagement, low interest rates, unrealistic expectations, greedy, extractive venture capitalists, and the impossibility of exponential growth.

If it felt like a fake job, that’s because, in the harshest financial terms, it was: In 2014, the venture firm Andreesen Horowitz invested $50 million into BuzzFeed News, a number which makes my stomach drop now. I was the technology editor at the time and remember getting pulled into a meeting about it, mostly as a heads up and an assurance that the investment from Silicon Valley’s buzziest firm would not influence how we covered tech. This turned out to be true. Reporting on tech platforms while working at BuzzFeed News always felt like living in the town whose local politics you covered—you lived it and you wrote about it.

It all would’ve made at least some sense to you, too, if you were 28 and living a millennial subsidy life, taking cheap Ubers and watching Silicon Valley grow invincible. Those next few years were a blur. The new hire emails came in so fast that I stopped opening them. It all made sense then, but today, it looks like the inevitable fate-sealing that comes from making a deal with the venture capital devil.

BuzzFeed News was not, as Andreesen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon once said, a “full-stack startup.” This should've been blindingly obvious. The business of news gathering—not content creation—is expensive, and it does not scale. BuzzFeed News’s bread and butter—telling the internet’s stories and leveraging its systems to promote them, was only nominally a technology strategy, and one that was yoked to the success of other venture-funded social media companies like Facebook. The fate of the entire digital-media ecosystem was dependent on the line going up and to the right in perpetuity—or at least until the money men saw their returns. Just how infectious was this “perpetual growth” mindset? In the mid-2010s, BuzzFeed turned down a rumored $500 million acquisition from Disney, perhaps in part because it wanted to become Disney.

Around the time I left in 2019, it became clear that browsing and attention habits were shifting, turning places like Facebook into ghost towns for politically radicalized Boomers. This was the first time I heard internal rumblings of investor concern. I started hearing people whispering the word profitability—a term I’d never had occasion to hear around the office—a lot more. It took less than four years to fully internalize the lesson that venture capitalism is just a form of gambling: You invest in 10 companies to make money off one, and employees are the chips. News, no matter how much technology you wrap around it, may be a public good, but, if you’re looking for Facebook-level exits, it’s a bad bet.

I am sad and angry that the extractive practices of modern finance, the whims of rich and powerful investors, and the race-to-the-bottom economics of the digital media industry have stripped BuzzFeed for parts. I’m worried, on a practical level, about what might happen to the site’s archives, as well as the nearly 200 people the company plans to lay off. What’s left of the company (including the good, hard-working employees who are not fired) will have to navigate the wreckage created by an industry with a broken economic model. It seems likely that a zombified form of BuzzFeed will become the embodiment of everything the previous version wasn’t: terrified, obsessed with squeezing every ounce of shareholder value from its employees, and constantly bending to the forces of new technology like artificial intelligence, rather than harnessing and growing alongside them.

BuzzFeed News was oriented around the mission of finding, celebrating, and chronicling the indelible humanity pouring out of every nook and cranny of the internet, so it makes sense that any iteration that comes next will be more interested in employing machines to create content. The BuzzFeed era of media is now officially over. What comes next in the ChatGPT era is likely to be just as disruptive, but I doubt it’ll be as joyous and chaotic. And I guarantee it’ll feel less human.

Two of the top news stories in recent weeks—the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal indictment in People of the State of New York v. Donald Trump and the three-quarter-billion-dollar settlement in Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network—may seem like independent affairs, but they are parts of one bigger story. That story is how former President Trump has been able to control what information is available to the public, as he has repeatedly done in an effort to aggrandize and cling to his own power. His willing helpers were media companies, but they were not acting as news organizations. The National Enquirer deliberately generated false information and hid true information from the public as part of a scheme to secure Trump’s grip on political power. Fox aired false claims and questioned true ones as it sought to placate Trump’s supporters. Together they have succeeded in polluting the marketplace of ideas in which democratic politics is supposed to thrive.

[John Hendrickson: Inside the Manhattan criminal court with Donald Trump]

But law and litigation has helped bring this story to light. The courts—a place where facts still matter—have shown a path to catching up with the wrongdoers, but worryingly, these cases could also be treated as a guide for future collusive media outlets keen on engaging in disinformation while sidestepping exposure.

Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s criminal case—beyond the headlines about the first-ever charge against a former president and the hush money paid to a porn star—is about the capitulation of the National Enquirer to Trump’s 2016 campaign. The two were a natural pair, as seen in the Bragg indictment and statement of facts: a popular media outlet conspiring with a campaign to suppress stories that could damage the candidate’s chances of being elected. The proof of such an unholy alignment is direct: David Pecker, the head of the National Enquirer, admitted to the Department of Justice that he, Trump, and Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen engaged in a catch-and-kill scheme for stories about alleged affairs and one-night stands involving Trump, with the goal of keeping such information from voters. It was a smart move. After all, it had been the Enquirer that broke the 2007 story of then–Democratic Senator John Edwards’s affair, which ended that presidential aspirant’s political career.

The arrangement with Pecker went further than killing negative stories about Trump, to encompass promoting negative stories about Trump’s Republican and Democratic adversaries. On Trump’s road to the GOP presidential nomination, the Enquirer published more than 60 stories attacking his political opponents.

This scheme thus bore an uncanny resemblance to the contemporaneous Russian disinformation efforts, which also promoted Trump and denigrated his Republican primary adversaries while attacking 2016 Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and praising her challengers, including Senator Bernie Sanders. (All of this is outlined in the federal indictment of the Internet Research Agency and the Russians helping run that company.) Similarly, the Federal Election Commission sanctioned American Media Inc., the National Enquirer’s parent company, for its illegal interference in the 2016 election. AMI agreed to pay $187,500 in fines after the FEC’s nonpartisan staff found that the catch-and-kill arrangement, in coordination with Trump and Cohen, violated federal campaign-finance law.

That we know of the AMI-Trump alliance is fortuitous. The coordination of a candidate with a powerful media outlet in the lead-up to an election would not have necessarily come to light but for the secret payment of money to kill adverse stories—payments that attracted the attention of federal and state prosecutors and led to Cohen’s conviction for campaign-finance charges and Trump’s indictment on charges of falsifying business records. If Trump and AMI had been content to publish favorable stories about Trump and derogatory pieces about his adversaries—regardless of truth—without the element of hush money, we might be none the wiser as to this systemic corruption of our electoral process.

A very similar fortuity revealed an even more pervasive systemic corruption of our electoral process, one involving Trump’s collusion with another media outlet, this one far more influential. Fox Corporation and its subsidiary Fox News would have avoided their recent legal troubles if they had steered clear of targeting Dominion Voting Systems, a private company with enough resources to sue. If their election-fraud claims had been more diffuse and focused on unspecified figures or governments, the now-infamous Fox emails and texts may have never come to light.

But because Dominion brought its civil suit with its attendant right to discovery of Fox’s internal communications, the public now can see an effort—strikingly similar to that by AMI—to curry favor with one and only one candidate, in spite of many Fox employees’ private antipathy toward the man. The Dominion suit revealed how Fox actively sought to promote Trump’s effort to stay in office after losing the 2020 presidential election. Like AMI, Fox became the amanuensis of the then-president, regurgitating nightly his election-fraud claims, lies that plenty of people at Fox, up to and including News Corp Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch, disbelieved. Such efforts included direct coordination with the White House and Trump campaign, reminiscent of the direct coordination between Sean Hannity and Paul Manafort years earlier.

Indeed, the judge overseeing the Dominion suit found that the plaintiff had so overwhelmingly established certain facts, there was no need for the jurors to consider them at trial. One such fact: Dominion did not tamper with any election results, and any claims to that effect by Fox were false. The court went further in its pretrial rulings with respect to the role Fox played in promoting this falsehood. Remarkably, the court precluded Fox from trying to convince jurors—had a trial taken place—that it was merely reporting the news.

[Read: Stormy Daniels’s oh-so-familiar story]

This is yet another aspect that aligns the two cases. In the defamation lawsuit, Fox had argued that regardless of whether the network believed Trump’s election-fraud claims, they were news and thus it had a responsibility to report them. The court rejected this argument, not because such a defense could not be valid in theory, but because that defense was not factually supported in this case. As Murdoch himself admitted, the Fox anchors were not impartially reporting; they were “endorsing” Trump’s claims.

Similarly, AMI claimed in front of the Federal Election Commission that it was covered by the so-called press exemption, which holds that “any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication” does not count as an expenditure on a political campaign. Relying primarily on AMI’s own statements to the Justice Department, the FEC easily rejected this claim. The company “disclaim[ed] a journalistic or editorial purpose” by admitting that it had made the hush-money payments for the express purpose of assisting the Trump campaign, the FEC legal staff explained.

In short, these conclusions of the federal court in the Fox case and the FEC and Bragg in the hush-money case underscore the nature of this threat to American democracy. In both these cases, the most damning thing is not their outcome—Dominion’s settlement or a Manhattan jury’s eventual verdict—but their revelations.

When national media companies pollute the information environment in collusion with a political campaign, the question becomes whether American institutions and the legal system can adequately respond. The courts may hinder Trump, or for that matter any politician with autocratic leanings, from colluding with media companies. But the worrying messages to such politicians may be to avoid mischaracterizing or paying hush money altogether and to avoid defaming a company with deep pockets when promulgating the next big lie. Bragg and Dominion may win their battles, but the electorate may lose the war.   

When I realized the power of online journalism in the early aughts, I saw transparency as key to its promise. I’d watched Gawker X-ray New York’s media scene, and seen bloggers tear apart mainstream reporting on the 2004 presidential campaign. I found that I could drive the political conversation simply by telling my readers what I knew in plain English, when I knew it. At Politico in 2007, we adopted Gawker’s ethos that many of old-school journalists’ most interesting stories were the ones they told one another in bars, rather than the ones they printed, and applied it to American politics. We immediately hooked political junkies on a steady stream of scoops that assumed readers were on a first-name basis with Hillary and Barack, and that they didn’t need us to provide much context or analysis.

At its best, this ethos bypassed the patronizing, gatekeeping practices that often led great American institutions to mislead the country on vital public subjects. At its worst, it encouraged journalists to publish things that their predecessors had good reason to pass over, such as leaked sex tapes.

And then there were the hard cases, the explosive facts and documents that journalists had long worried citizens would take out of context if they were revealed in full. I found, and still find, that concern ludicrous in this digital age. But the trajectory of the document known as “the dossier” has disabused me of my Panglossian assumption that the new transparency is a simple blessing.

I first got wind of the dossier in December 2016, when I was the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. One of our reporters, Ken Bensinger, received an unusual invitation to a small gathering at a hilltop mansion in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. He’d been invited by an acquaintance, Glenn Simpson, a onetime journalist who had become a kind of private investigator and co-founded the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Ken got lost and showed up late, finding a boisterous, all‑male affair: plenty of booze, hunks of meat on the grill, some weed being smoked outside. Simpson drew him into a conversation about a mutual acquaintance, a former British spy named Christopher Steele. Simpson then told Ken something he didn’t know: Steele had been working the case of the president-elect, Donald Trump, and he’d assembled evidence that Trump had close ties to the Kremlin—including claims that Michael Cohen, one of his lawyers, had held secret meetings with Russian officials in Prague, and that the Kremlin had a lurid video of Trump cavorting with prostitutes in the Ritz-Carlton Moscow that would come to be known as the “pee tape.”

Ken told Simpson’s story to our investigations editor, Mark Schoofs, who told me about it. Simpson wouldn’t give Ken the document, and neither would Steele. It was merely high-grade Washington gossip, irresistible chatter.

I heard about the report again over lunch in Brooklyn, when a peculiar character in Hillary Clinton’s orbit passed through town. David Brock had been an anti-Clinton journalist in the 1990s. Now he was Hillary’s fiercest ally, a genius at raising money for Democratic groups. He showed up at a café a couple of days before Christmas wearing a coat with a lavish fur collar, and stashed full shopping bags beside the table. Brock was consumed with the mission of stopping Trump, manic; he was headed, it turned out, for a heart attack that landed him in the hospital. He wanted to spread the word about a dossier of allegations involving Trump’s ties to Russia. Brock didn’t have the document, he said. But he knew The Washington Post did, and so did The New York Times. Politicians had it too, he told me, and spies; as far as I could figure out, so did everyone, except the reading public. And me.

That, I believed, made it exactly the sort of thing you should publish. The dossier would be a great story, a journalistic and traffic sensation.

We were hardly the first journalists to get the document—but we may have been the first to get it without promising to keep it secret.

Simpson, whose firm was working for the Democratic National Committee, had months earlier summoned the leading lights of Washington journalism to the Tabard Inn, a tatty hotel off Dupont Circle. There, Steele calmly shared his shocking suggestion that Trump had been compromised by the Russian government. The journalists came from The New York Times, The New Yorker, ABC News, CNN. BuzzFeed didn’t get an invite.

To Simpson’s frustration, the reporters couldn’t confirm the dossier’s allegations. And because they had promised Simpson that they wouldn’t write about the dossier itself, its author, or its path through the American government, they couldn’t report on these things either, even as they became equally interesting stories.

On December 29, David Kramer invited Ken to his office at the McCain Institute. He then did something careful Washington insiders do: He left Ken alone in the room with the document for 20 minutes, without, in Ken’s view, giving clear instructions about whether he could make a copy. Ken took a picture of every page. (Kramer later denied that he’d allowed Ken to copy it, though I believed the denial was a fig leaf. Kramer eventually clarified that denial to say that he had wanted Ken to take a paper copy with him, rather than take pictures of the document.) I printed out the 35-page document and pored over it, looking for details that we could confirm, or refute. Then I hid my copy in the back of a closet. We scrambled—as other news outlets had done—sending reporters to check out the details; one went to 61 Prague hotels to ask whether anyone had seen Michael Cohen.

On January 10, CNN’s Jake Tapper announced a big scoop: “CNN has learned that the nation’s top intelligence officials provided information to President-elect Donald Trump and to President Barack Obama last week about claims of Russian efforts to compromise President-elect Trump.” The briefing, CNN reported, was “based on memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative whose past work U.S. intelligence officials consider credible.” The memos included, the network said—ominously and hazily—“allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.”

The dossier was in circulation, affecting the course of American politics. Now that CNN had effectively waved it in the air, surely someone, soon, would let regular people in on the secret? I knew what I thought we should do, but I asked Mark; our executive editor, Shani Hilton; and Miriam Elder, the former Guardian Moscow correspondent editing our international coverage, if we should publish it. They all agreed that the document itself was news.

We stood around Mark’s laptop as he started typing. Ken, on speakerphone, warned that we could get sued; I too-curtly told him that I wasn’t asking him for legal advice. Then we turned to writing. “A dossier making explosive—but unverified—allegations” had been in wide circulation, we wrote. The allegations were “specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable.” Miriam had noticed a couple of odd, minor false notes in the discussion of Russian specifics. She took a turn at the laptop. “It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors,” we said. I sent a copy of our story to our in-house lawyer.

By 6:20 p.m., about an hour after Tapper’s segment concluded, we had 350 careful words explaining what we knew. In the best traditions of the internet, we published that short introduction alongside a PDF of the full document.

Then I went to stand in the middle of the newsroom and watch the traffic flow.

For the next hour, my eyes flicked between a big screen where I watched the dossier go viral, and my phone, where I watched it dominate Twitter. The tweet that came up the most included a screenshotted excerpt from the dossier describing a “perverted” scene at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow, where Trump had allegedly hired “a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.” That excerpt was shared and shared again. Our caveats didn’t always accompany it.

The news organizations that had accepted Simpson’s invitation to the Tabard Inn were furious. This was, I believe, in part because they had been boxed out of covering the real story by their agreements with a source, but also because they genuinely thought that what we’d done—floating inflammatory, salacious, and unverified claims about the president-elect of the United States—was wildly irresponsible.

Jake Tapper sent me a furious email that evening saying that publishing the document “makes the story less serious and credible,” which was probably true—but if keeping a document secret makes it more credible, you might have a problem. Tapper also said he wished we had at least waited until morning to give his news the attention it deserved: “Collegiality wise it was you stepping on my dick,” he wrote.

I’d expected that backlash, and at first welcomed it. I thought we were on the right side of the decade-old conflict between the transparent new internet and a legacy media whose power came in part from the information they withheld. And, of course, I loved the traffic. This was a huge revelation, a secret unveiled. What made me uncomfortable was the gratitude.

My phone lit up with text messages from Democrats thanking us for publishing the dossier and revealing Trump to be as depraved as they had always believed him to be. Hillary Clinton had never mastered social media; her supporters had never developed the dense networks of memes and conspiracy theories that powered the Trump movement. But now liberals, forming a nascent “resistance,” were starting to build their own powerful narratives on social media that were sometimes more resonant than factual. The notion of a single, vast conspiracy seemed to answer their desperate question of how Trump could have been elected. Russia clearly had helped. WikiLeaks’s hack-and-dump operation was a crucial factor among many in a very close election. You didn’t need to believe all the details in the dossier to know those things.

But perhaps I should have thought a little more about WikiLeaks. A couple of weeks before the 2016 election, I’d attended a Trump rally in Edison, New Jersey, and on my way in, I’d encountered a supporter chanting, “WikiLeaks! WikiLeaks!” I asked him which specific documents he thought painted Hillary Clinton in such a bad light. He didn’t exactly know. I realized that I was looking at social media in real life, a man shouting information cast as a symbol of what he already believed about Clintonian corruption, not as anything meant to convey new knowledge.

Something similar happened with the dossier. We had embedded it as a PDF, which meant that it could travel context-free, without our article’s careful disclaimers, and that’s exactly what happened. I watched uneasily as educated Democrats who abhorred Trump supporters’ crude rants about child sex rings in Washington pizza joints were led by the dossier into similar patterns of thought. They read screenshots of Steele’s report; they connected the dots. They retweeted threads about how the plane of a Russian oligarch—previously unknown to them, now sinister—had made a mysterious stop in North Carolina.

We’d been careful, I found myself having to remind people, to say we didn’t know whether everything in the dossier was true when we published it. I defended the decision in public, in a New York Times op-ed and in a deposition, after a Russian man whom Steele had suggested was tied to the Democratic National Committee hack sued us.

Months after we released the dossier, the media executive Ben Sherwood came by my office. We’d met years earlier when he’d been at Disney, which had been trying to buy BuzzFeed. We had turned Disney down, but it had been a hard decision. I told him that running BuzzFeed had gotten more difficult, with the complexities of management and the realities of digital advertising bearing down on me.

So what did I think now? he asked. Didn’t I wish we’d done the Disney deal? “Would we have been able to publish the dossier?” I asked. “Not in a million years,” he told me. Then I told him I was glad we hadn’t taken the money.

That was an easy position to hold in 2017. It seemed reasonable to argue that publishing the dossier had been, on balance, good for the country. It had blown wide open a Russia investigation and forced voters to ask just why Trump seemed so friendly with Vladimir Putin. But although the biggest-picture claim—that the Russian government had worked to help Trump—was clearly true, the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in April 2019 did not support Steele’s report. Indeed, it knocked down crucial elements of the dossier, including Cohen’s supposed visit to Prague. Internet sleuths—followed by a federal prosecutor—had poked holes in Steele’s sourcing, suggesting that he’d overstated the quality of his information.

And there had always been a more mundane version of the Trump-Russia story. Trump was the sort of destabilizing right-wing figure that Putin had covertly supported across Europe. Trump’s value to Putin was related not to a secret deal, but to the overt damage he could do to America. And Trump, BuzzFeed News’s Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold discovered, had a more mundane interest in Russia as well: He had drawn up plans to build the biggest apartment building in Europe on the banks of the Moskva River. The Trump Organization planned to offer the $50 million penthouse to Putin as a sweetener.

That real-estate project wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the dossier. Yet it seemed to explain the same pattern of behavior, without the lurid sexual allegations or hints of devious espionage.

And publishing the dossier wasn’t, in the end, a dagger to Trump’s heart. If anything, it muddied the less sensational revelations of his business dealings and his campaign manager’s ties to Russia. An FBI agent who investigated Trump, Peter Strzok, later said the dossier “framed the debate” in a way that ultimately helped Trump: “Here’s what’s alleged to have happened, and if it happened, boy, it’s horrible—we’ve got a traitor in the White House. But if it isn’t true, well, then everything is fine.”

It was, the reporter Barry Meier wrote, “a media clusterfuck of epic proportions.” The dossier’s overreaching allegation of an immense and perverse conspiracy would, he predicted, “ultimately benefit Donald Trump.”

Six years after publication, I accept that conclusion. And yet I remain defensive of our decision. I find it easiest to explain not in the grandiose terms of journalism, but in the more direct language of respect for your reader. Don’t you, the reader, think you’re smart enough to see a document like that and understand that it is influential but unverified without losing your mind? Would you rather people like me had protected you from seeing it?

Imagine the alternative, a world in which the American public knows that there is a secret document making murky allegations that the president-elect has been compromised, a document that is being investigated by the FBI, that the president-elect and the outgoing president have been briefed on, and that everyone who is anyone has seen—but that they can’t. This would, if anything, produce darker speculation. It might have made the allegations seem more credible than they were.

We faced a difficult series of lawsuits, but we won them all, in part because we’d maintained our journalistic distance. We argued, successfully, that we were not making these claims ourselves; we were making the “fair report” of what amounted to a government document. We’d published the dossier while holding it at arm’s length, noting that we hadn’t been able to verify or knock down its claims—even if we had inadvertently launched a million conspiracy theories in the process.

And that’s the part of the dossier’s strange trajectory that remains most disturbing to me. The way the document became a social-media totem for the anti-Trump resistance rebutted my confidence that people could be trusted with a complex, contradictory set of information, and that journalists should simply print what they had and revel, guilt-free, in the traffic. We seemed to be in an impossible, even dangerous, situation: The public had lost trust in institutions while simultaneously demanding that those same institutions filter the swirl of claims that surround democracy’s biggest decisions.

I have no pat conclusion. If I had to do it again, I would publish the dossier—we couldn’t suppress it, not once CNN had discussed it and its implications on air. But I would hold more tightly to the document, so that no one could read it without reading what we knew about it—that we weren’t sure it was true, and in fact we had noticed errors in it. Releasing a document that could be shared without context—and this is as true of the WikiLeaks material as it is of the dossier—created partisan symbols, not crowdsourced analysis.

In technical terms, that means I wouldn’t simply publish it as a PDF, destined to float free from our earnest caveats. At best, we could have published the document as screenshots attached to the context we had and the context we would learn. Perhaps in some small way, this would have limited its transformation from a set of claims into a banner of the “resistance.” But I’m not under the illusion that journalists could have contained its wildfire spread, any more than I think we could have concealed it.

I’m now leading a news organization, Semafor, that is also rooted in transparency. But I no longer think transparency means that journalists can be simple conduits for facts, obscuring our own points of view, leaving our audiences to figure it out. The best we can do, I think, is to lay our cards on the table in separate piles: Here are the facts, and here’s what we think they mean—and to retain some humility about the difference between the two.

This essay is adapted from the forthcoming Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.