The rise and fall of digital pioneers Ben Smith is making the rounds to promote his new book, “Traffic.” The proprieter of the shuttering BuzzFeed News told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tuesday night he did not aniticpate, in its infancy, what digital media would do to legacy media and politics. The pursuit of clicks contained in the BuzzFeed name came to define the goal of social media. That business model was the digital equivalent of “if it bleeds, it leads.” I recall once sitting in a packed Netroots Nation workshop on writing clickbait headlines to attract eyeballs before clickbait was a word and swiftly became a four-letter one. Smith did not forsee in those days what the lefties’ tech tools that gave rise to Jezebel or Huffington Post would become in the hands of the radical right. I recall, too, that Right Online, the onetime conservative shadow to Netroots, was thought a joke by our younger attendees. Right Online seemed a collection or hopelessly unhip retirees in the digital age trying still learning to turn on a computer and manipulate a cursor. That was then. Smith writes in the New York Times: The media is still grappling with what Jezebel’s creators helped unleash, for good and ill. The era opened opportunities for journalists and creative people who, by instinct or practice, could blend their identities with the stories they told. The new generation of millennial writers at the Gawker sites, BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital projects challenged stuffy, insular and occasionally…