I think the breaking news ecosystem is so broken and so many organizations are doing this thing of something happens and you write like a really quick one-sentence story and throw it on the internet in the hope of getting the Google link.
Yeah. And then maybe you fill in some more words- Yeah... because Google wants words or something, or some SEO expert told you it did. But that, that is just not a good piece.
That's not a thing that is helping anybody understand the world. I think our approach has been the inverse.
Wait a beat, figure out what the facts are, and then find people expressing really thoughtful, informed analysis, often disagreeing if we can find it, and give you something that reflects what kind of almost used to be the best of the social media experience, which is, here's what happened- Yeah...
here's how to understand it. So you're making aggregation great again. We are making aggregation great again. [laughs] I, I believe I prefer the word distillation.
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey. This week I'm joined by Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor. Ben has a new podcast which he hosts with Naima Raza called Mixed Signals.
It aims to unpack the truth in modern media. I've listened to the first couple episodes and I'm already hooked. You should all check it out, and this is a great time for it.
Ben and I talk about the podcast as well as this weird moment the media business is in.
As the pressures of the business force changes at many legacy publishers like The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, I think what we're seeing is in many ways a dismantling of the resistance media machine built around the time of Trump's election in two thousand and sixteen.
As publishers seized a moment in time and told themselves and the world that their role was to oppose the Trump agenda, I think the pressures on the business now has made that approach something of a luxury belief, and unwinding it is gonna be tough work that's often left to Brits.
We talk about why that is. Now here's my conversation with Ben. [upbeat music] All right, Ben, we're doing this podcast. I think the last time I did a podcast with you was at Cannes last year.
We're both about to head out to Cannes. What, what, what are you gonna do different? You're, you're, this is your second year at Cannes. At Cannes?
You know, Max Tani, our media editor, and I, I think are genuinely kind of more sophisticated about the stories in the ad and marketing industry, and so I think we will [laughs] do a better job covering them.
We'll- The Michael Casson dueling cocktail party, you mean? I think we may have broken that. Very excited for this. Do you have... Have you... Has, uh, has anyone written about that? Have you guys written about that?
We did, yeah. Okay. We, we dropped it in the newsletter. And I don't know, I'm gonna attempt to run around less in the heat as the things are super urgent. Okay. Good. Well, I hope to see you there.
We were talking before, it's like the, the market for- Yeah... Cannes news is actually exceedingly small. [laughs] It could be possibly subzero, as you suggested.
The people who are there have no time or no, you know, inclination 'cause they've got a cocktail party to be to, and the people who are not there actively hate it. So anyway, be sure to- So please si- yes.
[laughs] The Semafor pop-up. So please sign up for our, our Cannes pop-up newsletter, but only if you are there, because I am big on...
I'm a big believer in not doing, not forcing your general audience to read about cool parties they weren't invited to.
We did actually last year in Cannes, we accidentally sent one of the Cannes special newsletters to the big list of all my media subs, all our media subscribers. Yeah.
Which, and I just, as it went out, I just sort of felt, you know, the blood rushing to my face. It just... And you just- Yeah... don't wanna do that. Well, I'll be doing that.
Anyway, I have a- Well, you, you have a more, you have an audience that is specifically focused on marketing. Eh. A lot of people in the media business who are less, uh- Yes and no. Well, we can get into that.
So you have a new podcast. Is this, is this competition for this podcast? No, you're going with a different... You're going much broader. I mean, it's the war of the all against all out there, right?
But I do think it's a bit different. I mean, we're, we're certainly... I mean, I think the way I cover media is different from the way you cover media. I mean, and it, and it sort of reflects that.
I'm, you know, I think I sort of try to use media as kind of a vector into politics, technology, culture, and that's what the show will be. Less than a, less than sort of a x-ray of the business itself.
Okay, well, just stay away from programmatic advertising, if you don't mind. For so many reasons, I will. [laughs] So it's called Mixed Signals. First couple episodes are out. I'm enjoying it.
O-one of the things that the promise is around the, the, the true media conspiracy, explain that to me. Yeah, I mean, I think, let's see, I think there are...
I'll, I'll maybe kind of step back 'cause I have a theory about podcasts, which I suspect as I'm a real non-expert here, and hopefully many of your listeners can email me and tell me I'm a moron when I articulate this.
But I think that there was a generation of American podcasts, many still really popular and wonderful, whose sort of vibe is, "We're a couple of kids on a voyage of discovery.
And Brian, you and I don't know anything about this, but we're gonna go figure it out." And like, we, uh, we get out of the car and our feet crunch in the gravel as we go to interview the suspect or whatever.
And many of those are wonderful, but I do think related to the moment in the culture and the media, there is increasingly an interest in a kind of a show across the board that is like, "Hey, we actually really know a lot about this subject, have been doing it for a long time, and can tell you things that are different from what you're gonna hear in a sort of conspiracy-minded, chaotic mass media."
And I think, I mean, your show is that through expertise-based. There's a British show I love called The Rest Is Politics that very much has that kind of attitude.
And, and so y- my co-host, Naima Raza, who's been in film production for a long time in docs and worked at The New York Times with me, and I, I think sort of, at least I think that often media stories are covered as conspiracy and sort of seen as conspiracy, and there is a broad belief that something, there's some element of the media business- Yeah...
just sort of isn't on the level.And I think, by the way, often that's true if you-- but in, and these, the-these companies say one thing, but what they do doesn't quite match that.
And people, I think, often jump to think that there's some kind of political conspiracy. Yeah. And by the way, sometimes there is.
But really often it's basically- Definitely not as organized, I don't think, as people think. [chuckles] Yeah. And it's usually just a conspiracy to make money. Yeah.
And by the way, not, not a good-- not a well-functioning conspiracy to make money. No.
And I think trying to take these things that are happening, you know, whether it's like the British invasion of all these American newsrooms or whether it's the vanishing of sex from the movies, and try to kind of talk to experts and with real expertise about, "Hey, what actually happened here?"
Yeah. But, I mean, you're bringing your own expertise.
'Cause I think what's interesting in podcasting is I think it's the front end of this sort of expert media, it-- meaning that the people, like All In, for instance, which I never would have thought would become a giant podcast, but it has, and there's this promise of bringing people inside the room, the quote, unquote "rooms where decisions are being made."
Is that-- Are you going for that in a way? I mean, I think that... I, I don't-- I'm not sure you wanna be inside the room. But I mean, that, or that's a slightly different promise, I would say.
I think we're just trying to...
But I do think we're trying to bring real expertise and experience to explain what is really happening and to some degree to undercut this sort of huge miasma of assumption and conspiracy that just totally besets American kinda media culture right now.
Yeah. So how did you think about formats for this? Because I, I think, you know, you guys launched with, with formats at the forefront, I feel like, with, with Semaforum, and, and now there's Semaforum, right? Yeah.
What is the tech Q&A called? You know, our, our sort of... Yeah, I mean, I definitely with-- in terms of our, our interview format, Semaforum, which is really a pun, and our, and our- [chuckles]...
article format, which we're calling a Semaforum, it was really about can you kind of pull apart the story and say, "Here are the facts, and here is the, here, you know, here's the r- journalist's opinion, here are other points of view on it."
And I, and I do think that, I mean, the show very much has that same spirit that we're trying to bring transparency. We're trying to give you a real blunt, transparent look at what is happening in the media.
You know, but in terms of, I mean, more sort of we have interviews, but it's not an interview show, and I think the way we're trying to bring the interviews in is to, you know, in a way a little, little more like radio, where you have somebody, somebody calls in for a- Yeah...
few minutes and you pull them into your conversation. I mean, I actually love long-form interview shows, but this really isn't that. It's more a sort of focused attempt to answer questions. Yeah.
And there's at least the first couple, there's three segments. I mean, you have segments, right? Yeah, that's right.
'Cause I think a lot of times, I think one of the flaws of, I don't know, maybe I'm telling on myself, of podcasts is sometimes they can come off as college radio.
Yeah, it's sometimes a flaw, and sometimes I think it's a benefit, right? There's a- Yeah... looseness and an honesty to it. But we definitely are trying to keep it tighter and a bit shorter.
I don't think anybody ever... Rarely do people say, "Oh, man, that was too short," and that is usually a compliment.
And so we have two sort of substantive segments, and then, and then Max Tani leads this blind spot segment, which is something from our, our Washington coverage, just that the idea is to bring in stories that you didn't see in your media bubble but that some other chunk of the world, the country did or that you did and you didn't realize nobody else saw, and to kind of dissect some of those, which is fun.
So what is your headline right now for what's going on in newsrooms at this time of tremendous change, obviously, in, in the business?
Is there a headline that connects all of these things, what we're seeing going on at The Washington Post, we're seeing going on at The Wall Street Journal? I think to some degree as you could extrapolate it to CNN.
And leave aside the Brits. We can, we can get to the Brits later. Let's see.
I mean, I think the, in the biggest picture, we just have this fragmenting landscape, and inside that, you have these remnant big newsrooms that are, I think, trying to, you know, fix their businesses and sharpen their brands and identities.
And, and, uh, I think you actually can't leave out the Brits because I think what's happening a-across these newsrooms is that you have proprietors who, you know, saw...
You know, it's, it reminds me a little of the ESG story that in the, in the, in the twenty tens, you had all these investors who were running around telling you and sort of fund managers running around pat-- saying that they were focused entirely on ESG, congratulating themselves about it, "And by the way, our returns are better than anybody else's, and we're on ESG.
It's win-win," right? And that's because all their investments were in Tesla and Netflix, and those stocks were going up.
And then come really the Russian invasion of Ukraine, uh, you know, the, the stocks that start spiking are arms, you know, are weapons manufacturers- Yeah...
and energy, and you have more complicated choices as an investor and less self-congratulation.
And I think the parallel in media is that there was this moment when changing your motto to democracy dies in the dark and positioning yourselves as warrior priests in the struggle against Donald Trump was great for business, won Pulitzer Prizes, and led you to congratulate yourself.
And, and that, that fell apart after twenty twenty. And, you know, in particular, the New York Times to some degree is an exception to this because they built a bunch of other businesses.
But a lot of these other newsrooms, CNN and The Washington Post first among them, just saw the tide go out.
And then when you g-- And, and the problem is you have then built this infrastructure of marketing yourself as the sort of truth tellers of Washington first and foremost.
If you are then trying, you wanna keep that, but you also wanna do some other things, and you need to cut costs, and you are trying to figure out your future as a business, but you've marketed yourself externally and internally as this other thing, and I think that's where they're getting hung up.
And they, and, and so you, you know, so you go and you try to restructure your newsroom, and you, and you get these lectures on journalism from the journalists you have told who are repeating back to you the words you told themAnd I think there is that then a temptation to bring in a bunch of kind of feral Brits who lack respect for these- [laughs] -great American institutions to shake things up.
Yeah. And I think that's what you're seeing happen. Yeah, I think there's definitely a s- s- I mean, the Brits that take themselves a little less seriously than American capital J journalism. Yeah, a lot less seriously.
I, I keep- Which is- -coming back to the, the David Blaine. Remember when David Blaine was doing his stunts, like, in the early 2000s? Yeah, sure.
He went, he went to, he went to London and did this thing where he was, like, in a box over the Thames, and he was starving himself.
And so, of course, the tabloids have a remote-controlled helicopter that is, like, dangling a cheeseburger in front of him [laughs] you know? And, like, there is that aspect that I think can be good.
Like, I actually think- Yeah, they think journalism's really fun, and it's about, and, and, and entertain... it's about entertaining people.
And by the way, it can be about confronting power in a very intense way but with a, but with a sense of humor about yourself and kind- and without a real, I think, often without a sort of quite as elevated sense of mission as- Yeah...
American journalists, you know, for better and for worse.
And I would say there's a lot about this moment that when you and I talk about it, and I hear you, I heard you talk about it on the show the other day, and I, I've heard other, like, kind of media journalists on podcasts talk about how, "Well, look, like, tough, you know, the days of wine and roses are over," and these, you know, it's, and sort of side with management here.
And I have been, like, in management long enough, like, I have this terrible impulse to side with management in these conversations.
There is this reality that if you go in and you tell your room full of journalists that the days of wine and roses are over, and you guys are bus- you're in a business, and you have to figure out the business, and we're gonna optimize for margin or something, like, most of them have to suck it up.
But the people who do not have to suck it up are the best, are your best journalists who are gonna leave.
And I think that's a real problem with this approach right now, is that, is that there's this impulse in these newsrooms, and this is, the Times is not doing this, and they're benefiting from it, and they're p-picking people off from these other newsrooms.
But you have these, this message from the top that's basically like, "We gotta get serious. No more fooling around. This is a business."
But it's a talent business, and you just can't go walking around talent businesses talking like that, I think. Yeah. And that's gonna be, that's, that's gonna be a long-term challenge.
I mean, we've talked about this before. I think our last podcast, you objected to the term influencer journalists. I don't think I came up with it. I think I said I flew, threw up in my mouth when you said it.
[laughs] I believe that was- But also that it's- It's a good start... but also that it's kind of accurate. But obviously, yes, it does represent a real trend.
So do you think it was a, was it a short-term mistake, I guess a long-term mistake to, to go oppositional during the Trump era?
Obviously, 2016 was an in-insane time, and lots of, lots of things happened after that that I think in, in retrospect will seem very strange.
But- I mean, I think the media made some mistakes, but I think, you know, you have these right-wing populist movements whose- Yeah...
core move in part is to attack the media and to sometimes say things that aren't true in really loud ways, and, and, and to try to create that confrontation. Yeah.
I don't think there's- But is it more, do you think it's, it's, it's more strongly held than the normal working the refs situation?
'Cause, I mean, the role of, quote-unquote, "the media" as the refs has also changed quite a bit. Uh, oh, for sure, but then there's always been working the refs.
But Donald Trump's, you know, the way he used CNN as essentially the opposition candidate was different and new.
And he, it's not that, I don't, I think it's easy to go back and say people made mistakes, but there were, these were, you know, these were s- there were a s- a bunch of, partic- in the early days of the Trump White House, a bunch of crazy stuff happening that The Washington Post unearthed that the administration was furious at them about.
And there wasn't really a way around that. So when you get a question from someone who isn't steeped in this l- that says, "What, what, what is going on at The Washington Post?" How do you, how do you summarize it?
I mean, that I think they had found this sort of singular mission in covering the White House, and that, and didn't, a-and the rest of the organization had remained kind of adrift, trying to get traffic over here, doing some metro coverage over there, but without a clear sense of mission.
But that Marty Baron was a incredibly strong editor who led this very aggressive, fair, tough Washington coverage that captivated l- a huge audience for a period.
And then when that period ended, and the tide went out, they didn't ha- they had not built much else and had had an idea a lot, and they also, and I think this is a huge problem when you're owned by a billionaire, that there's, that, you know, you have an audience of one.
And they'd done all this flashy, we're gonna be a tech company stuff that obviously was fun to talk to Jeff Bezos about. Mm-hmm. They built a CMS that they were licensing.
They built ad tech products that they were gonna license.
And I think, you know, and, and that, I think, has not really turned into a real business and was their big bet, and was a bet that made, that I'm sure was super fun to tell Jeff Bezos about, but that is different.
But, but pleasing your billionaire owner is not always the same as running a business.
Yeah, I remember when they were talking, talking to us a, a lot about, you know, building an ad server for Kindle ads and things of, of that.
Anytime, I mean, Neil Vogel has a good line that says, "Anytime a media company says they're a tech company, run away as fast as you can," because it generally doesn't, it doesn't work.
A big part of the problem is that your customers are other struggling media companies for your cool ad for tech product, right? And so. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Shrinking market. How about The Journal?
Totally a very different situation. I mean, The Journal's profitable.
I think it, it, it's, it's almost like a harder challenge, I feel like, to, to make changes when, when things are going okay because, you know, look, a lot of people in this profession, when the i- when you come with the idea of, "Well, we have to expand profit margins," they're like, "What are you talking about?"
[laughs] Yeah, that's, that's a less inspiring... Um, right, w-right. When you say, "Hey, we're losing $70 million a year-" Yeah, that's an extension... everybody does say, "All right, we gotta fix that." Okay.
Yeah, yeah. When you're saying, "We gotta, we gotta drive margin," a little, little le- little less- Let's go... inspiring. [laughs] But, you know, The Journal's in a funny place.
I mean, it's in some ways similar, right? Nobody was gonna mess with the core news gathering in these, when it felt like they were living through history.
And in fact, when Gerry Baker, the editor, was seen as being, you know, to not taking Donald Trump's sort of, you know, challenges to democracy seriously enough, he basically got fired by the newsroom.
And so-Now you know, but also the Journal is a perfectly good business, and you can see why somebody and the pr-proprietor might say, "Well, this should be like an amazing business. It's The Wall Street Journal.
It's the most important business publication in the world or ought to be."
You know, the, it should be a booming business, and I do think it's always been sort of an under i-like, you know, it's, it's doing fine, but it, but it didn't, it didn't do what The Times did and really kind of take advantage of the digital, digital transition to become something much bigger than it had been, and it f-it has, I think it kind of typically rests on its laurels and sort of glides through in a way.
Mm-hmm. And they brought in a British editor, I do think to cut co-partly to cut costs and increase profit margins as inspiring for the Murdoch family, which is obviously an inspiring cause that we can all get behind.
But also to do the thing that I think Murdoch has been mumbling about since he bought the place, which is shake it up, make it less boring, make it move faster, make it more on the news.
And I do think a lot of the great journalists at The Wall Street Journal feel that Emma has done that, and that there, and that there are elements of what she's done that have really worked and are really, you know, have, have made it more of a reporter's paper and less of an editor's paper in a way and, and sped it up, and they've done, you know, they do great stuff all the time.
But I think there is, you know, but there's also when you're doing that, this question of what is the identity of the journal that you're hol-what are you trying to hold on to here?
And then just more broadly, like it's just really hard to build good culture when you're cutting costs, and I think it's an under, I mean, it's not like a big, it's not a theoretical question.
Like, it's no fun to be in a place when your friends are getting laid off, and even if you didn't think that they were in the top quartile or whatever. Like it's, it's- Yeah...
just a, it just hurts morale, it drives people to your competitors, and I, and I don't really think there's a, I mean, it's just, it's, they're, you know, fundamentally they're cutting costs and it's tough to be a- Yeah...
really inspiring, fun place to be when you're doing that. And there's a drip nature of it.
I mean, look, there's, everyone says it's best to get it over with once and then move on, have a, have a bad day, ha-have a bad week, rather than trim here, trim there.
But a lot of times the latter ends up being- Yeah, and they are-... the approach...
and they're sort of I think, you know, they're, they're complain-- the management there is complaining a lot about union contracts that were obviously in fact negotiated by them, you know.
And so at some point that is what it is. But they, but they have these kind of last in, first out rules that make it not as easy to manage as perhaps it was at some non-union titles in the UK. Yeah.
You were at, at BuzzFeed when it unionized, right? Yeah. Yeah. What is your take on the, the union's role in this time? I mean, I always say, "You can't say anything bad about the unions.
They'll come after you on Twitter. You have to shut down your Twitter." That's, that's like the new kneecapping. But- Although there's, I mean-... obviously there's a role for unions. Sorry.
I will say we're so deep into the kind of like backlash moment that union organizers were having to turn off their Twitters at the Twitters at The New York Times last week because they were criticized, or one, somebody, they were criticizing Times journalism about Gaza.
Oh, yeah. Max Tanney has a kind of interesting piece- I know... about the rifts there.
You know, I mean, I guess I have a sort of, you know, like you have to be an optimist to be in this business, I suppose, and I do think that, that you could imagine, and you have totally not seen the unions play a really constructive role, in particular vis-à-vis the tech companies.
I always thought that like as in other industries like auto, the management and labor had this very, very clear united interest around stru-the industrial, the structure of the industrial landscape and putting pri- you know, when there were these tug of wars over revenue.
C-could have, there was an opportunity to sort of present a united front that didn't really work out. I mean, I don't think that it's been a particularly happy story, you know, over the last few years.
And, and I don't think the folks, I mean, The Times Union is currently in this very, then the, the News Guild is currently in this huge fight with The Ti-Times and Reuters in particular, who many of whose employees feel like they're paying, they're paying a disproportionate share of the bills, but they organize these new newsrooms that get to vote on how the money is spent and what share of dues there are.
So there are these bitter fights about, I mean, I don't know, bit-bitter but pretty normal fights about, you know, normal labor stuff. It, I mean, honestly, these are stories nobody reads when we write them. Yeah.
[laughs] So I'm gonna stop talking now. [laughs] But it seems like they're a symptom of, I mean, it's difficult to run a newsroom these days. Would you wanna run one of these big newsrooms? No.
I mean, it's incredibly fun to start a newsroom and to build from scratch, but it's, it's very, I think it's very hard to run an institution these days. Yeah. Why, why do you think that is?
I mean, there's, there's a, there is a generational element, I feel like, but you know, part of it is just, I think journalists are difficult to organize in, in the best of times.
Yeah, good journalists are sort of, right, are, are not great em-are not always great employees. But that's okay. I mean, that's great.
Jonah Peretti [chuckles] once said, 'cause I, I should disclose, I was, the News Guild were the cou-our counterparts, you know, who organized the BuzzFeed newsroom when I was there.
But I remember Jonah Peretti saying to me once, this always stuck with me, that, you know, journalists, you don't really work for your employer. You work for the guild.
And I don't mean the news guild, I mean like you're, it's like, like a medieval guild.
You know, you'll, within the certain parameters, you'll do what your employer requests usually, but there are definitely things where your employer's like, "Do this," and you're like, "No, I'm gonna take my tools and go back to the guild hall, sorry."
And I think that's, you know, call it journalistic ethics, call it whatever you want. It's sort of professi-in that way, I suppose it's like, it's like lawyers, it's like certain financial professionals.
There's just stuff that we won't do, and it's something that our, is sort of mystifying to people running other kinds of businesses, where your employees just work for you and you can say, "Do this," and then they'll do it.
Yeah. 'Cause in newsrooms, it's like, well, they, you, they work for you, but you can, and you can suggest or request that they do something, and they'll like really take it under very serious advisement.
And if you're a better editor or a better boss, you'll hopefully be like steering them in good directions and they'll respect that. But it isn't like a normal [chuckles] workplace where you can tell people what to do.
Yeah. Which I think is quite frustrating for managers sometimes. I found the fact that The Post is creating a third newsroom fascinating. Yeah.
They're creating, I think it's a marketing stunt, but what do you think it is?
Why do you, well, I mean, I, I, well-I mean, Matt Murray, obviously there was, there was moving chairs and, and how, how that transition, quote unquote, was, was handled was pretty messy from, from Sally Buzby to the new guy.
So I think it was, it's sort of a less than meets the eye organizational shift, which is lots of big newsrooms.
Their social media editors and their video teams are sometimes embedded with the desk, and sometimes they're over in the audience hub, and that's sort of a very boring bureaucratic choice.
But do you have the social media editor for the business team sitting with the business team, or does she go sit over with the head of audience and social media and the video folks?
And, and, you know, Will Lewis' previous startup was a essentially kind of social media team without a newsroom attached that produced a bunch of short videos that... on TikTok and stuff and marketed itself as an agency.
And I think we're basically talking about, it's called the news movement.
I think we're basically talking about taking the existing social media and video editors at the journal who are currently sitting with the business team or the politics team or whatever, having them all sit in one-- together in one place over on the left side of the newsroom, putting a very senior established prestige editor on top of them.
So we say, "Now you are senior established prestige newsroom, not, not the social media and video team that you were yesterday," and then calling it a third newsroom and then selling something out of it or maybe just telling Jeff Bezos- Yeah.
-,"See, we did something dynamic and tech-related." But I, I, I don't... I think it's actually not a great leap forward in the history of journalism.
But hopefully they'll create a bunch of really cool and brilliant social media stuff. Yeah, I don't think it's a great leap forward.
I do think it speaks to, again, from an outsider perspective, how unoptimized these organizations are. Like, they're not massive organizations to be this matrix.
The fact that commerce content is created in a completely different, you know, area than the, the core news content is, would be strange to someone from outside.
And again, all these things sort of layer on top of one another. Like we were talking about people working for the guild, not for the organization, and I feel like at this time it becomes a real drag.
All these things add up to, on top of one another.
When you're trying to make really dramatic change in an organization where you're, the thing you're waking up in the morning worrying about is that it's losing seventy-seven million dollars a year and, and that's oddly not urgent to your s- very matrixed, complicated newsroom, I do think it probably makes you crazy.
Yeah. So you're a year and a half in now with Saphore. I think a little bit more than a year and a half. I'll ask you the typical question. What's changed now versus when you launched? You know, I think we've...
You know, it's, you just, you launch with a bunch of theories, and some are true and some aren't.
I think we had a intuition that the events business would be really positive for us and a real kind of hub, but I think we didn't anticipate how, just what a, you know, how much, what a sort of like center of journalistic and commercial heat that would be.
You know, we had this world economy summit l-last month, month before that was in, in Washington, where we had fourteen events over two days, and these, you know, finance ministers from six countries, a bunch of White House officials, bunch of CEOs, made a lot of news, moved the markets, and it was also this hugely commercially successful event, and most complicated thing I've ever been involved in personally.
But also, but it, but just we're operating that business at a scale that I didn't anticipate, honestly, and I'm kind of...
And we're all kinda clinging with our fingernails a bit, but in a, in a way that feels, you know, really, like, exciting. The newsletter business has been really good, as, as I think you would expect.
I mean, I could see... The news-newsletters were, we did not invent newsletters, but I think we do them well, and people seem to like them.
You know, we took a run at video, made some amazing stuff, but I think like a lot of other publishers found, that's, that's a very hard place right now to get traction.
So I think, but, you know, I think that's, th-those are, those are a few of the things that we've learned.
I do think that there's this opportunity now, and I, you know, you've talked about this a lot, in this, that, that so much of the opportunity is in essential, in niches, in kind of, you know, what you might call a kind of business to business space, and a lot of our energy goes into doing coverage of media, of technology, of politics, of finance, which are the kind of core, I suppose, kind of power verticals.
Yeah, power centers. And doing it at a real, doing it at power centers- There's money. There's still, there's always gonna be money. Yeah, and doing that- And writing for those people.
And if you do that at a really high level, you can both build a business and you can break big news, 'cause if you're writing stuff that is of interest to the leaders on those and really in conversation with the leaders in those sectors, you're, you're writing some of the biggest stories in the world.
And so that's...
And I think we've been g- pretty decent at kind of trying to occupy the high end of those spaces and then kind of draw connections between them, have a kind of highest common denominator conversation, which has been really editorially satisfying, I would say.
Yeah. But how is it different, like, running this kind of organization versus BuzzFeed News? 'Cause again, BuzzFeed News is a totally different- Yeah... animal at a totally different time.
I mean, tra- the biggest, you know, I wrote a book called Traffic. Yeah. Right?
And, and we thought about traffic all day, and I still, like, I hit that parsley link like some kind of weird dead limb, phantom limb, and I'm just, like, twitching over here.
You know, it's one of a number of reasonably important things, right, to have good, to have a bunch of readers, and I think we're doing, uh, pretty good on that front.
But it's not, you know, it's not what we're oriented toward. We're oriented toward having, like, deep relationships with a, this core audience, you know, who are really at the center of these stories.
And so, a-and, and meanwhile, just watching the dynam- So what does that mean? What are the, what are the numbers- Watching, like, the dyn- What are the numbers you look at then?
You know, I mean, I mean, it, it, like, you know, the email number, like the, you know, growth of email newsletters, but not just random growth.
We're not, like, going on Facebook and buying random emails so that we can tell you that we have a zillion readers.
We're, you know, obsessing about where we acquire people who really are gonna want the product and open it and are deeply engaged in that subject, which is different.
And, you know, events have been a great place for us to build audience for the newsletters, actually, which I hadn't totally expected. You know, and I think we're in this n- really nice feedback loop with that audience.
But it is, yeah, but it, but it's just not that kind of business of random scale anymore.
I had this interesting conversation with somebody at a, a company that, let's say I'm sure I don't wanna sort of-Identify the person.
But it was a, a, you know, a publisher that does newsletters and they were saying that a few years ago when they had tens of thousands of subscribers to their newsletters, it was actually like a among oth- their things, a lucrative business and they then invested in buying lots of audience on Facebook, have hundreds of thousands subscribers to their newsletters, and now can't sell it because advertisers are like, "Huh, who are these people?
They're random people that you bought on Facebook, and if, like, we wanted to buy audience on Facebook, we'd buy audience on Facebook." And that is so different from the BuzzFeed days when it was just all about scale.
Yeah. I mean, the other big difference which goes with that saying is just that, you know, I look at our traffic and Facebook is just not a meaningful referrer.
In the end, at BuzzFeed, it was really always the first referrer. Yeah. When you look back on BuzzFeed News, could it have worked or was it always sort of because of the macro environment, you know?
I mean, the core bet was that you could build a news organization on the back of social media, and that was wrong, right? I think that just-- well, that's what Jonah and I thought.
We then made a lot of mistakes, including spending too much, just way too more money. We just thought that it could support a bigger business than it could.
I mean, there were lots of mistakes that we made, but that kind of core bet that so- that the social media ecosystem was kind of gonna evolve into something like cable where there were business models for content businesses.
I mean, nobody cracked that. There are individual creators doing okay, but there are no news organizations running that way, and so I don't... I think that it was fundamentally this macro thing.
I think we could have seen that a lot sooner and tried to turn it into a smaller, more subscriber-driven thing.
We had this great newsletter that we launched in probably twenty fifteen written by this guy, Eleamin Abdelmahmoud, who is now a, I r- recently learned, a very important Canadian cultural figure. Great, great guy.
Check out his show on CBC. And wrote a great newsletter, and the newsletter really got traction.
We could just feel the audience and, but we didn't, we had no idea what to do with it, and obviously, in retrospect, we should have been trying to build like a, a s- you know, a business with a smaller but more- Yeah...
you know, but, but, but very plugged in audience. So how different is it now with building Semafor in this more with less era? I know the types of people you hire.
Like, what are, what are, what are the differences in, in approaches from, you know, back when you're building BuzzFeed News to what you're doing now?
I mean, I think when we were building BuzzFeed News, we considered Twitter and our sort of competitive advantage for a little while was that we figured out that Twitter was the front page of news and just, like, said it that clearly and I told, you know, Rosie Gray and Zeke Miller and these great reporters I hired in twenty twelve, "Just think of Twitter as your front page.
If it's already on there, don't write it 'cause it's already on there. Break news.
It can be small news, but break stuff that people on Twitter are curious about, answer their questions, and that's how you build a news brand and news organization," and it totally worked.
And it, and, and the kind of journalists who did really well were often journalists with this very, very sort of sixth sense sensitivity to social media and sense of what was being talked about all the time.
Still a useful skill, for sure, but I think that kind of micro scoop matters a lot less actually.
You know, it's, it's hard, much, much harder to cut through, and to cut through, you need more velocity, more sort of weight to a story.
I do think original reporting scoops still just, you know, there's no, there's no replacement for that. They do call it news, and it has to, there has to be news in it.
But, but the, the, but the, the thing that the audience wants often is a direct connection with the individual journalist, which is so different, and also just help nav-- and I think if, like, people ten years ago thought, "Wow, this opening of social media is so delightful, and the fact that instead of just being stuck reading one publication, I have everything at my fingertips, it's wonderful," now people hate that and are looking to publishers to give them an alternative that synthesizes all this stuff coming from all over.
And so a lot of our effort is, is now directed toward synthesis, and we have this product called Signals, which is just really about saying we're n- 'cause I think the breaking news ecosystem is so broken, and so many organizations are doing this thing of something happens, and you write, like, a really quick one-sentence story and throw it on the internet in the hope of getting the Google link.
Yeah. And then maybe you fill in some more words 'cause Google wants words or something, or some SEO expert told you it did. But that, that is just not a good piece.
That's not a thing that is helping anybody understand the world. And so we've been, I think our approach has been the inverse.
Wait a beat, figure out what the facts are, and then get, find people expressing really thoughtful, informed analysis, often that dis- you know, disagreeing, if we can find it, and, and give you something that reflects what kind of almost used to be the best of the social media experience, which is, "Here's what happened.
Here's how to understand it." So you're making aggregation great again. We are making aggregation great again. [laughs] I, I believe I prefer the word distillation, I think. Well, that's the thing.
I mean, aggregation moves on, right?
I mean, I think aggregation was frequently done for algorithms, and it always drove me crazy when B-Business Insider would, in my view, rip off, like, a piece of original content, put it into a slideshow, and get ten times the traffic.
Just drove me nuts. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it also has a very long history in the media business. Yeah. The Associated Press began aggregating. So I think you, you know, you wanna do it really well.
You wanna add intelligence and, and, and, and also be- make sure that, and, and not, there is that sense of we are s- and it's a little hard to put your finger on, right? The, like, "They just stole our story.
What the hell?" Versus, "Oh, cool. They linked us." And it's a bit about humility- Yeah... among other things, and just how you do it.
And the fact that, like, I think anyone in any, any walk of life should remember that, you know, most people don't care. [laughs] Right. Yeah. Get the steal. But we, but it's not a... Yeah.
But that's about being a good citizen in the news ecosystem- Yeah... not about the reader. So let's talk about being good citizens.
These AI companies and the AI deals that are taking place, I think there's roughly two camps, and really your business model depends on which camp you're in.
One says there's, there's little choice, there's not much, I mean, my, I believe this, there's not much leverage that publishers are bringing if, if they ever had it.
At least they now know that they don't have any leverage. And money that goes to, straight to the bottom line, great, great.
Don't, don't bank on it, though [laughs] I wouldn't, I wouldn't extrapolate it in any ten-year plan, if anyone can have a ten-year plan.
The other is, you know, the Charlie Brown with the football gif that we kept running on any platform story for five years at Digiday.
What's your take?I guess I, I think, yeah, I found Jessica Lessin's argument pretty persuasive, that if you can afford to avoid doing these deals, it is too early, basically, and that there's a real risk in a deal that is basically like, "Hey, here's some money, stop complaining," as opposed to a deal that is a clear value exchange, and it's just too early to figure out what the value exchange is because these companies don't have businesses yet.
And so I do think it's-- th-this current round of deals is a sort of hand-wavy, leave us alone, here's some goodwill kind of a deal.
Although that said, the details matter a lot, and a lot of them are quite short-term and don't actually preclude the publishers from turning around and suing in two years, and don't necessarily sign away, you know, and, and concede all the rights questions.
So I don't know. We'll see, we'll see how it plays out. I guess I do think that there's a lot of different ways the AI, AI industry can go.
I mean, I think the notion that it's gonna be this kind of incredible monopoly business like the social and search platform business not, is not for sure.
It could be, you know, a huge business that loses money or a product that gets really commoditized.
And so I think those questions that are sort of hovering around what kind of a business is AI make it hard to figure out how the news business and how the media business plugs into it. Mm-hmm.
I mean, I guess my own view is that, you know, it's in some sense, it's like in the way, the way that you experience it, if you look at Perplexity taking whole news articles basically last week, it's just- it's distribution.
And it doesn't seem to me that it's written in stone that the distributors should get ninety percent of the revenue and the content should get ten. That's what the last era of media was, but not the one before.
And so I think, I do think the publishers ought to be pretty greedy here and be say-- and if you're The New York Times, and you're looking at these platforms, I do think you're saying, "Wait, this is a lot of our information.
They should have low margins for re- for rejiggering our information, and we should, and we should get most of the profits." Yeah.
And a lot of these deals are for, I mean, they're looking backwards to some degree, and I think what's unknown is how valuable news that's new will be- Right... in this.
Because they, they need to keep learning, they need to be up to date, and they s- they took all the stuff. So I can- Yeah, but now-...
understand, you know, look, not all the money's going to compute, a lot of it's going to lawyers. And so if a publisher's looking at it, they're like, "Oh my god, let The New York Times take on this battle."
[chuckles] Yeah, but it is true they're just literally running out of training data, and they're trying to figure out whether you can create, you can basically use AI to write new words that it can then train on.
There is some interesting and promising research in that direction. But they're gonna have basically used all the words up, like this year. And so maybe there then is relatively more value to new information. Yeah.
But it's not changing your... I mean, you're still a believer in, in words as a main output of Semafor. Yeah.
I mean, I think that there's a misperception among people who aren't in our business that we spend most of our time typing, that journalism is just typing.
But actually, most reporters spend as little time as possible typing, and most time gathering information that is out, that is not on, that is not yet on the internet.
And in some sense, like the core thing that great journalists are doing is taking things that are not on the internet and putting them on the internet. And that's not really...
I mean, I think, you know, there are probably AI tools that can help you do that better, but that's not something that I think is immediately threatened by AI.
And I think the kind of worst and least valuable and least sort of socially valuable and least fun forms of journalism are the ones where you're writing eleven blog posts a day about, you know, like cool things to do in Seattle- Yeah...
and maybe AI, based on your reading of TripAdvisor, and I think, like, probably AI can do that. Are you using AI in, in, at Semafor in the newsroom? Yeah.
We, you know, we have a, we do have a, a deal with Microsoft and OpenAI, although it's not a, it's a different, it's not around the corpus of text, like we're new, we don't have a lot of text, and so I, I fortunately didn't have to, didn't have to weigh that decision.
But the, I mean, these things are incredible research tools and, and they're sponsoring our, you know, our use of OpenAI for this, this tool that we're using for s- uh, one, one of our sort of value propositions is, is trying to make sure that you're getting a global point of view on stories.
And searching, even though machine translation is amazing, search across languages is hard.
Like, if I said to you like, "Hey, could you see if there's anybody say, in Japanese, Chinese, or Korean talking about yesterday's news?" That's a non-trivial challenge.
You could, I suppose, translate into Korean and Google in the Korean Google, but that's really hard.
And we, we, and, and OpenAI allowed us to build a tool that allows you to search across multiple languages for analysis of stories.
And then we're not copying and pasting their OpenAI text, but it's an amazing research tool. Do you think that lo- when you look long term, you'll have to build a far smaller newsroom in order to...
Can you cover more ground with fewer people? I mean, you look at like Klarna, you know, they got, they got, they got... The CEO of Klarna is like, "We're stopping recruiting.
We're gonna need twenty percent fewer people in every area." I think it really depends what kind of, what people in your newsroom are doing.
I mean, I do think, you know, things that I guess you could call AI have been chipping away at copy desks for a long time.
Like, I don't think Grammarly is gonna be out on street corners gunning down, you know- Copy editors always go first-... people-... yeah... Minority Report style. That's what I say.
But I do think copy editors are kinda getting screwed again, for sure. And they're production jobs. I mean, I do think the s- you, the s- you know, I mean, the, if you...
I mean, before the previous wave of the internet put a lot of drivers and printers out of business, and I do think it's continuing to kind of chew its way up that ladder of production and take out a lot of production tasks, which if you're running a big newsroom, I mean, you have a lot of people you really have to worry about.
These are people's jobs. Mm-hmm. If you are starting a thing from scratch, I mean, for us, it's a huge advantage.
It just means there's stuff that we can do much more inexpensively and use that money to hire journalists, which is what I'd rather do. Yeah. Actually, that's unfair. Those people are journalists. But to hire reporters.
What other advantages do you have starting from scratch? 'Cause it is, this seems like a great time to start from scratch.
But just- It is a great- From the outside, I look at what's going on in these, in these big newsrooms, I'm like, "Oh my God." There's so much going on that's threatening from the outside world.
And- Yeah, it's a great time to start from scratch. It truly is.
I mean, partly because the landscape is, because the distribution landscape has changed so radically and you can put your energy into reaching people one to one, into doing events where you would have, as opposed to trying to, you know, feed a kind of social media beast.
I mean, just it's a very different way of thinking.The other big change, which we've talked about a lot, is, is around, you know, just the readers and attachment to individual journalists and wanting to amplify the voices of individuals versus a kind of faceless brand.
And then, you know, there's space for some of both, but certainly if you are, you know, a great reporter at the, the Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post, give me a call, let's talk about how to make your byline bigger and have people know who you are.
I mean, I think that's a real advantage for, for startups that are built in this particular moment when... And I, and I do hate these words like influencer and creator and all that, but, and personal brand, right?
Like, everybody sort of just rolls their eyes in, in, in the sort of hard journalism world.
But at the same time, that is, that is the direction of travel for the industry and figuring out how you can do that in a way that kinda, you know, where you're not turning over your journalism card to, you know, at the door- Yeah...
is pretty exciting. Speaking of that, I was, I was intrigued that you're, you're reading ads now. I mean, was this something that you [laughs] would have thought of when you got into this profession?
You know, I think I'm, I'm very-- I love breaking stories. I'm not, I don't have sort of ideological views on, you know, on, on, on this kind of stuff, on, on the business.
I think it's really important for journalists to have very, very strong ideological views about journalism and be pretty agnostic about revenue. I just mean, like, actually being...
Like, I think one of the interesting things with podcasting is- Right, is that it's like early days radio and you're reading the ads yourselves?
Well, yeah, because, like, in, in, in print or text-based journalism, I mean, nobody, very few journalists, I mean, outside of some lifestyle categories are, are, are writing the ads. Yeah.
I mean, I am glad that, I mean, in we, in our case, I think actually I read the ads in the first one, but my colleague Rachel Oppenheim is perhaps slightly more forcefully and enthusiastically reading some of the ads going forward.
But we did.
I mean, I was concerned when we started talking about audio that I would, and I got beat up when I said this before, but that I was gonna have to talk about green juice, and actually, in fact, love green juice.
You're talking about Google instead. It's great. But instead I- That can get more awkward, to be honest with you, when you're talking- I'm talking about-... with your media podcast [laughs]... advertising.
Well, let's talk, well, let's talk about advertising and with the, with, with this, with, uh, this very senior Google ad exec who's genuinely totally wired into it. So it's, it's pretty... I don't know.
I think, I think you could do worse. Yeah. No. I, I'm not precious about it. Um, but- Thank you. Uh, you're my, you're my ethical North Star, Brian. [laughs] I don't know what that means.
I think that was an insult, but I'm not sure. We'll just leave it there. [laughs] We'll leave it hanging. Ben, thank you. It's always a pleasure. Fun to talk. Yeah. Thanks for having me on.
[outro music]