[on-hold jingle] And so you ask, well, what is going on here? Why has so much value been created by this little magazine that is not well known?
That is sort of being imported a little bit into the Semafor model, but not on a weekly print basis, but on a twenty-four/seven minute-by-minute digital basis. Yeah. So let's talk about, like, the money, right?
[on-hold jingle] The Rebooting show is a weekly podcast where I have in-depth conversations with people who are building sustainable media businesses.
I'm Brian Morrissey, and this week I'm joined by Justin Smith, a longtime media executive who was most recently the CEO of Bloomberg News.
Justin, alongside co-founder Ben Smith, former NYT media columnist and editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, is launching today Semafor, a global news brand that's backed with twenty-five million dollars of private investment.
The big takeaway from our discussion was around differentiation. How you differentiate a brand is different today than it was.
There are many ways to differentiate from the surface level of design to the product level and of course, in mission.
I think in a crowded media landscape, differentiation has both never been harder but also never been more important.
We talk about how Semafor is unbundling a news article, solving for the trust deficit in news, and also the sequencing of a business model as Semafor is launching with an ad model before adding in subscriptions alongside events.
As always, please send me your feedback. My email is bmorrissey@gmail.com. And if you like the episode, please leave it a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or a rating, hopefully a high one, on Spotify.
Justin, very glad to, uh, do the podcast again. I think this is, like, the third or fourth I've done with you. I love your podcast.
[chuckles] I'm a big fan, and, you know, been a little bit in sort of stealth mode the last couple of months, but happy to be back on.
Okay, so we only have a half hour, but I don't, I don't wanna cover the stuff that's already been covered. But very quickly, like, I think one of the big questions with, with Semafor, and I'm so glad to see it.
I mean, I just... you just walked me through the product itself, and we'll get to that. But what... very quickly, what, what is the gap in the market exactly?
'Cause I think a lot of people, and myself too, is like, "Well, I read the FT, I get The Economist.
Bloomberg News I have a subscription to, and various other publications out there that are getting me smart about what's happening in the world around me." Where's the gap exactly?
Listen, I think the gap is actually found when you talk to news consumers themselves, and you just have to look at the data, look at the research, and the level of frustration that news consumers have with their existing news ecosystem, even though you may like a lot of those brands and others may like those brands, is actually very, very high.
People are screaming from the rooftops, "We're tired of bias. We're tired of polarization. We're tired of editorial and news being blended with, with opinion."
Where this whole thing started with all this social media distortion and news... the news industry's re-response has been, you know, not generally that appealing to a lot of consumers. And so the idea of an incredibly...
of, of a new, high quality, totally independent, extremely transparent news brand that is responding to these concerns is really what set... the mark the gap that Semafor is gonna try to fill.
Layered on top of the polarization bias, of course, is this notion, the other huge problem in, amongst news consumers is this sense of information overload.
You know, people are completely overwhelmed, and you can, you could, you can read story after story after story, and if you wanna be well informed, you literally could spend your whole day doing so.
And very few of the existing quality international global news brands actually make it their business to try to solve that information overload for their readers as well, by actually reading everything, distilling things, and packaging that information with our own original content in a very kind of novel and new way.
So in a sense, it's bringing transparent news to these frustrated consumers.
It's totally separating out news from analysis from opinion, and then it's bringing in, from a range of intelligent source, a whole range of competing distilled views that actually s- you know, save time for the consumer and offer a much more, much richer, much more kaleidoscopic news experience than they're getting from traditional news media.
Yeah. One of the things that I find really interesting is how you launch a brand now and what type of brands it is versus five, seven, ten years ago. So, I mean, you launched Quartz, right?
So, like, you know, and in some ways, like, I think there's some similarities in that when Quartz was...
it was a different era, and it was a different approach, but it was going after, I think, broadly something kind of similar, right? But, like, the way you're going about it is completely different. Yeah.
Explain the thinking here, because, like, you know, I forget when Quartz launched. All the years blend together. Two thousand and eleven. Two thousand- Two thousand and eleven. I knew it was around then.
But- I mean, Quartz w- Quartz was a, was different in a very significant way because Quartz was really targeting a very narrow, um, business and financial global audience. It was sort of...
it was entering into that specific space that the FT or The Economist occupied at the time. Obviously, it went in a different direction over a while.
So there was sort of a, a fundamental kind of editorial difference, whereas Semafor is really going after a premium general interest audience, but globally as well.
You know, I mean, there's so many differences to obviously how we launched Quartz to how we're launching Semafor. I think the rise of newsletters, uh, honestly, has been a kind of a, a big change in the last ten years.
And even though newsletters in some ways in twenty twenty-two, you know, I think it was, what, two years ago that people wrote about peak newsletter? Yeah. Or was it last year or three years ago?
Even though it sort of feels like a kind of a well-trodden sort of publishing model, the reality is, is that newsletters in the news sector for news consumersKind of remain the, the most potent, most powerful way of actually connecting direct to new audiences and new subscribers, and that's been a very resilient forum.
And so Quartz, for instance, launched with one global newsletter, the Quartz Daily Brief, which did really, really well. Semafor's launching actually with eight, and f- on, on a range of different subjects.
One global newsletter called Flagship, which is going to be effectively a, a morning publication for cross-border thinkers around the world who don't wanna read 10 different intelligence sources, but actually Semafor will do the work for them and summarize and distill the most intelligent news around the world to a whole range of newsletters focused on places like Washington, DC, and so the power and influence game in Washington to a bunch of vertical newsletters around very specific verticals like business, technology, climate, media, obviously with Ben Smith.
And in some, some ways... I think you tweeted this a couple of weeks ago, and I kind of... I really thought it was really a smart observation, is in, in many ways we're launching with a collection of niche
verticals- Mm-hmm... that all kind of together are gonna live in this- on this platform called Semafor. And there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of reasons for that.
I mean, primarily it's because I think that's how consu- consumers are looking to connect with specific subjects on specific- in specific areas.
But as you will well know, too, the, the, the business model advantage is actually- of actually monetizing verticals as opposed to sort of broad horizontals makes, make a lot of sense, too.
And so, um, your- I think your, your tweet, your observation was really accurate. [gentle music] Okay, so it seems pretty clear that...
I mean, would you describe this as like a newsletter first approach? Because you're, you're looking to...
I mean, we just walked through the product, and everyone will see it by the time this is out, but- Are you gonna give your reaction, Brian? It's like your, your first- No, I said [laughs] I was gonna give it to you.
I'll give it to you after you answer this question- Okay... 'cause I need more information. I'm still- Well, I gotta interrupt first because it is definitely- Gosh... we're definitely not a newsletter first- Okay.
That's why I wanted to a- [laughs] That's what I wanted to ask. Yeah.
Because I think, I think what we're seeing now in the kinds of brands that are coming out, you know, a lot of them are leaning much more on newsletters, like, you know, as the heart of it.
Like, so if you were to look at the KPIs, it used to all be website KPIs, right?
And like now I think a l- and for a lot of brands, it's more about having that direct connection, and we, we've gone over a, a million times why that's, why that's incredibly important.
But I think in just going through the product, like I see what you guys are trying to do is balance a bunch of different things, right? The site is still important, but newsletters are still important.
The individuals are very important. Their, the photos are bigger, and their names are bigger, and stuff like this, but at the same time the institutional brand is important. So first of all, is that accurate?
And like how do you- No, that, that, that is accurate. Apologies for interrupting. Yeah. I think that we are a brand first launch, a multi-platform m- media brand first approach.
We're launching with a number of different channels. Email is a really, really effective channel for the reasons you mentioned.
It's also a great channel to start with, especially if you're, you know, you're starting with a new venture from scratch.
It's a great way of amplifying that direct relationship between really, really strong, uh, journalists who have followings on social media, have followings, you know, based on their prior reporting, which we've hired a, an amazing group.
Digital, you know, mobile web is a very important channel as well. Video is actually going to be a very important channel for us.
We hired Joe Posner from Vox, who was the, the wiz there, who built, you know, I think one of the best and most dynamic video businesses for a news organization, Vox's Explained series, et cetera.
And we've already stood up, you know, some time ago, actually six months ago, we stood up Semafor X, which is our live events business.
And, and those are just the initial four channels that we're focused on, and we're gonna be, you know, over time e- exploring others.
We're not doing podcasts at the outset, as you may have noticed, but that's something which we will, you know, which we're exploring. So it's really...
It's, it's less about being, you know, a certain channel prior- prioritized over others and more about the sequencing of different channels and how effective various channels are at different stages of the growth of the business.
And I think, you know, we're starting off with a pretty good base of newsletter subscribers today, and we- when we launch, and it's... and obviously none of these newsletters have actually been consumed by anyone.
That's a really good and great advantage, and we're also starting with a really great cohort of advertisers that are, that are gonna be embedded into the platform from the very beginning, too.
So first, good idea for skipping podcasts. I don't need Ben doing like a media podcast, so I wholeheartedly endorse that. Definitely not a podcast first company.
[laughs] One of the things that there's always a pivot down the road. One of the things that you mentioned when we were walking through the product is differentiation, right?
When you launch, you need to differentiate, and I actually wrote a, a piece, uh, I think it was like a year or two ago, about the hierarchy of differentiation because there's a lot of different ways to differentiate, and it's almost, like, harder now to differentiate, like, right?
Like, you used to be able to differentiate in, particularly in the analog era, in a whole different- in a whole bunch of different ways, particularly on the packaging side.
Now, from what I see of the product, you have a bunch of different differentiation. There's the Semafor Yellow, I think we're trying to call it, sort of like your version of the, the salmon of the FT.
But you're also trying to differentiate w- within the sort of product format, you know, and that's what you're calling Semaform, and I assume that is going to carry over beyond just text content into, into video and the other ways.
E- explain, like, how you guys were thinking about differentiation.Well, differentiation for differentiation's sake is potentially a dangerous strategy.
I think that the way that we went about this was that we really, really tried to think about the consumer then in twenty twenty-two.
And even though you opened up this podcast with glowing reports of satisfied news consumers loving, you know, all the great existing legacy newspapers, you know, there's a slightly different story.
You know, there's, you know, people are pretty upset with, you know, the rise of, you know, of advocacy journalism, for instance, on- Yeah... you know, on the left or the right.
And it's kind of, you know, and it's argued that we're not in a pretty polarized environment in this country and in other countries around the world.
So it's incredibly hard to argue that information overload is not at kind of peak levels.
So we really started, first and foremost, trying to understand these concerns, these frustrations, and then trying to build basically a s- a product or a series of products that address those concerns.
You know, newsrooms, premium journalism enviro- companies in the world aren't necessarily known for their consumer centricity around really, really listening to their customers that much.
And for instance, one example of that is very few of the big global premium journalism brands will ever aggregate anybody else's content. That's a no-no.
If you want to receive any content from us, it's gonna be from our brand, even though, you know, even though there's an amazing series of stories on the same subject that you ought to know about. So anyway.
So we started really with the consumer, and then, and as we were solving those consumer problems with the product, that's when the sort of the constant overlay of differentiation the really, really strong force for us.
And so you have to be different. You have to be solving consumer problems. The way that we've... Say our differentiation is in a couple of different are- different areas.
Um, it starts with, honestly, you know, the quality of the journalists and the quality of the original news.
You know, remember Semafor is a breaking news model where, you know, we, you know, our growth and our future is going to be based on, you know, how much original, highly relevant, agenda-setting news that we bring out into the world, and that's starting today.
So that's obviously a huge source of differentiation, having original content that is of high quality and high relevance.
The Semaform you mentioned probably is probably the most significant kind of product differentiation that is also answering this consumer concern.
And just for your audience, just to explain it, I mean, we learned through a lot of discussions with consumers that people view the sort of the traditional atomic unit of journalism, which is the seven hundred word article, as a bit of a black box, and that, you know, sometimes it's actually the article form itself is a source of, of confusion and a source of actually of, of the distrust that people feel because people feel like they're being sort of sold a bill of goods.
In the process of being information or news being conveyed, there's sort of framing, there's sort of the blending in of some analysis, there's a blending, blending of opinion, and people end up feeling like they just can't trust a certain source, and then they go and look for alternative sources.
So we decided that we would break down the article into its ind- individual components and separate it into sections that would be completely transparent and exposed to the reader. We call it transparent journalism.
And the idea is you'd start with the news or the facts or the scoop, which is the information that can't be really debated because it's objective news.
And then we introduce a section called the reporter's view, which is actually allowing the reporter to actually analyze very openly to the reader, this is actually what this experienced reporter thinks of this subject.
And then to the point I made earlier about distilling other sources, we then go and identify an alternative perspective from the reporter's view called Room for Disagreement, which we embed into our own article to show sort of a, a counterpoint, frankly, to our reporter's perspective.
And finally, we anchor all of that at the end in a section called The View From, which is meant to provide, to provide global context and is one of the, one of the theses of Semafor is that in twenty twenty-two, most, if not all stories have or require some sort of global context or understanding, and so we're gonna embed that into every story.
So that's the Semaform.
And, you know, I think between the design, the Semafor yellow, I think some of the other tension to design and other things, the Semaform, the multi-platform approach, I think we're doing a lot of very different things.
Will they all work? I'm sure some will and some won't. Yeah. And obviously, this is a kind of a moving experiment of some sorts, like any startup should be.
And so, you know, the minute we get reader feedback later today and across this week, we're, you know, we're gonna be pouncing on that information, trying to see what's hitting, what's not hitting, and how we can evolve it in order to better serve these consumers.
[instrumental music] Yeah, what I found interesting about the Semaform is that it's kind of unbundling the article format.
The seven hundred word article format has been around for a long time, and it, it really existed because of the constraints of analog, and it didn't really make sense in digital.
But there's been some attempts to really change it. I think the way Axios has gone about, um- Totally... its approach, I think it has some flaws. It gets a little monotonous in my view, but that's me.
But I think what's interesting about this is
there is like a la- a lack of transparency that's always been built into the, um, to the news article because there's a lot of things that go on in the background that nobody sees.
And I think just like there's a lack of trust in ad tech because of that, I think that that leads to a lack of trust in, in journalism to some degree.
You have an editor that you don't even know about who, like, wrote the headline and framing and stuff like this. I mean, at Digiday, a lot of times I was writing the leads and stuff.
And so I would always say to reporters, "Look, if anyone ever complains, just blame me," because a lot of times it was true. No, and it is, it's also...
I mean, the other kind of widespread behavior, I mean, we're, you know, the audience that we're targeting, you know, in our initial phase is gonna be, you know, a combination of national and global, uh-You know, opin, you know, opinion leaders, thought leaders, we're starting with that sort of news omnivore who's reading lots of sources.
We think there's a lot of frustration there but one of the use cases that we picked up over and over and over by studying these people is the use case of a reader reading a certain story from a single source, most likely in a seven hundred word inverted pyramid, sort of black box article, beginning halfway through or towards the end to think, "Well, wait, what am I being sold here?
What's, what, why am I being... " Yeah.
And then having to, like, stop their news consumption process, go onto, you know, fire up their browser and then go and Google alternative perspectives to that story that they just read in one source.
And we call it triangulating the news.
People have become their own news triangulators, you know, they're, because they just, they're like, "I love The New York Times," or, "I love this or that, but, you know, I just want a different perspective."
And so for this group, I think the service that, that Semafor is offering is gonna be unique and unusual, which is we're gonna triangulate the news for you.
We're gonna bring in ideological perspectives from the other side. We're gonna bring in, you know, geographic perspectives.
You know, and a lot of this, Brian, we knew each other back then too, was inspired by, you know, my time, it's now 20, more than 20 years ago when I started The Week magazine in the US. Yeah.
Um, you know, which is really designed in a weekly print format to sort of distill the entire world's, uh, media to basically help people with information overload.
And, you know, I always tell, I tell a little funny little story, which is, you know, The Week, a print magazine, The Week UK and The Week US I think sold for five hundred and fifty million dollars in 2021.
This is a news weekly print magazine selling for five hundred and fifty million dollars, which is five times the price that Marc Benioff paid for Time magazine, twice the price that Jeff Bezos paid for The Washington Post.
And so you ask, "Well, what is going on here? Why has so much value been created by this little magazine that is not well-known?"
Well, the answer is they're connected so deeply with their audience and their consumers 'cause they're solving a problem they have. Mm-hmm. And I remember the, the reader feedback we got at The Week was just intense.
People said, "Thank you, I'm drowning."
And so a lot of the, the service that, you know, that that provided is sort of being imported a little bit into the Semafor model, but not on a weekly print basis, but on a twenty-four/seven minute-by-minute digital basis.
And so you'll see us leaning into that idea very, very strongly across the coming, uh, weeks and months. Yeah. So let's talk about, like, the money, right?
I think everyone is going towards the same direction for most models and having diversified models, but it's also where you begin. These days, more people are beginning with subscriptions.
Uh, and there are advantages to that, there are trade-offs to that. You're starting with advertising. From what I've read, you plan on adding in subscriptions. There's obviously events.
Explain how you're thinking through both the, the revenue model and also the sequencing. Sure.
Well, I guess if everyone's starting with subscriptions and we're starting with advertising, it's another example of differentiate- Yes, contrarian.
[laughs] No, I think, first of all, there isn't just one way to do this, and I've been a huge admirer of this whole, this new crop of startups that are doing all sorts of interesting things.
You know, Jessica Lessin of The Information has just done an amazing job, and she's one of our, actually one of our investors and a great friend of Semafor's.
And obviously we're seeing, you know, obviously the Axios kind of, the rise of Axios has just been just absolutely astounding and well executed.
You know, our view is that starting with a hard paywall for a brand new brand and brand new journalism with a totally different journalistic format and proposition is, is a tough slog, especially if you're looking at building something with some scale.
You know, I think it's, it makes, can make a little bit more sense in a, in a niche market, but if you're looking to build a global news brand, if we started with a hard paywall, no, no one would really understand, have any time to really understand what the brand meant, what the product offering was.
And so we felt very strongly that the initial phase of Semafor really needed to be a phase of introducing the brand and the content and the journalism and these innovations I've been talking about to the target audience, developing a relationship, developing that engagement across these different channels.
And we also felt that there, you know, because of the unique and innovative nature of what we're trying to do, because of the mission that we're pursuing, which is really to sort of restore quality, independent journalism in this somewhat broken market, that a, that a lot of forward-thinking global, uh, marketers and brands would, would really want to align with that and, uh, align with that not only because they want to reach the audience that we're reaching, but also because of the, the mission that we're undertaking.
[upbeat music] You know, I, I can't tell you the number of, uh, meetings with advertisers that I've had across the last six months where literally advertisers said, "Listen, thank you so much for doing this.
You know, this is so needed in the world right now." And yeah, they're not gonnaBy advertising with us on the basis of that, but it's the most important part of it. So we have been really, really fortunate.
We did a global roadshow. We met with eighty of the Fortune global one hundred companies at the C-suite level, working with our CRO, Rachel Oppenheim, who's-- who came from The New York Times.
And, you know, we're launching with ten founding partners, some of the great brands in the world who are engaging with us on a, you know, on a, a number of different levels in advertising, on thought leadership, integrated partnerships.
They're, you know, highly custom programs that, you know, some of which are fifteen months long, some of which are twelve months long, some of which are six months long.
Very customized to each individual, each individual brand.
And the promise to them, of course, is that we are innovating in a critical marketplace and into an audience that is, you know, of opinion leaders that they care tremendously about.
All the advertisers largely are corporate brand advertisers, you know.
So it's not-- we're not necessarily working with the sort of the broad consumer advertising base, but, you know, whole, a whole range of companies from, you know, from Mastercard to Verizon to, you know, Tata, the Indian company, to Chevron, to Pfizer, to Qualcomm, to Genesis and Hyundai, the Korean car company.
So a really, really blue chip group.
And, you know, they're gonna, gonna be integrated into our platform in a bunch of very, very creative ways that we'll be talking about in the coming-- well, the people will see, but we'll also be talking about in the coming weeks.
Yeah.
So final thing is, are a lot of these dipping into, like, the corporate, like, I forget, the corporate, like, affairs budgets that, you know, the, the advertisers in Axios, Politico, Punchbowl, and, like, a lot of the...
I mean, there's so many. I didn't think Washington, DC would ever be the hotbed of, like- [laughs]... media innovation, but, like, you know, you go where the money is.
You see them in The New York Times and Bloomberg too. I mean, and you also saw them in my other alma mater, The Atlantic. You know, I mean, that, that was-- The Atlantic was really built in a lot of this ad base as well.
Listen, it's a really interesting story, actually.
I think Peter Kafka wrote a piece recently about it, which is it's the rise of corporate brand marketing, really, in this country, which used to be sort of a nit- niche market, but really has grown as companies have found the, you know, the need, the imperative urgency around telling their corporate brand story.
As companies have been held more accountable by a broader range of stakeholders about their role in the world, about their, you know, environmental footprint, about their, their social footprints, et cetera.
So yes, a big part of our initial advertising model, given the target audience I mentioned, is from that category. Right.
And it's a little bit protected in that you're not totally competing on a DR basis with, like, a Google and Facebook and stuff.
It's much more akin to a business-to-business kind of advertising market than it is to a broad consumer market.
And I think, and this goes back to your prescient tweet a few weeks ago, which is, you know, if you're launching with a, you know, eight verticals that reach deep into the opinion leader segment of business and finance and technology and climate and Washington, the business model proposition is ph- is, as you say, it's sort of a disaggregated B2B niche model all sort of sitting on top of a general interest platform.
And I think that's potentially the in-an in-innovation too, uh, in terms of how we're thinking about it. Yeah. All right, Justin, we're gonna leave it there.
I wanna revisit this in six months or at least a year 'cause things will change. We didn't, we didn't even get to talk about our events business, which is another- I know. But, like- [laughs]...
we don't know where-- We're out of time. I'm, I'm happy to go into, to the events business. But I mean, I do see, I mean... I remember when you were at Bloomberg, you know, starting the alternative Davos. Yeah.
It seems like you're gonna be going in that direction a little bit with this too. Yeah. We've got a great events, events plan in place.
You know, we're, you know, coming out of-- It's funny, coming out of COVID, and again, because I've been talking to so many of these clients the last number of months, I can't tell you the number of times people have said, "Justin, I can't believe today I had twelve clients call me, and they all had the same question.
I need a li- I need a live event proposal."
[laughs] You know, and so whether that's a psychological thing that is, is a result of people being cooped up and feeling the need to sort of socialize again, or whether it's actually sort of a, a media mix shift for-- into experiential, I don't know, but it's just an interesting thing.
Yeah. Okay. Cool. Okay. Justin, thank you so much. Thanks, Brian. Bye-bye. Bye. Thank you for listening this week. We will be back next week with a new episode. The Rebooting show is produced by Podhelpus.
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