Hey, it's Eric Newcomer.
Welcome to Newcomer, the podcast.
This week I have on Ben Smith, the former editor and chief of Buzzfeed News and the co-founder
of Semaphore.
We talk about the death, unfortunately, of Buzzfeed News.
We recorded the episode before the New York Times reported that Vice looked to be on the
edge of declaring bankruptcy.
And so this has been a period of total decimation for the once wonder children of digital media.
Ben and I talk about Buzzfeed and Gawker and his book Traffic, which is coming out soon.
It's a media story, but it's also a story of blitzkaling and unicorn funding.
Both Buzzfeed and Vice-Rays, tons of venture capital money, threw all that money at building
a media business and then saw it all unwind.
So fun to look back on that period and to get a preview of Ben's upcoming book.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
Always fun to talk with Ben, someone who's very in touch with the news moments.
So we also talked a little bit about Tuck Carlson and the presidential election.
Definitely worth sticking it out to the end.
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And now for the episode, my conversation with Ben Smith.
Ben, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thank you for having me here.
I'm in a random hotel room at the Harvard Crimson is doing their 150th reunion.
So I am at peak media event in my world.
My feeling I met on the Crimson, you know, and then I got engaged like more than a decade
later anyway.
If I'd known you went to Harvard before now, it would have totally changed.
So I thought of you.
Good. I'm glad you didn't feel like I shamelessly lead with that.
Not at all.
Nobody does.
It's funny.
You're going to the White House correspondent centers.
Yes.
So I'm actually going to the dinner.
Oh, really?
Which is now the sort of more interesting stuff and the kind of useful Washington one
stop shop at Alice Lake where you get to see a group of the earth series of parties before
and after, including one we just threw last night.
I was rereading an old David car piece from 2012 where he sort of profiling BuzzFeed.
You just came on.
It was like a funny snapshot of the time.
Like his lead is about you, I think, scooping that John McCain had endorsed Mitt Romney,
which is like also just such a different political environment where like, I feel like there
are these beliefs that like these endorsements are going to like, I mean, it seemed like it
mattered at the time.
Yeah.
It was one of those big ephemeral scoops you couldn't possibly care about two days later,
but was meaningful for a startup news organization.
Right.
And you know, he sort of captures the idea, you know, that I think you get the distill
plays out true is like this contrast between BuzzFeed going like high and low, right?
And this sort of, oh, they're going to to story about the Arab Spring will be next to
a picture of your sister's new baby.
Why not have a publishing site that embraces those colliding worlds?
It's just funny to go down memory lane there.
I wanted to just start off, you know, to talk about this book traffic.
Like, why did you join BuzzFeed in the first place?
Like going back to you had been a reporter of political, right?
And when you started BuzzFeed, you were still like doing a column still for political, right?
Like what convinced you to go over to BuzzFeed?
Yeah.
I've been writing a blog for political people remember blogs.
It was a blog.
All right.
Then earlier form of this kind of transitional form of digital media.
And it was like that blog with a handful of others were sort of where the 2008 presidential
race had been arbitrated.
And I could just, you could feel and I could also see in the traffic because I'd gotten
a political engineer to embed an extreme tracker.
If anybody remembers what that is, into the header of my blog.
And so I would sort of watch the traffic click by click and did.
Yeah.
And both could see the intensity with which people were reading about that race.
The insert feel, it was so fun.
You were just in this role in conversation with, you know, tens of thousands of people,
some of them, you know, the chief of staff to the candidate and some of them smart, clever,
random people, good ideas.
And in 2008, 2009, that still happens.
And then in like 2010, 2011, you can both feel and see in the traffic that the conversation
has moved to Twitter.
And that when you break a story, you know what you want to see is, oh my God, is it
traveling on Twitter or people sharing or the people in that conversation sharing it.
Oh, and by the way, like the commenters, the sources, the readers, a lot of them, like
if you're that intensely immersed in it, you know by name, have moved over to Twitter
too.
Right.
And so when Jonah came to me and said, I want to start this new news organization that
just takes for granted the Facebook and Twitter or the front page of the internet and the
media company's goals to punch through there, it's like, that's what I was already doing
and not articulated it as clearly as he could.
And also could not really explain it to my political colleagues.
Like it was so, you know, they were very focused on, you know, oh, can you write the
big homepage story, which I think to some degree with what felt like the job, but for
me, felt like being asked, like, can you like fill something in for print?
Like felt like this ancient outmoded thing to have to do.
And you know, I'm having you on this podcast that focuses on like Star of Symmetric Capital,
partially like looking through the list.
I mean, reading this old story, you see like it was the layers who are investors, pen layer,
NEA, Hearst Interactive, SoftBank, RE, like, you know, tech investors were going behind
Buzzfeed earlier.
Did you talk, was it all Jonah talking to the sort of VCs or did you spend much time while
you were a buzzfeed?
No, I mean, I didn't, I wasn't, I was around in in some of those conversations.
When we went out to the Stendries and Horror Woods in 2012, I was certainly in those meetings,
although the political journalists who'd been totally immersed in that, I had no idea
about, I mean, I didn't know anything about the media business, like much less about the
sort of second order financial elements.
Like, I'd been totally focused on the reporting, but I do think it's interesting because, you
know, in retrospect, and as I've written this book, and I, there was a chapter that went
around, we talked a little bit about, you know, our retrospectively, just unbelievably
dumb decision not to sell the company.
Yeah, so you have them right.
I thought a little lately, but like, what the hell were we thinking and what were they
thinking when they put this much money into Buzzfeed and into other companies?
Like, even was the bet, it's hard to explain.
And I would not go out and say to anyone, I'm doing a media startup and, you know, we're
going to generate the kind of returns in four years that a venture capitalist would be
satisfied with.
Right.
I think in a good case, it's a, you know, we create a lot of value, but not that fast.
McCrystixen, who does the Coinbase investment, he leads the investment and recent horror
rights, right?
Yeah, these are really smart people.
Right.
He's a smart person.
Well, I mean, it's easy to forget.
First, just the extent to which we felt like the wind was crazily at our back.
Right. Jonah had like been the first to see the direction of the wind and like hoist up
sail and like just the traffic was growing like crazy.
And people were responding well to this blend of news and fun stuff, which sort of was a
mirror of your Facebook feed at the time, which people also were responding well to.
And we were growing with Facebook, most of all, and we were sort of in the Facebook
ecosystem.
We knew that was a risk, but it was also an opportunity.
And the metaphor that was so powerful then, you know, Ken Lear, the chairman, the founder
of the Herr Ventures had admitted MTV in the early days.
And the metaphor that we thought that we were the piece of history, we thought we were
reliving was the birth of cable, most of all, when you had a new way of distributing content.
And then, you know, these lines laid, you know, in the earth and a bunch of media companies
enduring incredibly valuable media companies, CNN, ESPN, Fox, you know, MTV, grow up as the
content for these pipes.
And there's a mutual, you know, there's a tug of war between a continual tug of war
between the cable operator and the contact company over who gets the value.
But there's also a mutual recognition that each is essential and that the ecosystem is
important.
And we thought, wow, Wokey, we're going to be, you know, social media is the pipes.
It's the cable.
And we're going to be the content player.
And there are going to be a number of content companies like you grow up and become via
them.
And obviously, I say this now and I sound like an insane person.
But at the time that did not seem utterly implausible, and I think a little about is
there an alternate version of history where these social media companies, which are now
dying, see into the future that their competitor are not each other, but are Netflix are, you
know, changing the cultural change or that they need to get to a place where they're
delivering content people love and that they can't rely on UGC for it.
Well, yeah, I mean, Facebook in particular, you know, has been a terrible partner throughout
its whole history.
You know, it's like screws over a zinga, screws over, you know, the gaming company, you
know, in your book, it's, you know, you have like Jonah, like texting with what like top
product people of Facebook really feeling like, Oh, no, we've got our arms around it.
We know where this company is going to go.
And then, you know, Facebook, it seems like it betrays everybody at some point does.
I don't think they owed us anything.
I don't really see it as a betrayal.
And I think they were trying to, I mean, I think often when media companies look at Facebook,
it's like you're looking through the telescope through the opposite end and trying to figure
out what's going on.
Like, it's an unequal relationship and Facebook wasn't thinking much about media companies.
It wasn't, it was sort of thinking about users.
I do think as you watch that blue app lose its cultural place, you know, it's interesting
to think about if they had tried to cultivate kind of the sort of healthy ecosystem the
cable companies did, you know, where, I mean, cable would not have stopped around if it
was all public access.
Right.
Yeah.
Early on a network, you need to sort of facilitate sort of premium content.
Well, that's the, hold on.
Now, what you just said is the lie that they tell VCs that early on you need to see the
premium content so it'll have it free.
I think what I'm saying is that you need to develop a long-term relationship where you
share like half the value with media companies.
If you want them to stick around, like, you know, it turns into a way worse business.
It turns it into the media business.
Nobody wants to be in the media business.
Right.
I mean, in some ways, that sounds like YouTube where, you know, they do give a large share.
They give a massive share of one of their revenue streams to creators.
But no, it sounds like NBC Universal, right?
It sounds like companies that these incredible, these very highly valued tech companies do
not want to emulate.
Right.
I mean, in the book, you set it up as this duel with Gawker or I wanted to bring Gawker
into the story here a little bit.
I mean, you know, obviously in Silicon Valley's memory, sort of, I think, Valley Wags sits
in the center of it and Peter Teal bringing down Gawker.
I feel like in particular with Silicon Valley people, they don't have many like fond memories
of Gawker, but I think you've been talking to media people.
It's like, oh my God, they were like so alive.
And you know, there were some truly like great pieces.
I mean, can you capture some of the like, you know, what was exciting about Gawker at
sort of its peak and what represented like what was great about it?
Yeah, what was great about it for real?
I mean, a couple of things.
One was that Gawker itself early on where, you know, where these the writers were almost
entirely like young women who were outsiders who were great writers and who were, you know,
basically making fun of the ossified pathetic decaying New York Times, Conde Nast, world
of big New York media.
And so obviously outsiders that if they were being a little mean and they were sometimes,
you know, they were the power dynamic was so total in the other direction.
They were punching out.
And also they were capturing this New York in this particular moment.
To me, the most interesting and powerful and emblematic of all those sites was the set
Jezebel, which was a women's blog, which probably neither you know, I spent our time
reading, but it was run by this woman, Anna Holmes, is brilliant, kind of like totally
alienated product of glamour, where she's been writing like the dumbest stuff and she
eats it and comes out.
Nick, the founder of Gawker's persuaded himself, this is a great way to sell makeup advertising
and Anna soon lets him believe this to accept somebody's advice not to put the word femme
at its inner proposal is higher.
And the first thing they do is they offer a $10,000 bounty for someone who can get an
unreattached before version of some fashion magazine spread, which they get.
Like some anonymous person turns up and cuts the cash.
And they just and they did they started counting how many black models were in each issue of
every magazine, which is like zero.
And the fashion industry like free.
It's a big industry that has a lot of cultural power and, you know, panics about them and
responds by changing its ways and what are obviously I think in a positive way is and
the language they wrote in was just so much the way young women actually talk to each
other, not the passionate of women's magazines, which also had like, it had to hold to me
what seems like really obviously positive cultural impact.
And also a way commenters in a relationship with their audience that was totally pathological
that if they strayed from the line or if they disappointed their audience audience would
go nuts and attack them personally, they felt captive to their audience in a way that was
exactly like what social media would become.
And they and after a year of it, like they kind of self-immolated and there is this sort
of moment where it's like, oh, they lived in the year 2007, basically through like both
the kind of interesting positive power of this new media world and the like incredibly
damaging car.
The other thing I'd say it's interesting in that context is just like, and I think this
is one of the many things that Silicon Valley people had against Valley WAG in particular.
But it was often incredibly sexist, like casually sexiness.
So you look back and you're like, wow, the internet and not that I'm sure that may not
be like the absolute top priority for a lot of Silicon Valley people.
But one of the things I thought was really emblematic was Nick Denton was writing Valley
WAG for a while himself, the founder of Gawker, who was a British journalist who was importing
some of the nastiness and fun of the British press.
And writes this whole piece about like how Sarah Lacey, who was running Pando daily, like
he's only good at her job because she's attracted and people only talk to her.
She's attracted or something.
You're just like, what is this piece of cut?
Like this is horrendous, you know, and I don't know.
It was this.
It's amazing going back and reading old stories and like, oh my God, it was such a different
culture.
And like, it's a reminder that you live so much in your time.
I mean, yeah, totally.
No, that was.
I mean, the thing Peter too, it's mad about is that he's only promised writes a piece,
you know, that's basically out in teal of the teal wasn't exactly in the closet.
And I'm not sure teal is not a shame.
Right.
Oh, in Thomasville argument, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to is this idea that it was a
very well known thing in Silicon Valley, but it was just like the kind of thing you didn't
say online.
Yeah.
In some ways, like what got her.
You wouldn't say in the press.
You would to bridge that.
I'm pretty unsympathetic to adding people in general.
So I don't, I don't, I don't love it.
But in any case, what Tia later told Ryan Holiday was that the thing that really bothered
him wasn't that, but was that Denton had gone into the comments and been like, there's
something was so weird and weird about that and this teal guy and just said a bunch of
mean stuff in the comments.
Like, imagine, you know, like, a G. Salzberger is like in the comments of a New York Times
article being like, I'm reading this article and I just don't like this guy.
I mean, it's a such a different moment.
To me, it does not justify a deranged secret crusade to destroy a bunch of people's jobs,
but it did.
Would G.O.K. promote that?
It's a great question.
G.O.K.
That's a great question.
G.O.K.
That's a great question.
G.O.K.
That was a good business because unlike Jonaparelli and me at BuzzFeed, unlike many others, it kept
his costs really low.
Turns out that's part of being a good business.
Who knew?
But yes, G.O.K.R. was a profitable advertising business that was growing that had a bunch
of different properties.
Gizmodo, in particular, had emerged as a really just like valuable property.
Yeah.
G.O.K.
Not take-measure investment had been burned in an earlier part of his career when he tried
to build kind of an early Google reader type thing and clashed with his own investors
over it and thought they were idiots.
And so really didn't take investment.
Bootstrapped it.
And so it was a good business, but as you said, it was like deeply a product of a moment.
And the thing that ultimately in this whole film didn't lawsuit that with Teal's help
destroyed it, it's pretty incomprehensible now that you would publish a sex tape to someone
else's intimate video.
Like what?
And now that's just off to the random on the internet.
We reporters on the internet.
Yeah, it's revenge for the 4-chan, you know, those people.
Yeah, but it's somebody who could have jailed for like it's revenge for.
It's not.
I'm not making it like that.
It's not ambiguous at all now.
How people feel about it.
And I do think there was this thing where Gawker was rooted in this moment where they
were the outsiders, they were powerless, they were having fun.
And in the aughts, they published a lot of sex tapes.
I mean, I'm sure Fred Durst's sex tape was a thing.
And he complained and threatened to sue them.
He told them to fuck off.
He kind of caved and set them flowers.
And there was a series of them.
There were Brett Farrs, Dickpicks were a thing.
I mean, this is a whole part of the internet that was about that.
The whole punching up excuse became too powerful of a concept.
Like it was like, oh, anything's allowed if we're punching up.
And also, and also, and also, Brett, as they think they're punching up, the rest of the
media is like collapsing and doggers growing and they're putting the power dynamic shifts
of it, right?
And they're sort of an established media company that's just punching people in the face.
And not necessarily.
And rich people care about their reputations.
I think the media can be like, you're rich.
Like who cares?
You can say whatever you want.
But you know, people reputations.
No, we're talking about selling compelling particular.
Yeah.
We're punching up is an absolute excuse.
You should write stories that are accurate.
You know, I agree with you that punching up is not an excuse.
Like ultimately, you should write stories that are accurate.
I think in the sort of like jokey internal politics of the media world, which Gawker
was born into, you know, there was, it was genuinely fun and harmless for this blogger
to go into the continent, sneak into the continent, ask cafeteria and make sure of the culture
of the thought I'd ask cafeteria, right?
And there the dynamic is a little hard where the old school media people can't write the
same type of piece back or there, you know, there was such a stylistic advantage to gawk.
Yeah.
There's a little, there had been those tradition like spy magazine was the sort of precursor
of it.
There was sort of a tradition of witty outsiders skiering the old media and sort of healthy
and basically harmless dynamic.
I want to go back to BuzzFeed.
Max Street in the Washington Post has like a great summary take on your book.
I mean, he writes about the scene you have in traffic with, you know, where you guys
are all debating, you know, what Disney paying $650 million to buy you what you're smoking
weed is that right?
And basically decide not to do it.
And Steinberg, what the founder of Cheddar, US Daily Mail is advocating for it.
And you know, basically the suggestion for Max is that, you know, this was like a pump
and dump and the only person to really realize that was the case that you had to sell after
the pump with Steinberg or I'm curious what your take on this.
I mean, it's obviously in retrospect, we should have sold it.
I mean, you know, they're very easy in retrospect.
I mean, Max is a wonderful writer and it's actually very helpful with the book.
And I, you know, I would say I disagree with him with no malice, but that was that piece
is just classic late Docker and it's beautifully written.
It's incredibly smug politically.
It sort of has its own political point of view.
And it assumes that it just, yeah, it just sort of imports this sort of level of, well,
of course I know it all and these people are all idiots.
Right.
Right.
Let me, sure.
You know, it's sort of the kind of investor that adds nothing in a funny way, but the writing
is great.
Right.
Yeah.
In retrospect, it was a disaster, right?
At the time, it wasn't so obvious that the path, or it was obvious to me, and maybe it
was to Max.
Right.
The past social media was taking was the one that then took and then the relationship
between social media and publishers, you know, would go the way it went.
I feel like the idea that was like hard to believe then, and this sort of comes here
in the car piece that I was starting with, but we should all say, but just to go back,
like we should have been more cynical and greedy, right?
I mean, that's really like the lesson.
I think that he's actually saying is that people should be more cynical and greedy and
always assume the worst.
Right.
And the decision we made was partly because we felt we had the wind of the back and we
were growing partly and this is like, I mean, if you think about it from sort of the perspective
of shareholder value, which is not how I as a journalist was thinking about it at the
time, you know, pretty irresponsible, but was that we had felt like we were just getting
traction with this thing and that at some level, Disney wanted to hire BuzzFeed to sprinkle
internet fairy dust on ABC news in particular.
And it was just profoundly like not what Jonah and I had signed up for, which is totally
selfish.
And I assume you were able to raise more venture money because of that deal.
And so it feels like, well, we're going to hire valuations.
So we're fine.
Or was that?
Yeah.
No, I think we're away.
In fact, we went to NBC and raised, I think it was another $400 million, which I mean,
a terrible mistake forever.
Yeah.
Right.
So the contradiction of BuzzFeed sort of being both sort of fun and serious, like, do you
think that was just like doomed from the start or like, do you think brands can be that
make things to people?
Right.
So I mean, I think the, I mean, I guess I'm more, I write more about politics and culture
than about venture capital and my, in fact, my colleague, Liz Hoffman always reads my
stories before they go.
And occasionally is like, I can't believe you're employed when I read about business.
So let me copy that.
But I do think that the culture, like basically, I mean, it's so hard to get your head back
there, but there was this moment when people were like, the Facebook news feed is so great,
baby pictures and memes and hard news all together mixed up, like cool, right?
And BuzzFeed was a product of that moment.
And people liked it.
Like consumers liked it was a thing consumers liked.
And then this tidal wave of incredibly divisive populist politics comes kind of sweeping through
society and social media.
And people don't like their feet.
And a lot of people do not like that.
That is much do not find the experience of reading about Donald Trump next to baby pictures
and memes or reading about, you know, you know, how much you hate Hillary Clinton.
Like it's a, it's not the same experience that people don't like it.
And Facebook starts ineptly trying to figure out how to respond to that and to, wow, we're
getting all this engagement.
We were more of it.
We wanted to be meaningful and somehow land with a measure called meaningful social interaction,
which is like the worst combination of all of the possible ways to do it where they're
like, well, we don't want people just getting kind of random garbage, low quality, fake
news flying by.
We want stuff they really engage with and by engagement.
I mean, I'm posting a story saying with Donald Trump is great.
Your comment and kill yourself 17 times.
And the algorithm is like, this is great.
I mean, I feel like people outside of the media underestimate how much just like the
weird capriciousness of Facebook could like form some of the journalist view of tack.
You know, it's just like, oh man, media is just subject to the sort of random, not fully
thought through views of social media companies and then, you know, success or failure is
done.
And then again, there is this level where media, we think that they're thinking about
us.
And in fact, what's that Shakespeare line, you know, like flies to wanting boys or we
to the gods, you know, like, like they're making decisions that are about engagement
and about audience.
And they're very, from my perspective, and I think now quite obviously reluctant to accept
the politics and culture are larger forces that they're themselves totally subject to
and that they ignore these and kind of think they see these big political and social trends
as like product trends kind of miss them and then light their own platform and fire as
a result, basically.
I wanted to offer a view on BuzzFeed.
Just, I mean, it fits to me into sort of the classic venture capital blitz scale sort
of funding story, right?
It's like just like an Uber or a WeWork where it's like, we're going to throw a lot of money
at something before it's profitable.
It's going to get, you know, outside's attention relative to how much we know the business
is going to work.
Obviously like Uber, I do think is a transformational business.
And obviously I think as a reporter like BuzzFeed news, like sort of changed how everyone wrote.
But at the end of the day, you know, the amount of venture capital funding and the ability
to spend at a loss, like just drives an audience an attention that's just like unjust relative
to sort of what it is accomplished.
You know, I was at information in 2015 and, you know, Jessica always fairly feels that
like, you know, I don't think they got sort of the attention they deserve because it's
a bootstrapped business.
You know, you've written profiles about hers.
You certainly understand that.
But it is a little frustrating.
The media and the narrative and the culture just broadly just buys that whoever has money
and is spending it is sort of what matters relative to like, I don't know, thinking about
these things is like, which business is going to last?
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And it's really destroying Nick was incredibly and kind of rightly resentful that Jonah had
raised all these money and was, you know, overpaying his people and hiring them from
his point of view.
I think Jessica too.
And right.
And it was, I mean, I don't think this is particularly specific to media, but you have
these venture back companies that can, you know, spend and lose money in an attempt to
get scale.
And by the way, like investors do that because sometimes it works.
But in this case, it both did not work.
And obviously, you know, kind of was incredibly frustrating to their competitors.
Right.
You know, Max flags this again.
But in the Rosenkranz Guilden certain line or like the sense that, you know, you're writing
this book about Buzzfeed and Gawker.
I mean, do you, and there's a question of whether are they really like the main characters
or like, will they last?
Or like, what is your true view and sort of, you know, in a decade, how much will remember
this story or how you reckon with sort of their lasting impact?
Yeah.
I mean, I think their lasting impact, I mean, we know what lasting is a funny word, but
I think their impact on culture and journalism was obvious.
And, you know, they kind of lined up kind of leading the way, I mean, into whatever the
hell it is we're doing now for better or for worse.
And I mean, the New York Times won.
I mean, the New York Times, you know, incredibly, and kind of incredible business story.
Like they did not follow fast, but they did like follow slow and thoughtful.
Right.
Really built incredible digital product.
Now they're counting around the actual semaphore headline styles, right?
Yeah, they also absorb it.
Yeah.
And I mean, they, they, they have a lot of challenges and it's hard to run a big institution
and things like that.
But they have a very devoted audience.
And they did basically absorb many of the people who were running these companies, went to
work by 2019, 2020, you know, you were a solution for them.
Does it?
Yes.
And me and Corey Seeker and Dodai Stewart from Jezebel, a bunch of people, many more who
had been part of this moment go to the New York Times and they sort of absorb a lot of
its DNA like for better and for worse, by the way, because we're a bunch of lunatics
who hate each other and have wildly varying views on what journalism ought to be and
on whether the New York Times is doing it right.
And I think we sort of look at the internal conflict with the New York Times.
Some of it is that like, like I think Corey Seeker is brilliant and love him, but I think
we like profoundly disagree about what journalism ought to be and probably both disagree with
some things New York Times leadership things.
And it's tough to run a place where everybody, where you have these dual and philosophies.
And I think what's happening now is that a lot of world, like, you know, when, for
various reasons, like we didn't totally get absorbed by the organism and they took what
it could from this strain at the end, but is now, I think, pushing people back out who
it thinks doesn't really fit the New York Times mold, which is also probably out there.
It's going back to be more the original New York Times.
It's just, it had to mean it has to be something.
It can't just be the whole internet.
And it kind of slightly by accident swallowed the whole internet.
Okay, so, you know, you're obviously the co-founder of Semaphore, and some ways we are indicting
the venture back model media and not saying it's impossible.
I mean, you all raised a ton of money from Sam Bankman Freed.
What makes your strategy with Semaphore different from the experience with BuzzFeed?
I mean, it's a very different moment, right?
So if I told you our strategy was to treat the social media companies like they were
cable, I mean, you know, that would not be a wise strategy.
Different broken metaphor than we did last night.
No, I mean, you know, I think, let's see, one is that we didn't take any venture money,
and that was the choice.
You know, we have-
You raised like rich media money or a pretty large number of investors who are sophisticated
people who, you know, want this, you know, who really, I think, care about returns and
about this being good business, but aren't under the illusion.
The other than it's going to 100 X and four years.
And Justin and I, and I think from my perspective, you know, I came in to BuzzFeed, never even
thought at all about the business of news and how different it is from the quote unquote
media business for a number of boring reasons related to the ad markets, the subscription
market.
But I did want to have an, you know, kind of gone through this stuff with BuzzFeed and
myself, like learned on the job, how to try to generate revenue around news and not done
a pretty good job of that wanted to build a news business that is a harder business
than an entertainment business, I would say.
So-
Sorry, the distinction you're dividing between like the business and media and the business
of news or, sorry, can you tease that out a little bit more?
Yeah, media includes theme parks.
It includes movies.
It includes entertainment.
You're saying news is hard mode for media.
It's a subset that's-
Yeah.
I think that's right.
It's hard-load.
There's also it's a different set of advertisers.
It's a different-
It's an overlapping and different set of consumers.
And, you know, there's a range of how good the executives are and how experienced they
are in that news business.
I think part of the reason that I was excited to do this is-
I think my partner Justin Smith, no relation, as we call him, is, you know, is really, I
think maybe the most successful news executive of his generation, you know, turned around
the Atlantic, turned around Bloomberg, you know, and I don't think that investors came
in because they said, wow, Ben is really like, he tweets a lot of scoops.
I think they came in because they said, wow, Justin has created a ton of value for a series
of news publishers over his career.
And that to me was actually like really, you know, that was really important to me, you
know, just to build a sustainable business around news.
Right.
And you're not giving yourself enough credit.
I mean, literally, I mean, I try to emulate your writing style.
I feel like there's so many reporters that look to your sort of style of writing and
publicly communicating as sort of the state of the art in terms of where good reporters
are today.
And I'm sure that's helped you build a newsroom.
Yeah.
I think I'm a pretty good editor and reporter.
I love scoops.
But I'm just saying like, I don't think that investors were like, based on this guy's record
of tweets as well as his like, you know, record of, you know, business savvy, we're investing,
I think they thought, well, like it's good.
I know, but I think that's the reason.
I mean, that's always frustrating to me.
I feel like one thing that like the investor.
Maybe I'm not giving myself enough credit.
I'm just.
Under estimates about media is that like the pros and the techs is like the product of
the media business, right?
You know, like the whole Buzzfeed experience is like we're going to be like data, you know,
like we're going to look at how like it works on Facebook and we're going to have lots of
analytics.
So we're going to be experts at that.
And that is like a type of tech company too.
But like Apple and like the tech companies that VCs worship are like product companies
where you're like, fuck the data.
Like we know what's like a great product and we like really curate it.
And I think in a similar way, like great media businesses are like, we know what like the
great product is.
And we're not going to like chase some like number that we don't even really know what
it means down like a rabbit hole to destroy like this product that people expect from.
Yeah, I feel like I'm now like kind of old and have sort of reject all binaries like
that.
Like I think that when we were good at Buzzfeed, we had a bunch of data nobody else had and
it was really useful and it made our bespoke products better because ultimately there is
a kind of media person who you and I know well and journalists who just pours enormous
energy into a story so that it will win a prize from a prize.
Yes.
And everyone will ever read it.
Yeah.
And he's almost dismissive and sneering about the audience.
And I think there's like you've been I kind of find that repellent as well.
Right.
Yes.
I do.
Yes, certainly.
You know, obviously as a sub stacker, I'm like, oh yes, it is for them, not right.
Yeah, that's what the data tells you.
But you also if the data is telling you to treat your customers like total idiots and
to trick them, like don't do it.
Right.
So, you know, I mean, I think you can be totally informed by an immersed in data without, you
know, it's like, and these sort of early days of digital media and it's again, you got
to get your head back to the point where your competitors just didn't have data and you
did, but it's like suddenly you're flying with instruments and they are flying without
instruments and it's a huge advantage.
Not that you can't fly a plane to that.
Yeah.
And I'm not against data.
I guess it's more just if you know what your product is about, you can interpret the data
better, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Like if I get certain numbers, it might be like you could find some correlation of time
of day I publish, but really it's like, oh, I publish my best stories like late in the
day because I like need to get them out because they're scoops or you know what I mean?
Because you sleep until three PM every day.
You need sort of to understand, yeah, your business and you're with the data.
I want to like get a little bit more, you know, the old media call Mr. What's I mean,
spinning out and not in a self-interested semaphore way, like where do you think like
the media business is going now or particularly like the news media business or like, what
are you optimistic about in terms of opportunities?
Like, obviously I'm like, yeah, I mean, that is a big piece of it.
I mean, I think, you know, I can't really like deceive anybody about what I think because
I'm we're really doing that.
You have a very active thesis.
Yeah, I mean, I think our thesis, I mean, it's a few things.
One is certainly that building that individual, you know, the people trust individuals more
than they trust sort of faceless brands.
And that's, you know, obviously what you're doing and it's the sub-stack model.
And it's also the, again, if you step outside media, it's what you see in politics.
It's what you see in sports.
Donald Trump is more important than the Republican Party, you know, so it's what you've seen.
So it's not, I think it's some searing insight about digital journalism, but I do think
it's a moment when you can build a brand and a build a news organization around great reporters.
But I think the most important thing about it.
It makes sense.
The real world people trust people and now we have the tools to extend a person far enough
that it can be a bigger brand.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think, I mean, I guess, I think the other, if you look at data or if you just talk
to people, the two big complaints about media are that people feel totally overwhelmed,
but quantity and they don't know what to trust.
And so we're trying to run it.
We have individual journalists who are being totally transparent about, you know, what
they think.
And we're doing it in a kind of a stylized way where stories are literally segmented into
here's the scoop.
And here's what I learned with Tucker Fierlsen yesterday.
Here's what I think it means.
You know, I think that the Fox press shop is probably lying as usual, but I could be
wrong.
And I'm just going to say that because that is actually coming from on this and have a
lot of experience.
But again, if you have an interesting hypothesis, almost by definition, you could be wrong.
Like if it's if you're, if there's no chance you could be wrong, you're saying something
totally banal and useless and you're not your expertise is sort of wasted.
And then we really go out of our way to find somebody smart who disagrees with that thesis
and include that and include all the other stuff that's been written around this subject
because one of the sort of most annoying things consumers have to do on the internet
right now is you read a story in a publication you like in respect like November.
And then you're like, huh, this is probably right.
But I'm just for safety in a Google separate other stories and the same topic and see what
they say, which is, which is, which I want to talk about.
I mean, yeah, you have to read it, but people still like to have to triangulate the truth.
It's just not like a particularly consumer friendly way to live.
And then we also do think and I think based on kind of experience is just that a lot of
the best stories are global, like to understand the world these days.
If you want to understand like, you know, really the obvious stories, COVID, social media,
the rise of the right wing, you sort of miss out.
I think a lot of consumers realize this if you're getting a sort of city hall perspective
on it, you know, COVID is basically the product of Donald Trump, mismanagement, which is a lot of
the coverage.
It's like, well, yes, but also you've got to look at what, you know, an informed reader
is seeing stuff from around the world and there are readers around the world looking for in
their own regions, these same problems being solved.
So we launched in the US and Sub-Saharan Africa have big global aspirations.
Also both I think have enough experience to not bite off more than we can chew, but not
bite enough anymore than this right now.
How did you pick Africa as a coverage area?
You know, obviously I run a business.
It's like I write about money because it's very monetizable.
And you know, like if I were to pick a country, it would be like India or China or something.
I don't know.
How did you pick it?
Yeah.
I mean, I think, you know, from our perspective, it's, you know, most of our investments in the
US, most of our revenue will be in the US.
It's the biggest by far.
I mean, like 60% of all the whole news business in the world is in the US.
I mean, it's the most developed media market.
And then, you know, these African economies and countries are the demographically, you
can obviously the fastest growing.
And I think when you, we really wanted, you know, we're thinking about trying to build
for, you know, a media company for this century.
I mean, you don't go to London.
You look south and east.
And it's also a place where there's, it's for a variety of reasons.
There's really an opportunity there.
There's an audience and there are advertisers who want, who are interested in really high
quality journalism.
And then the last thing is just talent.
Like Yinka, the editor is a genius who's done this before.
And we were able to get him.
Are scoops a business driver or a personal curiosity?
That's sort of like, what is the value?
Well, what do you find?
Discoops convert for you.
Stories that don't have the biggest stories drive the conversions.
I would assume so, right?
Yeah, big stories and like you get a lot of really attention on scoops.
Yeah, I mean, they call it the news business.
It needs to have news in it.
Like that's it.
Right.
I just think certainly, yeah, unless your name literally is Matt Levine, there's an exception
if your name is Matt Levine that you don't have to have any news.
The great everybody else has said.
Yeah.
Right.
I think scoops are necessary, but not sufficient unless.
But if you did a fast follow strategy, like if you were like super smart on the beat,
or you only like as soon as somebody has a scoop, you like matched it and like, I don't
know, do you think that would work?
Or like, is it the news people want in the time before it's covered or they want to hear
it from the person who is in the loop enough to get it?
Right.
I just try to disentangle sometimes what did it mean?
You also say they don't care about scoops.
Sometimes if you're not care broadly about scoops, right?
I think if you're starting a new thing, you know, you can and you probably have kind of
an interesting thesis about, well, actually, like the story form is broken.
We want to do things a little differently.
There's this challenge of how do you get people to check out your thing and saying,
hello, I have a new and interesting theory about the organization of articles is not
how you do that.
Because these are folks who are fundamentally like not interested in like no one is interested
in meta conversations about news or very few nerds.
People do want to know what's going on though.
And if you can tell them what's going on before somebody else, they will then come look at
your site, look at your emails, look sort of test out the thesis of whether they like
you or not and maybe stick around.
And so in some sense, it's the top of the funnel.
It's the tip of the spear.
But it also is the thing that if you are a really good reporter who is really dug into
a beat, you better be getting scoops if not what you're doing in this sort of meta news
narrative.
What is your read on what this next election, presidential election will look like in terms
of the reporters or going back to the sort of thesis at the beginning of the conversation
that like, I don't know, you read news stories and news coverage from like a previous period.
And it's like bewildering and it's like, why do we care about that?
Like, why do we write these stories this way?
What is your view on like the type of conversation we're going to have in this election cycle,
especially with Trump where it feels like people are so practiced it.
The last thing I'll say with Trump, especially like at the end of the Trump administration,
some of the media outlets felt more, they suddenly had more moral clarity on it where
they would directly say like he's, you know, the New York Times stories, I think got much
more like condemning once he lost the election and like how do they go back to the old way
once once he's running or you know, I don't know.
I never really totally saw the value of telling a New York Times reader that Donald Trump
is also bad.
Right.
And they already, which is, I guess, if they want to be told, we agree with you that he's
bad, like sure, but it's not, I don't know, it's not straight.
I think a lot of energy was wasted on the thesis that the New World stance, the New York
Times takes toward Donald Trump is changing anyone's mind.
I mean, I think this is a weird cycle because it's just sort of Biden and Trump kind of
shuffling toward each other for one last battle, these two men in their, you're going
to be their eighties.
And so there's no Democratic primary and primaries rather than general election or a
delight to cover, but also like kind of where the parties shape their ideas, right, where,
you know, it's the sort of wide open part and Biden won't have one and a meaningful one.
And the Republican primary is taking its time to get started.
And I mean, I think the most interesting, in a way, the most interesting thing happening
is watching the Republican party wrecking with abortion rights.
Like you saw Nikki Haley, who's not an idiot, go out there and give a speech saying that,
well, like, you know, we should all agree that advocating for a 15 week ban, you know,
is an appropriate place, which sort of matches where a lot of polling is.
And then if you ask her, okay, are you for a 15 week ban, she declines to comment.
I mean, it's a very complicated, right.
I mean, they are truly the sort of dog, the cop, the political car on this.
And I think there's a very few Americans want to sort of, you know, outright bans on abortion
that they've in some cases put into place.
The many Americans and women are like just furious and outraged in comprehending that
they would do this stuff.
And so they're, you know, you're in through the primary process, on one hand, going to
be trying to wriggle out of this.
On the other hand, though, we candidates in the primary trying to get that anti-abortion
base and trying to, you know, to try to pull those.
And I think that'll be, I mean, I think people underestimate the, I mean, this sort of a
day, but I'm sort of stealing this from Waggle, that I do think people underestimate how
much policy is made in these primaries.
And the other thing is there's this race to the most extreme anti-trans position.
And I think for a lot of, you know, kind of center left people who think that, well,
some of the reports in Europe, you know, answered the treatment of trans kids is troubling that,
you know, they made these new friends on the right who were like, yes, we love your accurate
reporting on gender youth clinics.
Also we don't think trans people exist and we want to, you know, imprison them, right?
And call them rumors and all this really like, right, crazy, you know, really extremist
hate, you've used that, you know, it's kind of denied the existence of trans people.
And that conversation is just racing to the right in a way that I don't really think
is where, you know, swing voters in the suburbs, which is where the election would be decided
are.
And so all that in the Republican primaries really interesting the substance of it.
But now Donald Trump is dominating it from a political society.
So is it bad business for the media?
Like do you think this is going to be, I mean, it seems like Joe Biden almost wants
it to be like a sleepy election where it's like just vote for the guy.
Yeah, I think I mean, I think he's not going to be out there all the time.
You know, I don't know.
I mean, I would say like, I think everyone should in some sense, why do like healthy
countries don't wake up, right meet each other about politics every morning.
But that's our TV.
That's what we that's our culture.
I don't know.
It's a reading sound pending on it.
Reading's pretty bad.
I mean, that's probably healthy.
Yeah.
I think I mean, I'm obviously I'm a political journalist and will be and find these stuff
fascinating and we'll cover it.
But to me, it feels more like 2012, which is, I mean, 2012 in retrospect, like imagine
being given the choice between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as presidents, like, right?
These are two very impressive, great Americans, like, you know, if you do a lot worse.
And so I don't think it's like low stakes and not several low stakes.
But I do think and I'm sure by the end, there's, you know, many Americans are very panicked
at the idea of Donald Trump becoming president again and will be motivated and will come
out to vote if he's on the ballot.
Yeah.
But it does feel just like a there's less interest, there's less panic, there's less
drama.
I mean, it's to my surprise, like when we launched and we launched right in the midterms, which
stressed me out because it's hard to break through in the final weeks of the midterms
and have done do great coverage out of Washington and great campaign coverage.
But I sort of assumed that by now campaign coverage would be, you know, the top of the
fold of the New York Times every day.
Right.
And it's really not.
I mean, a lot of it is finance.
It's SPB, it's SBS.
It's, you know, it's talking about politics more than New York Times in some way.
You know, they're like, I mean, you know, they do this all in, by the way, or like, I
mean, I do sometimes, yeah, penetrate.
Yeah.
You know, the Chamath is like cheering for Nikki Haley and David Sachs is clearly cheering
for Ron DeSantis.
It's funny.
Yeah, where it's like, they're the show that professes to be less political, but it's
they're almost like more obsessed with like the politics.
If you're media at the moment.
Yeah.
And Silicon Valley is now in a place where there are Republicans basically.
And so the Republican primary is particularly of interest to Republicans.
And I think, you know, the old, the dry and in some sense, the New York Times gets to
decide who wins the Democratic primary in some sense.
The way all in has a vote in the Republican primary.
And so since there's not a Democratic primary, that's not a fact for the soul.
Like most I know you're being actually in cheek, but like it's just like the people with
the loudest voices in Silicon Valley are the richest where they're more likely to be
Republicans.
And then, you know, the Democrats feel that they have a stay in the Republican primary.
Like they would like to see a lot of people still value would love to see a, you know,
free market oriented anti-woke, but not psychotic challenger to Joe Biden.
Cause I think a lot of them feel like, God, I really don't want to have to vote for Joe
Biden who I dislike a million ways, but also probably don't want to vote for Donald Trump.
And so I think there'll be a lot of people who feel a lot of this is right.
True.
The business, I don't think actually is Brazil.
And this is true of a lot of business people in America who have longed in Republicans
because they want less taxes, less regulation and have a view of how the economy should
work that is roughly the Republican view and not the Joe Biden much more.
The Republican party feels very green field right now.
Like if they, you know, from the elite perspective, if they could not talk about trans stuff,
which obviously is like the core of the party.
Yeah.
I mean, it read if they could only just not talk about the things.
The things they are.
Yeah.
I'd be the thing that used to be Mitt Romney's Republican party.
Yeah.
Right.
I wanted to end.
I'll let you go.
And I thank you so much for taking the time.
The Tucker Carlson saga leaving Fox news.
I mean, you've been on Twitter basically, I don't know, questioning some of the like
narratives or have you come to a view on like why he left and what it means?
No, I think it's a reporting question and whatever I was actually was arguing with one
of the great reporters covering it last night, not Matt's.
I would also say this to us to myself, but like in person just, you know, people are
saying, well, you know, I think it was an accumulation of factors.
What is that?
I know.
Well, I think it was an accumulation of factors and like sure, of course, it was accumulation
of factors.
Everything was an accumulation of factors in every story, but nobody has reported like
what was the email that Richard Bruegge or the call he got and he was like, all right,
enough.
Something specific.
And I think they're in that scene, you know, eight or nine really plausible theories printed
based on anonymous sourcing as though they were fat and many of them.
And it feels like when they coming out of Fox and they have to like embed their old story
in and pretend like, Oh, maybe that was part of the reason.
It's like a cobbling of reasons.
Yeah.
And I think it is true that there were lots of good reasons to fire.
He was in support and as he said, discussing things about women, he had really diverged
from Murdochs, you know, in Ukraine, he thought he was bigger than the plug.
I mean, lots of things, but those things, most of those things have been true.
Oh, he was the favorite of Murdochs ex-fiance.
I mean, lots of things that were true, but none of them that happened between Friday when
he was, you know, and Monday morning when they fire him with no notice.
I mean, it's an incredible study on how not to run a company.
And some of the stories are based on anonymous leaks that from Fox's PR department, where
you can tell because they're like, well, you know, we did this in a totally normal manner
in which we had meetings and made decisions and they knew it wasn't Rupert Murdoch.
It was really a bunch of executives who do their jobs in a totally normal fashion.
And like anyone who's ever covered Murdochs world knows that's not true.
Like that's not how it works.
But they only afterward go out and try to make it seem like it's not a sort of erratic
tycoon shooting from the hip, but he has always been an erratic tycoon shooting.
And that was sort of the story you all did, right?
Like Fox's, yeah, the Murdoch's empire is like a defined by how erratic it is.
Yeah, and that's always been true, by the way, like it's not so totally brandy thing,
but Max, they're a very smart story about how in the last several months, even by Murdoch
Sanders, you know, they announced a merger of Fox score and you scored and then called
it off.
He announced his engagement, called it off, you know, pushed out a couple of editors and
then firetucker Carlson, the notion that we can sort of be like, well, these were
all a series of considered decisions that came out of meetings with the senior leadership
team, blah, blah, blah, of course not.
All right, this will test your ability here to forecast media.
Do you think Tucker Carlson is relevant without Fox?
Of course, he's relevant.
I mean, relevant is a low bar.
I think he'll think about running for president.
Why wouldn't he?
It's a way to stay relevant.
But I think people underestimate the power of that platform.
And Fox, like, you know, a bunch of people have come and gone, and Bill O'Reilly making
Kelly Glenn back, they're all employed and gainfully and relevant, but not enough.
It will be is bigger than they are.
It will be more relevant.
But you know, that's a very old audience.
It's a it's people who navigate by speaking out loud to their remotes.
It's not people who we know.
That is a great way that I do that sometimes, but it's not necessarily an audience that
downloads your new app.
And we know this because Fox launched an app, Fox Nation, right?
It did not take off, even though they used Fox's own channels to say, come get more
Tucker over here.
And people did not do it.
So it's very hard for me to see without the Fox platform and the Fox audience who are
just proportionately in their 70s.
Like there is a smaller, younger group of people here, right-wing nationalists and
populist love, Tucker, but it's not the same.
Good.
Ben Smith.
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Really appreciate that.
It's great to have you here.
Thanks.
Great.
Cool.
Thanks so much.
I'm Eric Newcomer.
That was my conversation with Ben Smith.
Shout out to Tommy Herron, our audio editor, Riley Kinsell, my chief of staff, Jung Chomsky
for the music.
Thanks again to Vanta for sponsoring this episode.
Check us out on iTunes, YouTube, and of course, subscribe to my sub-sac, Newcomer.co.
Thanks so much.
See you next week.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Thank you.