The 2010s saw the rise of a number of digital media startups like BuzzFeed News, Gawker Media, Vice, Business Insider and others who were set to usher in a new era of news consumption, displacing legacy outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Now, by and large, that dream seems to have died. Gawker is gone. BuzzFeed News is closed. Vice has filed for bankruptcy. Insider recently had layoffs. So how did it all fall apart and what is the future for upstart media? In this episode, we speak with Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semafor and the author of the new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, to discuss his experience as the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and how times have changed so dramatically for online journalism. We also discussed what business models work today, the use of AI, and the future of news consumption. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Key insights from the pod:
Why did Buzzfeed News exist? — 4:42
How digital media balanced traffic and prestige — 9:15
The discovery of traffic — 10:33
Jonah Peretti vs. Nick Denton — 11:13
When did that era of digital media peak? — 17:27
How the incumbents fought back — 19:22
What was the pivot to video? — 21:37
Where does traffic come from now? — 23:45
Can news be VC-funded? — 26:54
What was Vice? — 27:59
What happens to media if Twitter goes away? — 32:46
What will AI do to news? — 35:04
What were the moral lessons from this era of news? — 38:31
The politics of digital media — 40:34
Why business news is different — 44:48
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Joe Weisenthal: (00:10)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy Alloway: (00:15)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Joe: (00:17)
Tracy, there's been a lot of media news lately. And it's a cliché and I'm sure it's been repeated over and over again in headlines, but we're at the end of the era of journalism that we both came up in.
Tracy: (00:28)
I feel like before we start this episode, we should just get the disclaimer out right away that this is probably going to be our most naval gazing episode ever.
Joe: (00:39)
Yes. And I think we're even planning on releasing this as like a Friday bonus episode of the week. Just to acknowledge that it's like, okay, if you don't want to know anything about the media business or Joe and Tracy or all these things that are sort of endemic to their lives over the last decade, feel free to skip this one.
Tracy: (00:57)
Yeah. This is media talking about the media, but you are right. There have been some things that have been happening lately, specifically we've seen Buzzfeed News announcing that it will be shutting down. I think there was a report recently about Vice Media potentially filing for bankruptcy [Ed Note: it happened today]. It feels like the end of an era for a lot of these digital-focused media startups.
Joe: (01:21)
It is definitely true and, you know, as listeners know, we both started our careers in digital basically roughly the same time basically right at the worst of the great financial crisis. And out of this period came all of these new experiments and upstart media companies that were supposed to dislodge the incumbents. You know, the blogs...
Tracy: (01:46)
I was at FT Alphaville...
Joe: (01:47)
I was at Insider. And Insider’s still chugging. They recently did announce layoffs, but of all of the companies — and maybe we'll talk about this — of all of the companies, I kind of feel like they're like the winner that nobody talks about.
Tracy: (02:00)
I noticed you call it Insider and not its original name. Have you just erased that from your mind?
Joe: (02:05)
Do you know what the original name was?
Tracy: (02:06)
Was it not Clusterstock?
Joe: (02:08)
It was! Clusterstock. Because everyone's like Business Insider. But we had names even before then and even before then was Silicon Alley Insider. Anyway. Yeah, it's a pretty pivotal time. And you know, I guess the question is was this all a ZIRP phenomenon or was this something else? What was going on there?
Tracy: (02:25)
And I think there is an overlap with some of the bigger themes, and I might be reaching here, but I think there is an overlap with some of the bigger themes we've been talking about recently, which is I guess the sort of attrition of tech or the tech strains that we've seen.
And the thing that digital media has in common with a lot of the tech industry has to be venture capital financing. There was a story about what was going to happen in the digital media market. You know, people talked about these big numbers, huge audiences that could now be reached through online publishing. So it feels like there is some overlap there.
Joe: (03:02)
When I was a Business Insider, there was a really intense pressure month after month to hit new traffic goals. And part of that was clearly ad sales right, which are on some level of function of traffic. But I think the other thing is there's a function of telling a story to your investors for your next round.
Tracy: (03:24)
Having lots of lines going up and to the right.
Joe: (03:25)
Lots of lines. And so regardless of whether you're actually profitable or not at any given moment, if the lines are up, you can live because you can get that next round of funding…
Tracy: (03:33)
A classic tech growth story.
Joe: (03:35)
Yeah. Well we're going to talk all about this because we are gonna be speaking with Ben Smith. He is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Semafor. Previously he was a media columnist at the New York Times and previous to that he was the editor-in-chief of the aforementioned Buzzfeed News, which changed the world. And he is the author of the new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. So Ben, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Ben Smith: (04:00)
Thank you so much for having me. And I should say, as a genuine fan and listener of the show, I can't imagine that anybody does not want to know all the details of your lives. I certainly do.
Joe: (04:10)
Thank you so much for saying that on air! I have a question, which is why did Buzzfeed News exist? And the reason I ask that specifically is that in my mind, as a competitor to it, when I was at Insider for several years, my perception was that Buzzfeed itself was this huge traffic monster. A cultural juggernaut. Everyone knows about the quizzes, etc. And that Buzzfeed News was there to raise the prestige of the brand maybe for advertisers. Is that correct?
Ben: (04:42)
So that's partially correct, but I think you have to put your head back to 2011, 2012 when we started it, when the kind of thesis that we were working on was that in part that the Facebook newsfeed was this central pillar of society. And people loved it. People loved the idea that quizzes, that memes, that baby pictures from your friends were all mixed up together.
And at Buzzfeed, among other things, they'd noticed that on big news days their traffic went down. And so both kind of in a functional sense, that was part of this mix that again the people liked that this stuff was all mixed together. And so it was part of the mix that I think Jonah Perretti, the founder, thought people wanted.
But also Buzzfeed, you say it was cultural juggernaut, but actually it was struggling for relevance. It was halfway to being seen by advertisers and by the platforms and by everybody else as a media company. And halfway to being seen as like 9gag or like break.com or like a generation of cheezburger. An earlier generation of essentially meme sites that got wiped out in that era because the platforms considered them spam.
Tracy: (05:50)
I was going to ask how much did the content mix become a problem for Buzzfeed overall? Because it was trying to do something kind of unusual in the sense that it was trying to do very important sometimes investigative journalism. Hard news, while at the same time publishing memes and you know, “10 of the best random products you can buy off of Amazon” kind of lists?
Ben: (06:16)
Yeah. You know, in this moment of — which again, this very kind of optimistic fresh moment of social media in 2012 — it seemed plausible that people liked the mix actually. And that the same people who liked memes wanted to get hard news and wanted to get 'em in the same place, which was to say Facebook-slash-Buzzfeed.
I think as you suggest in the question that really starts to change. News got less fun as the decade wore on, not from some technical perspective, but because in fact there was this huge rise of right wing populism, of left wing populism, of super confrontational public politics playing out through people screaming at each other on social media.
And suddenly this idea that the Facebook feed is this delightful mix of all these different things kind of curdled. And I think that was a huge problem for us that we never totally found our way out of.
Tracy: (07:04)
So you had this like weird mix of maybe the ultra right talking about fascism and then like “10 clapback tweets that you've never seen before” and they kind of sit badly alongside each other?
Ben: (07:17)
More you have a list of like, you know, “Things You Only Know If You Grew Up Persian In New Jersey,” and a bunch of cute cats and a story about Donald Trump. And the reactions to that story about Donald Trump are totally polarizing.
Tracy: (07:30)
Oh I see.
Ben: (07:31)
And there's always this huge brand problem in question that like Buzzfeed News, it's like calling something Disney News or something. It's a weird brand, but there was a window in which we leaned into it and people liked it. And then I think the broader social forces changed and turned against that. None of this speaks to the business model or anything else. But that was real. You could feel as Trump rose, you could kind of feel the weather change and feel that brand get worse.
Joe: (08:00)
Oh man, there's a lot there. I hadn't really thought about that element though that like basically people just got angrier with each other at the end of the 2010s than they were at the beginning of the 2010s.
Ben: (08:13)
I think that's the story of Facebook. And Buzzfeed was a big bet on news being distributed by social media.
Joe: (08:21)
You know, just on this brand question though. And then we can sort of pivot, when I was at Insider I always sort of felt this sort of, you know, my boss then, Henry Blodget, again, winner of this whole era in my opinion and completely brilliant media executive.
But I also sort of felt like to some extent that if you're like going up against the New York Times or the Washington Post or Bloomberg News, etc., does the existence of the sort of meme side of the operation create some sort of like hard cap in terms of really how far you can go with like prestige? Because I got the sense that Insider that on some level that you could win Pulitzers and do great work, etc. But on some level you kind of have to pick one or the other.
Ben: (09:15)
Yeah, I don't know. I mean I think that there was a path for Buzzfeed were at its best and maybe I'm somebody who actually thinks prestige is overrated. And sometimes counterproductive.
But there's, you know, there was journalism you could do that was particularly focused on stuff that the majority young women who were sharing memes cared about a lot. Which could be like sexual assault at Massage Envy for instance was something we wrote about. I think at our best we were, a lot of the coverage, you know, was in sync with the people who were reading the site and was really hard hitting journalism that also overlapped with the interests of regular people reading Buzzfeed.
Tracy: (10:08)
Talk to us about how we — I mean the book is called Traffic — so I assume you have a lot of opinions on the importance of traffic and how it works. But talk to us maybe specifically about how that fed — the lines going up on the chart — how that fed into the business model and shaped the offering. How were people thinking about traffic as a monetizable commodity back then?
Ben: (10:33)
Yeah, I spent a lot of time in the book and the kind of reporting of the book for me particularly was on the stuff that happened before I got there, which is to say kind of the discovery of traffic in the mid aughts by the folks at, you know, your team at at Insider a little bit later, but early on by Jonah Perretti who was then at Huffington Post and Nick Denton at Gawker.
And it's interesting you use the word commodity because they really did think it was a commodity. Because they really did think it was a commodity. It was something where they could, you know, for every individual who clicked on their sites, they could get something like a $9 CPM, which is a pretty good rate then and sadly now.
Joe: (11:09)
CPM is per a thousand clicks, so it $9 for a thousand clicks.
Ben: (11:13)
And they had I think every reason to think that wow, like at this very rudimentary stage of this business, we're getting $9 for a really crappy product. We're going to make that product way better and we're going to scale it a lot more. And if this is a classic commodity, we're going to make an enormous amount of money. And so they're focused on traffic. They had different theories about it. [Nick] Denton who started Gawker had this very, both very ideological guys actually, had this theory that traffic is really to be found in kind of like ripping the mask off of society's hypocrisy, of your own hypocrisy. If your audience wants pornography, give them pornography. If they want sort of malicious stuff, give them that
Joe: (11:50)
Gawker had an actual porn site. In the Gawker family there was a porn site.
Ben: (11:51)
Called Fleshbot. But also if they wanted stuff that appealed to their worst instincts, give them that. Don't make them pretend to be better. And then also sort of rip the mask off traditional journalism and print the stuff, the sort of mean sometimes gossipy stuff or sometimes true hard truths the journalists say to each other at a bar, but don't print. So that's one theory. Jonah's theory was totally different. He saw this kind bubbling of this social media world and the theory that we had at Buzzfeed.
Tracy: (12:19)
This is Jonah Peretti..
Ben: (12:20)
Founder of The Huffington Post and then of Buzzfeed. And what he saw in this social media world, which also was true for a time, was that the stuff that people would share tended to be very positive. Like you weren't going to go out and I mean, God forbid, share insane screamy politics because that would make you look like a crazy person. No one would do that.
What you would share on Facebook was, you know, fundraisers for earthquake victims or lists of cute cats. And so he sort of, what he built, was around an idea at first that people were gonna be distributing media themselves hand-to-hand and doing it in a way that reflected their best selves. And so there was very different tactical ideological approaches to the internet.
Tracy: (13:02)
This is actually something that I wanted to ask you about, which is, it feels like the way people thought about traffic is, it's always good. Eyeballs are always good, but it sort of ignores that one way of generating a lot of traffic is through the hate read. You have something saying something provocative, you're still going to get a lot of eyeballs on it, but you can't tell whether people are reading that because they think it's a valuable piece of journalism or they're reading it because people like to read those sort of hate-ready, you know, like dog whistle-y type pieces. Is that something that you ever noticed?
Ben: (13:38)
Oh yes. Is that something I ever noticed? That people hate read? For sure. And I would say though, if you're, thinking of traffic as a commodity, what you're really selling is the the white space next to that article. And so you don't care if people love it or hate it, the sort of purest logic of traffic, I guess, which turned out by the way to be not how it worked. And I think not how good editors ever quite saw it.
Tracy: (14:02)
The way I should have phrased the question is, did that eventually impact the business model?
Ben: (14:08)
You know, I don't think that… It's hard to think of a site that really lived on hate reads. I'm sure I'm forgetting one. There was something sort of similar that the...
Tracy: (14:18)
The marriage announcement section of the New York Times?
Ben: (14:20)
There is that, I mean there was also a site called XOjane that…
Joe: (14:41)
Our producer just in the message [said] Thought Catalog.
Ben (14:24)
That's a good one. Yes. There was a kind of writing and I actually, that was basically about having mostly young women write in a totally unselfconscious way about their personal experiences in a way that was torqued by, often by kind of sophisticated, cynical editors to make them look like horrible people. So people would attack them on the internet. I mean, that to me is one of the really worst forms of internet journalism and did like lots of damage to these writers in the name of traffic.
And there and more broadly there was, it was a kind of, I think, and this came out of Gawker particularly came out of Jezebel, which I was not a reader of at the time in 2007, but was this incredibly high impact piece of internet history that for a time, it's actually kind of amazing to look at, you know, they launch in ‘07 and the first thing they do is offer a bounty for anybody who can find an un retouched photograph from a women's magazine. And they get it. They have $10,000 and they pay it out and they get an un-retouched photo of Faith Hill, which before her freckles and smile lines have been removed and really like launched this incredibly effective assault on everything that was wrong with women's magazines, the way they distorted the images of people's bodies, the way there were no black models.
And they also published this very like frank revelatory writing about sex and about women's lives. And they also developed this unbelievably intense and pathological relationship with their commentators that sort of drove them totally nuts. And that who and the commenters felt they owned them and attacked them. And some of the writing was the kind of writing we're talking about where you people sort of exposed their own lives and then faced this intense and very personal criticism and it got enormous amounts of traffic.
And Nick Denton, who didn't really love the content kept it going cause it got so much traffic. But it was both is this sort of early glimpse both at the power of that kind of social media age and then also the emotions it could provoke and how damaging it could be for the writers.
Joe: (16:22)
I want to jump ahead just a like a few years. You know, it's funny because the day before the news came out that Buzzfeed News was shutting down, I was thinking about this famous letter to the editor of The Awl where someone is like, “I hate my life because I don't work at Buzzfeed.” I was literally just sharing this article with someone the day before the news. And the psychological hold that I think Buzzfeed, in its heyday, had over everyone else in the media was extraordinary.
I think reports went all the way up to like the board level at the New York Times, feeling like, what are we gonna do about this juggernaut? It's so innovative. They keep coming up with new story types and traffic and influence and all the young people prefer to get the news there. But what I'm curious about actually is like, what was the date that that peaked?
Ben: (17:19)
2015?
Joe: (17:20)
What happened? What was the turning point in 2015?
Ben: (17:27)
I mean to me, you know, Buzzfeed was this bet — and to some degree all these companies were a bet — that this new form of distribution was durable and that the economics would work themselves out. And I think everyone now totally rightly can say this was always idiotic. Maybe it was.
But the basic metaphor everyone was using was cable. You know this new form of distribution been laid out. The people owning the cable lines knew that they needed quality content to populate it. And they reached an economic arrangement where ESPN, CNN, MTV become, you know, become these great businesses.
And that's what I think Buzzfeed and others imagined they would become. I think 2015 was really where it started to become a little clear that a that that these platforms themselves were pretty fragile and sort of susceptible to all these social pressures and that they weren't gonna move away from their total reliance on user-generated content to create a business for publishers.
Tracy: (18:28)
So just on this note, my impression was always that in addition to the distribution issues that you just mentioned, which we should dig into a little bit further, one of the big problems here was that the traditional media companies also just got better at doing what a lot of the digital media companies were doing.
And you know, where I worked — Alphaville — it wasn't necessarily a traffic juggernaut, but it was kind of pioneering of a certain type of journalism. Certain experiments with audience engagement and events and things like that. And what always tended to happen within the Financial Times was that we would do something new and exciting and innovative and then that would just get replicated by the FT itself. And so it becomes hard to sort of maintain the momentum of having new types of exciting journalism at a constant rate.
Ben: (19:22)
Yeah. And that's a sign of a pretty healthy organization basically. But there was this arrogance that really came out of the aughts where we were looking at the New York Times, looking at CBS News and it was just so clear that they were doomed. They could never figure out digital media. Their leadership just was terrified of it. They had no idea what was going on. And I think this arrogance lasted long past expiry date.
And we just published on Semafor an excerpt from my book of when Jonah Perretti is invited into the New York Times in 2015 to tell them how to do their jobs. And he's speaking to a board meeting and the interviewer asks him what he would do if he was named CEO of the New York Times. And he says, “Well first I would ask you for a raise. And then second I would go into my office, shut my door and cry.”
Tracy: (20:07)
That's a lot of hubris, in retrospect.
Ben: (20:08)
And actually by then the Times had started to figure it out and they didn't follow fast. And in fact a number of traditional media companies — I'm thinking of the Washington Post — had really screwed themselves by trying to follow fast. Like they had copied this thing and that thing in blogs and never really built anything.
The New York Times followed slowly and carefully, but very deliberately and very effectively. And I think suddenly we looked up and yeah, they had copied a lot of our tactics. They had taken a lot of our best people. And they had closed that gap and then could deploy their huge advantages around brand. Around resources.
Joe: (20:43)
You know, you mentioned the doomed cable analogy at the peak. And one sort of phrase that I think lives rent free, so to speak, in the head of many digital journalists is “the pivot to video. We're going to do video” and my impression...
Tracy: (21:02)
Didn't we just launch a video product show?
Ben: (21:05)
Wait, are we being filmed? I'm still soaking wet, it was raining outside .
Joe: (21:10)
We did. Odd Lots is in fact doing a pivot to video. Kind of. But my impression is, like what happened, Facebook came to a bunch of publishers and said you'll go viral more if you do video.
Tracy: (21:24)
Oh yeah, who was driving this?
Joe: (21:25)
There's higher CPMs and you are going to do really well and so build all these expensive video studios and you're going to make a lot of money. Is that basically what happened and it didn't materialize in the end?
Ben: (21:37)
Yeah, I find it a little hard to be mad at Facebook for this. They just kind of randomly gave a bunch of publishers money and in some did redeploy their existing writers who weren't good on video to make videos.
I mean there here has been in society a pivot to video. There's this widely used product called TikTok, which has relied on short video. So I mean I think the notion that news was gonna be delivered in video by people who were terrible at making videos was probably not the case. And it came as a lot of these digital publishers, you know, were scrambling for revenue trying to figure out how their businesses were supposed to work. And so a pivot was a pretty scary thing.
Tracy: (22:16)
Can we talk more about the distribution channels here? Because I think that's the subtext of a lot of what we're talking about, which is you had this explosion of digital media, but then at the same time you had a handful of distribution platforms — so things like Google, Facebook, Apple — that were growing more and more powerful and sort of more concentrated in their own monopoly power when it came to distributing the news. So how much of that was a negative force on the digital media business?
Ben: (22:46)
Well it was the digital media business. I mean it was a hugely positive force, right? Much of the digital media business and certainly really Buzzfeed above all was a just all your chips on the table bet on Facebook and subsidiarily Twitter and Pinterest and others and that they were going to be your distribution.
And that again, like Jonah Peretti's basic theory, which I think you can argue now about whether it was true or not, was that Facebook and these other platforms would find that they had a need for quality content to retain their users, to compete against places like Netflix. And that they would eventually start paying for higher and higher quality content as other platforms head through history. And that just did not happen. And that bet went totally wrong.
Joe: (23:28)
Here's a 2023 question. How old is Semafor now?
Ben: (23:32)
About six months.
Joe: (23:33)
Where does traffic come from today? Or where does audience, if you want to redefine that, come from in 2023? Because it doesn't feel like many go viral at any level anymore.
Ben: (23:45)
Yeah, it's such a totally different world. I mean newsletters are really important to us and probably the sort of core of our distribution. The web exists. And it's a very familiar space to me for someone who's been kind of looking at traffic for 20 years. The Drudge Report is really important. People continue to go there. There's a set of kind of what I think of as Asian-style aggregators, some Asian, some specifically out of Asia. Smartnews, Newsbreak that’ll send traffic. Flipboard. But in a weird way it's this internet from 15 years ago before social media existed that has returned. And then, you know, we do a lot of events which people really like, which is the most intimate and direct form of audience.
Tracy: (24:23)
So is that the future of traffic and audience? Is it the sort of smaller scale, develop it organically? Or are there still the big channels? I know you mentioned Drudge Report, but is anyone still trying to target, you know, Facebook exclusively now?
Ben: (24:39)
You know, Facebook is just not on our radar as a distribution channel at all. I mean that was probably the biggest surprise to me in starting a new thing. And I'm not sure there's one future. I think we're really looking at is a much more splintered landscape in which, among other things like the web itself, and traffic is one of the splinters.
Joe: (24:58)
Is there ever going to be another publication that tries to, you know, like Insider or Buzzfeed or Gakwer through all of the various like Gawker sub-verticals that really attempt go after the New York Times and to create these all in one news packages? Like HuffingtonPost as well? Destinations that had everything? Would anyone try that again to sort of like create an all-purpose news brand?
Ben: (25:28)
What kind of an idiot would do something like that?
Joe: (25:36)
I mean you don't have sports…
Ben: (25:37)
I would say nobody would imagine that you can do it in a kind of explosive, flip the lights on and reach a billion people in three years kind of a way. I do think that it's again a weird changing moment where what people want is… if the challenges are different. When we were starting all this stuff, it was so cool to be able to read publications from all over and hear voices from all over. Now people are drowning in that and are looking for help navigating it. And if you can do that well that's real value. But it does feel like a kind of interregnum where there's some next thing. And we haven't totally seen it yet.
Tracy: (26:29)
We haven't really talked about the funding side, which I think is important. But we saw a lot of venture capital money flood into the space in the 2010s. What was the story back then? And then fast forward to today, are there any VCs out there who are very excited about the future of digital media? I assume there are some because Semafor got VC funding, I believe. But what is the story now?
Ben: (26:54)
Yeah, we didn't actually get any VC funding. And I think that was certainly a lesson I feel like I learned from that era. The expectation of fast massive returns — and we're talking about digital media, but we're really talking about the news business, the journalism business — that's a really unrealistic expectation and not something that we wanted to promise that we would in four years have some multiplier valuation by a thousand or whatever VCs expect.
You know, these people aren't… they're not widely seen as idiots and they were making these big bets on all of the publishers we've mentioned. Because they imagined a world in which there were companies, you know, in which Vice would be Disney. Or which Buzzfeed would be NBCUniversal. And these would go to massive, massive scale.
It's interesting to think back to how could they have thought such a thing. And I think that cable analogy tells some of that story, but I don't really see any VCs anywhere near the media business right now.
Joe: (27:46)
Just a quick detour, but what was Vice? Because people talked about Vice and I never knew someone went to went to vice.com. So what was Vice?
Ben: (27:59)
You know I wrote this whole book about traffic and Vice isn't really in it because they didn't get any traffic. They were the purest best brand of digital media. Shane Smith was the best advertising salesman probably of our generation and best equity salesman of our generation.
And they did have this brand that really stood for something. They made some incredible documentaries, mini documentaries that really caught people's attention and defined a style of telling stories. They did not ever really build digital audience. And what they were able to do for a time was to convert that brand into a television production company that made a pretty good news show for HBO. But the television production business, I mean, you think the digital media business is tough. I mean that's a really tough business as well because you can get your show canceled, which is ultimately what happened.
Tracy: (28:47)
Sorry to keep jumping back in time but I think it sort of informs the current state of the market, there was a moment when Jonah Peretti was talking about maybe the media could get together to give them some more bargaining power over the platforms, the distribution channels. Was that ever a viable solution to some of the issues we've been talking about?
Ben: (29:11)
Yeah. Jonah in particular had an idea that you could basically — if you rolled up enough scale on digital media — that you could get gain leverage against Facebook in particular. I mean, you see why that makes sense. I mean it's a very classic way of thinking about a market. But I think there's this underlying problem that what these guys were selling was not a commodity. That scale was infinite. That Facebook, whether or not they had access to high quality journalism, they thought they could reach every single person on the planet forever with their better mouse trap and didn't really need you.
I think as you look at social media and you watch it unravel, it's not crazy to think about, maybe these social platforms should have taken more seriously the idea that they should have been pivoting towards subscription services with high quality content since that seems like those are the companies that are now winning. But that was it. But it also seems in retrospect, that that was never gonna happen. And it was crazy to imagine it would.
Joe: (30:13)
So speaking of bargaining power. I was at Insider for six years and they were very good for my career, etc., and I wouldn't trade that for anything. Except that they were extremely psychologically and physically demanding. I basically worked seven days a week. I would get up early on weekends to post. I would probably work 12 hours a day on the weekdays. I would wake up sometimes so stressed out, I would punch a pillow a few times. And the reason I bring up bargaining power is that a number of newsrooms have unionized. And I'm sort of curious, because I left Insider prior to that newsroom having unionized, but Buzzfeed News did unionize while you were the editor-in-chief there, right?
Ben: (30:59)
Yeah, that's right.
Joe: (31:00)
How did that change? Was there like a noticeable difference in the “post post post” environment that I grew up in? Did that change or was there a shift in anything when the newsroom unionized?
Ben: (31:12)
I mean maybe we had already moved a little past that era that you're talking about where you were in a personal foot race with Twitter. And you were always second, which is pretty amazing, like no one else could manage it. You were the fleet of foot. It was crazy. But it did seem stressful. It was still second. And I was in that race too at various times.
No I don't think people unionized because they wanted to work less hard. I think it was a sense of wanting control over your life and your work in this very stressful, chaotic moment in America. Not just in news business.And in particular wanting protection against the downside at a pretty gloomy seeming moment. But you know, the New York Times Wall Street Journal have had unions forever.
It's an industry that has a history of pretty strong unions. I think there's this other challenge right now, which is that newsrooms, good newsrooms are really egalitarian and feel that unions are part of that culture. And at the same time this ecosystem rewards journalists who get their whatever… you know we all hate the word words like “influencer” and “brand,” but in fact that is it. It's an ecosystem that rewards that. And figuring out how you blend those cultures I think is a big kind of newsroom challenge.
Tracy: (32:24)
Since we mentioned Twitter, it has been interesting watching the slow implosion of Twitter at this time. But both Joe and I, our careers have certainly benefited from that platform. What would be the impact of Twitter suddenly going away or either becoming irrelevant, on the media industry?
Ben: (32:46)
I think we're halfway through that process and you're seeing it. It means that as a consumer, I mean I'm currently, and I don't know if you feel this or if your listeners feel this, but I wake up in the morning and my main use case for Twitter had been “what is happening now?” And it doesn't do that anymore for me. Just what are the four news stories I need to be watching? I need to go to the front page of the New York Times or the Drudge Report or, or 17 other places. And actually Semafor, that’s definitely like a job we feel can be done. That we're trying to do every morning with Flagship. “Here is what is happening in the world.” Because that is a service Twitter used to serve. Twitter now provides this riveting story about itself, which I find very interesting as a longtime Twitter user.
Tracy: (33:28)
That's most of the value now, is to see what people are saying about Twitter.
Ben: (33:31)
Yeah. But it doesn't do that particular thing. I think as a newswire, as a sort of user, it's become less useful as a journalist. It was a good place for people to build their brands to some degree. It still is, I think in certain spaces. I think in economics. In AI, there are really interesting threads of conversations that are still there. And you could imagine, I mean I think Reddit is a really interesting example. There's a social network that didn't go away actually. It's probably the best place on the internet. But it's also not centrally relevant to news and culture. And I think there's a path for Twitter that is that.
Joe: (34:06)
Okay, so you mentioned AI. Actually it's funny, Tracy and I recorded an episode earlier in the day and we decided that, well from now on, I guess there's always gonna be an AI question probably in every interview at least.
Tracy: (34:16)
It's usually going to be “how is AI gonna make this worse? “
Joe: (34:19)
But actually as someone who makes my living with words in one way or another A) I'm pretty blown away by what AI can do. And, in my mind I have a fair amount of anxiety that at some point in a few years someone could say, “You know, I'd really like to hear Ben Smith on the Odd Lots podcast.” And rather than waiting for us to book Ben Smith and then get it out a week later or whatever, they just say, “What would it be like?” And then they run it through a voice generation thing and they have a pretty good version of the Odd Lots podcast where Joe and Tracy interview Ben. I'm unironically anxious that this is a real possibility in the next few years. Does it worry you at all?
Ben: (35:04)
It worries me. I don't think I've quite figured out the scenario that's really going to freak me out. I’m not sure it's that. Because I think there's already enormous amounts of sort of copypasta, random generated content on the internet and the fact that you could get someone to read it aloud in my voice, I'm not sure who that's for. I think there was this sort of Google-centric view of the internet where if you just sprayed garbage content everywhere, you would occasionally make a few pennies.
Joe: (35:33)
My concern is that it's not going to be garbage. That it actually will scan the corpus of all Ben Smith content and be pretty good at sort of figuring out what you're going to answer. That it'll scan Joe and Tracy episodes and kind of be good at figuring out the questions we would ask.
Tracy: (35:50)
I actually don't worry about that. What I worry about is, because it will come up with something predictable, what humans will have to do, what human journalists will have to do, is become even more extreme and un-unpredictable.
Ben: (36:03)
Interesting. But I mean I don't think your audience wants that. I think you underestimate your audience. If you flagged in advance that this episode was entirely AI generated from re scrambling the corpus of things we've said before, they wouldn't listen. Yeah, I don't know.
But I guess I sort of come from like the sort of scoop world of journalism. I care a lot about reporting and that's a kind of journalism where it's sort of a little harder to see AI disrupting it. But also over, you know, over the last 20, 30 years of editors getting worn away in newsrooms, there's been this thing that I've noticed where there's a kind of journalist who was not a particularly good writer. And in the old days of tabloids, you know you were a runner and you had a rewrite guy. And as these metro newspapers ran out of money, the first people to go were these kind of rewrite mid-level editors. And it really disfavored people who did not have fancy educations and/or were not good writers, but were really great reporters. And if, I don't know if you have somebody who can really report and can't write and wants to use some writing tools, like that's fine with me.
Joe: (37:05)
I remember hearing a story, Tracy, from I forget who was someone at the New York Post talk about how, you know, they'd have the guy go out and there's like a doctor was found dead in a hotel room with his girlfriend, and then the rewrite guy would be like, “Okay, doc with Gal Pal” could translate it into New York Post-speak.
Ben: (37:21)
And that is so, and that's like literally what ChatGPT is.
Tracy: (37:25)
There was someone at the FT who was exactly like that. I'm not going to say who...
Ben: (37:29)
But he would make it more boring.
Tracy: (37:31)
No, there was someone who was very, very good at reporting and getting the story, but had to have all of their copy rewritten. They're a legend.
Ben: (37:37)
There are legendary, fabulous magazine writers whose names we all know and admire whose editors write every word. And what's wrong with that? It's different jobs. It's a great form of news production. It's sort of too bad that it's all been flattened out. And if some of these tools help people write, it's not the most important part of the job.
Tracy: (37:54)
So one of the things I wanted to ask you was, I was reading, first of all, I really want to read your book. I haven't done it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I was reading, instead, one of the reviews of the book, I think it was the one just read
Ben: (38:05)
Just read the reviews. Just like in that movie Metropolitan, just read the critics.
Tracy: (38:09)
I think it was probably John Gapper or someone like that. But they had a line in there saying that they felt that in the book there was no moral conclusion about this whole episode of digital media. So I guess I'd love to hear from you, you know, here's your chance at a clear moral conclusion. What is the big takeaway of the past 10 or 15 years in digital journalism?
Ben: (38:31)
What's the old apocryphal lie thing? Too soon to tell? But I don't know about a moral conclusion, but I would say the thing that surprised me most in the reporting was that the world that I was reporting on, that we were all in, in the kind of early internet, I think was assumed thought itself to be politically progressive, without really thinking about it. The internet was where young people got together to elect Barack Obama and you know, Barack Obama pays a visit to Facebook. Obviously Facebook, you know, it goes without saying, that Facebook is a democratic place that is friendly to Barack Obama.
And I think the people, some of the people at Huffington Post totally explicitly saw their job was to elect Barack Obama. And I think it was a surprise to me in the reporting to see that the sort of people who created the populist right, you know, the guy Chris Pool who founded 4chan worked at a Buzzfeed's offices. I don't think he was a conservative, but he built that. Andrew Breitbart was a co-founder of Huffington Post. Steve Bannon comes through and learns from Huffington Post and so on.
And then like, I think if the people who thought that the election of Barack Obama was kind of the apogee of this whole moment turn around and suddenly actually the election of Donald Trump is the apogee of the moment. And the people who thought they were the main characters actually were the supporting characters and the main characters were these conservatives who'd been hanging around the edges, but actually were the central thrust.
Joe: (39:53)
Since we're talking politics. We have the various cable networks on TV in the newsroom. And they're all on mute, so I don't really listen to them. But one thing I definitely noticed is that CNN and maybe some of the others, they've never been able to quit Trump.
Biden has been the president for over two years now, and I'm pretty sure I still see Trump just as much. Constantly. I'm just sort of curious about this lasting, strange love-hate. I kind of think the media mostly loves Trump even if the words are kind of anti-Trump. What has the Trump era done to the media?
Ben: (40:34)
I mean the rise of this reality show star turned would-be authoritarian is obviously the biggest story in this period of American history. So I don't think it's crazy that the media covers it or that its viewers are very interested in it. But obviously also TV has its own form of traffic, which is ratings.
And there's a sense in which Trump in 2016 was sort of providing free syndicated content to CNN that was just putting it on and people were watching it. I mean, Newsmax was competitive with other channels the other day because it just put a Trump speech on unfiltered and CNN is going back to the well and is planning a Town hall with Donald Trump. I think sometimes the media overestimates our own role and our own power and, you know, Trump in fact basically was banned from cable.
Rupert Murdoch said that he was going to make him a non-person. He was banned from the social networks. And he remained very popular because a lot of Republicans really love him and like what he's selling. And maybe we overestimated the role of the media in that. They weren't confused about who he was. They hadn't been tricked. They just really like him.
And so it's not particularly healthy for a country, like when a country's consuming as much news as this country in the period 2016-2020. That's like not a great sign. It is probably a more normal country that consumes less news. And we're headed probably to another national panic attack and consume a lot of news.
Tracy: (42:00)
I do remember before Trump won the presidency, I think I was in Abu Dhabi at the time and I wasn't watching cable news. And I remember coming back to the US for a visit and seeing CNN and it was wall to wall coverage of Trump. And up until that point I thought like, “oh, this is crazy.” But then you see him on TV all the time and you're like, “oh, wait a second.”
But just on that note, so I think the thing that traffic and cable news all kind of has in common, and going back to the question I asked earlier about the hate read, is a way to get people's attention is obviously to provoke outrage or to play to previously held opinions. Once that can has been opened, or once that box has been opened, can we ever go back to that sort of classic maybe 1950s, 1960s era of, you know, “unbiased media coverage,” bipartisan coverage that appeals to all types of people? Or is that just gone?
Ben: (43:03)
I think that specific thing you're talking about isn't so much classic as a sort of temporary product of post-war metropolitan newspaper businesses that were these monopoly advertising businesses that wanted to sell to everybody. But I also think suddenly, this data from digital media came in. And suddenly these people who'd been not only flying without instruments but kind of sleepwalking. They'd been doing the same thing for years and years in declining industry. And suddenly they were flying with instruments and we could all suddenly see in, in exquisite detail everyone who was reading everything, and in many ways probably, you know, over torqued toward that lesson.
Joe: (43:49)
I have one last question. It's very self-serving for me and Tracy, but I feel like to some extent — and tell me if you disagree, I feel like when you look at all of the big changes that have undergone the news business that business news is a bit of an exception and that it's been more stable.
And I remember at Insider when you — and I was a huge admirer that whole time of Buzzfeed News — but I remember I was like paranoid when you guys launched a business section because I was like, “Oh, now you're gonna come for us”. And it didn't really click in my opinion, like it didn't really work.
And generally speaking it does not feel like the level of disruption and sort of like tumult that many parts of the industry has faced has hit business news quite the same way. And the Wall Street Journal is still powerhouse and Bloomberg is still a powerhouse. Do you feel that that's the case? What was it about business news even at Buzzfeed that made it unlike some of these other categories?
Ben: (44:48)
Well, I think it was more competitive and it was better sort resourced and you had healthier institutions. And that's because business is where the money is. I just think that's actually why it's a better business than general interest news. Just for the literal reason that people are making money on what you produce. And trading on it and subscribing. I mean, this institution is probably the best example of that.
Joe: (45:11)
I'm not kidding about the psychological effects on me of those years. I mean, I've gotten over it and it's not one of these things like, “Oh, I need years of therapy.” But those were extremely stressful years. And I remember before Buzzfeed launched its business section just being insanely stressed. My life is stressful enough and now the news entity that's the juggernaut of all things is coming after business news and now we're done.
Ben: (45:35)
I'm glad we didn't push you over the edge with that one.
Joe: (45:37)
Thank you for not not doing that Ben and thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. This was a lot of fun.
Ben: (45:42)
Thank you so much for having me on.
Tracy: (45:44)
Thanks Ben. That was great.
Joe: (45:46)
Tracy. That was a lot of fun. I hope the listeners found it fun because for me actually, like I could talk about this for hours. There are not many topics that we discuss on this show in which I feel like I have expertise. That's why I'm the interviewer. But on the digital media business of the last 15 years, which we both had, I kind of consider us both experts.
Tracy: (46:19)
Joe, you know, which one of us got more traffic last year?
Joe: (46:22)
It was you wasn't it?
Tracy: (46:23)
It was me.
Joe: (46:24)
It was one of those housing stories. You had so many.
Tracy: (46:27)
I had a bunch. I was just behind Matt Levine in the traffic ranks. But actually, that's something we didn't talk about is the data visibility. Because this was one of the defining things of digital journalism, which was you could see how many people were reading your article in real time and that really helped you focus on the type of content you were producing.
Joe: (46:49)
At Insider it was on the walls. It was on a scoreboard for everyone to see.
Tracy: (46:56)
That's crazy.
Joe: (46:58)
I don't want to totally over exaggerate it and say like, “oh, I was scarred for years.” But the stress that caused people to see everyone's traffic on the walls at all the time. It did two things. It drove people crazy. And it turned people into absolute juggernauts. And you could take someone out of school from like Columbia J-School or UNC or Duke or Northwestern and in a few months they were a traffic monster.
Tracy: (47:21)
But see, this is also why I asked that question about hate reads. Because you can produce a headline that will get a bunch of people to click on it, but not necessarily in a good way. And I feel like a lot of digital journalism was about provoking that response and not necessarily building up a dedicated audience.
Joe: (47:42)
“Henry Blodget: What it's like to actually eat a cheeseburger.” Those were like hate reads, but oh my god this is so good.
Tracy: (47:48)
Totally. But you know, there's no differentiating between someone reading something because it's fair and balanced and accurate and insightful versus someone reading something because it's provocative or stupid or extreme in one way or another.
Joe: (48:03)
Your point is something I'm very concerned about about AI. Which is if there is this perception that sort of like, AI is gonna be really good at the sort of commodity, “normal” stuff. All these people in media think “Oh, I have to ‘AI proof’ my career”...
Tracy: (48:20)
You’re going to have to turbocharge the hot takes to like furnace level
Joe: (48:25)
It's what social media did and I think this is gonna be even more extreme.
Tracy: (48:29)
Yeah, that's what I think too. All right. On that happy note. Shall we leave it there?
Joe: (48:33)
Let's leave it there.
You can follow Ben Smith on Twitter at @semaforben.