Episode 123

Semafor’s Ben Smith on Newsroom Wars

Semafor editor in chief Ben Smith sees a fragmenting media landscape and impatient owners running headlong into the peculiarities of newsroom culture, where bosses have never had an easy time. Enter the hard-charing Brits. Also: check out Ben’s new podcast, Mixed Signals, in which Ben and co-host Nayeema Raza unpack the real conspiracies of modern media.

Skip to topic:

  • 00:54 Introducing Ben Smith and Mixed Signals
  • 04:14 Podcasting and Media Expertise
  • 09:09 Challenges in Modern Newsrooms
  • 20:11 Unionization and Media Management
  • 23:40 The Washington Post's Third Newsroom
  • 26:19 Semaphore's Journey and Business Insights
  • 28:37 BuzzFeed News: Reflections and Lessons
  • 35:28 AI in Journalism: Opportunities and Challenges
  • 41:55 Starting from Scratch: Advantages and Strategies
  • 43:22 The Role of Journalists in Modern Media
Transcript
Ben:

I think the breaking news ecosystem is so broken and so many organizations are doing this thing of something happens and you write like a really quick one sentence story and throw it on the internet in the hope of getting the Google link.

Ben:

And then maybe you fill in some more words.

Ben:

'cause Google wants words or something, or some SEO expert told you it did.

Ben:

but that, that is just not a good piece.

Ben:

That's not a thing that is helping anybody understand the world.

Ben:

I think our approach has been the inverse, wait a bit, figure out what the facts are and then find people expressing really thoughtful, informed analysis, often disagreeing, if we can find it and give you something that reflects what kind of almost used to be the best of the social media experience, which is, here's what happened.

Ben:

Here's how to understand it.

Brian:

So you're making aggregation great again.

Ben:

We are making aggregation great again.

Ben:

I believe I prefer the word distillation.

Brian:

Welcome to the Rebooting Show.

Brian:

I'm Brian Morrissey.

Brian:

This week, I'm joined by Ben Smith, co founder and editor in chief of Semaphore.

Brian:

Ben has a new podcast which he hosts with Naima Raza called Mixed Signals.

Brian:

It aims to unpack the truth in modern media.

Brian:

I've listened to the first couple episodes.

Brian:

And I'm already hooked.

Brian:

You should all check it out.

Brian:

and this is a great time for it.

Brian:

Ben and I talk about the podcast as well as this weird moment the media business is in as the pressures of the business force changes at many legacy publishers like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Brian:

And I think, What we're seeing is in many ways a dismantling of the resistance media machine built around the time of Trump's election in 2016.

Brian:

As publishers seized the moment in time and told themselves and the world that their role was to oppose the Trump agenda, I think the pressures on the business now has made that approach something of a luxury belief, and unwinding it is gonna be tough work that's often left to Brits, and we talk about why that is.

Brian:

Now here's my conversation with Ben.

Brian:

All right, ben.

Brian:

We're doing this podcast.

Brian:

I think the last time I did a podcast with you is at Cannes last year.

Brian:

We're both about to head out to Cannes.

Brian:

What what are you going to do different your your this is your second year at Cannes.

Ben:

At Cannes?

Ben:

You know, Max, Tony, our mediator and I, I think are genuinely kind of more sophisticated about the stories in the ad marketing industry.

Ben:

And so I think we will do a better job covering them.

Brian:

the michael casson dueling cocktail party You mean

Ben:

I think we may have broken that very

Brian:

do you have you have has anyone written about that?

Brian:

Have you guys written about

Ben:

We did, yeah.

Ben:

We dropped it in the newsletter.

Ben:

and, I don't know, I'm going to attempt to run around less in the heat as though things are super urgent.

Brian:

Good.

Brian:

Well, I hope to see you there.

Brian:

we were talking before it's like the, the market for can is, is actually exceedingly small because the

Ben:

possibly sub zero,

Brian:

the people who are there have no time or no, you know, inclination, cause they've got a cocktail party to be to.

Brian:

And the people who are not there actively hate it.

Brian:

So anyway, be sure

Ben:

So please, yes, so please sign up for our canned pop up newsletter.

Ben:

Only if you are there, because I am big on, I'm a big believer in not doing, not forcing your general audience to read about cool parties they weren't invited to.

Ben:

We did actually last year in Cannes, we accidentally sent one of the Cannes special newsletters To the big list of all my media, our media subscribers, which, and I just, as it went out, I just sort of felt, you know, the blood rushing to my face.

Ben:

It just, and you just don't want to do that.

Brian:

well I'll be doing that anyway,

Ben:

Well, you, you have as more, you have an audience that is specifically focused on marketing.

Ben:

A lot of people in the media business who are less,

Brian:

Yes, and no, we can get into that, so you have a new podcast, Is this is this competition for this podcast?

Brian:

No, you're going with a different, you're going much broader.

Brian:

Yeah.

Ben:

all against all out there, right?

Ben:

But I do think it's a bit different.

Ben:

I mean, we're, we're certainly, I mean, I think the way I cover media is different from the way you cover media.

Ben:

I mean, I think, and it sort of reflects that I'm, you know, I think I sort of try to use media as kind of a vector into politics, technology, culture.

Ben:

And that's what the show will be less than less than sort of a x ray of the business itself

Brian:

Okay, well just stay away from programmatic advertising if you don't mind.

Ben:

for so many reasons.

Ben:

I will.

Brian:

so it's called Mixed Signals, first couple episodes are out.

Brian:

I'm enjoying it.

Brian:

One of the things that the promise is around the, the, the true media conspiracy.

Brian:

Explain that to me.

Ben:

Yeah, I mean, I think, let's see.

Ben:

I think there are, let me come step back.

Ben:

I have a theory about podcasts, which I suspect I'm a real non expert here.

Ben:

And hopefully many of your listeners can email me and tell me a moron when I articulate this.

Ben:

But I think that there was a generation of American podcast, many still really popular and wonderful, whose sort of vibe is We're a couple of kids on a voyage of discovery.

Ben:

And Brian, you and I don't know anything about this, but we're going to go figure it out.

Ben:

And like the art, we get out of the car and our feet crunch in the gravel as we go to interview the suspect or whatever.

Ben:

and many of those are wonderful, but I do think.

Ben:

Related to the moment in the culture and the media, there is increasingly an interest in a kind of a show across the board that is like, Hey, we actually really know a lot about this subject, have been doing it for a long time and can tell you things that are different from what you're going to hear in a sort of conspiracy minded, chaotic mass media.

Ben:

And I think, I mean, your show is that through expertise based, there's a British show I love called the rest is politics that very much has that kind of attitude.

Ben:

And I, and so my cohost, Naima Raza, who's been in film production for a long time and docs and worked at the New York Times with me, and I, I think sort of.

Ben:

At least I think that often media stories are covered as conspiracy and sort of seen as conspiracy, and there is a broad belief that something, there's some element of the media business just sort of isn't on the level, and I think, by the way, often that's true, if you, and these companies say one thing, but what they do doesn't quite match that, and people I think often jump to think that there's some kind of political conspiracy, and by the way, sometimes there is, really often it is

Brian:

as organized, I don't think, as people

Ben:

Yeah.

Ben:

And it's usually just a conspiracy to make money.

Ben:

And by the way, not, not a good, not a well functioning conspiracy to make money.

Ben:

And I think trying to take these things that are happening, you know, whether it's like the British invasion of all these American newsrooms, or whether it's the vanishing of sex from the movies, and try to kind of talk to experts and with real expertise about, hey, what actually happened here?

Brian:

Yeah, but I mean, you're bringing your own expertise, because I think what's interesting in podcasting is, I think it's the front end of the sort of expert media, meaning that the people, like All In, for instance, which I never would have thought would become a giant podcast, but it has.

Brian:

and there's this promise of bringing people inside the room, the quote unquote rooms where decisions are being made, is that, are you going for that in a way?

Ben:

I mean, I think that, I don't, I'm not sure you want to be inside the room, but I mean, I have that, or that's a slightly different promise, I would say.

Ben:

I think we're just trying to, but I do think we're trying to bring real expertise and experience to explain what is really happening.

Ben:

and to some degree to undercut this sort of huge miasma of assumption and conspiracy that just totally besets American media culture right now.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

So how did you think about formats for this?

Brian:

Because I think, know, you guys launched with, with formats at the forefront, I feel like with, with Semiforum and, and now there's Semiforum.

Brian:

Right.

Ben:

Yeah, yeah, we, you know, our, our sort of, yeah, I mean, I definitely with, in terms of our, our interview format, Semaphorum, which is truly a pun, and our, and our article format, which we were calling a Semaphorum, it was really about, can you kind of pull apart the story and say, here are the facts, and here is the, here, you know, here's the, the, We're journalists opinion here.

Ben:

Other points of view on it.

Ben:

And I, and I do think that, I mean, the show very much has that same spirit that we're trying to bring transparency.

Ben:

We're trying to give you a real blunt, transparent look at what is happening in the media.

Ben:

you know, in terms of, I mean, more sort of, you know, we have interviews, but it's not an interview show.

Ben:

And I think the way we're trying to bring the interviews in is, to, you know, in a way, a little, a little more like radio where you have somebody, somebody calls in for a few minutes and you pull them into your conversation.

Ben:

I mean, I actually love long form interview shows, but this really isn't that it's more sort of focused attempt to answer questions.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

And there's at least the first couple, there's three segments.

Brian:

I mean, you have segments, right?

Brian:

Because I think a lot of times, I think one of the flaws of, I don't know, maybe I'm telling myself, of podcasts is sometimes it can come off as college radio.

Ben:

It's sometimes the flaw and sometimes I think it's a benefit, right?

Ben:

There's a looseness and an honesty to it, but we definitely are trying to keep it tighter and a bit shorter . don't think anybody ever, Rarely do people say, Oh, man, that was too short.

Ben:

And that is usually a compliment.

Ben:

and so we have two sort of substantive segments.

Ben:

And then, and then Max Taney leads this blind spot segment, which is something from our, our Washington coverage.

Ben:

Just that the idea is to bring in stories that you didn't see in your media bubble, but that some other chunk of the world, the country did, or that you did, and you didn't realize nobody else saw.

Ben:

And to kind of dissect some of those, which is fun.

Brian:

So what is your headline right now for what's going on in newsrooms at this time of tremendous change, obviously, in the business?

Brian:

is there a headline that connects all these things?

Brian:

What we're seeing going on at the Washington Post, we're seeing going on at, the Wall Street Journal, I think to some degrees you could extrapolate it to CNN, and leave aside the Brits, we can, we can get to the Brits later.

Ben:

let's see.

Ben:

I mean, I think the, in the biggest picture, we just have this fragmenting landscape and inside that you have these remnant big newsrooms that are, I think, trying to, you know, fix their businesses and sharpen their brands and identities.

Ben:

And, and I think you actually can't leave out the Brits because I think what's happening across these newsrooms is that you have proprietors who, you know, saw, you ESG story.

Ben:

But in the, in the, in the 2010s, you had all these investors who were running around telling you and sort of fund managers running around saying that they were focused entirely on ESG, congratulating themselves about it.

Ben:

And by the way, our returns are better than anybody else's.

Ben:

And we're on ESG.

Ben:

It's win win, right?

Ben:

And that's because all their investments were in Tesla and Netflix.

Ben:

The stocks were going up.

Ben:

And then come really the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Ben:

You know, the, the stocks that start spiking our arms, you know, our weapons manufacturers and energy.

Ben:

and you have more complicated choices as an investor and less self congratulation.

Ben:

And I think the parallel in media is that there was this moment when changing your motto to democracy dies in the dark and position yourselves as warrior priests and the struggle against Donald Trump.

Ben:

Yeah.

Ben:

was great for business, one Pulitzer prizes and led you to congratulate yourself.

Ben:

And, and that, that fell apart after 2020.

Ben:

And you know, in particular, the New York Times to some degree is an exception to this because they built a bunch of other businesses.

Ben:

But a lot of these other newsrooms, CNN and the Washington Post first among them just saw the tide go out.

Ben:

And then when you go, and the problem is you have then built this.

Ben:

infrastructure of marketing yourself as the sort of truth tellers of Washington, first and foremost.

Ben:

if you are then trying, you want to keep that, but you also want to do some other things and you need to cut costs and you are trying to figure out your future as a business, but you've marketed yourself externally and internally.

Ben:

as this other thing.

Ben:

And I think that's where they're getting hung up.

Ben:

And, and, and so you, you know, so you go and you try to restructure your newsroom and you, and you get these lectures on journalism from the journalists you have told who are repeating back to you the words you told them.

Ben:

And I think there is that then a temptation to bring in a bunch of kind of feral Brits who lack respect for these great American institutions to shake things up.

Ben:

And I think that's what you're seeing happen.

Brian:

Yeah, I think there's definitely a, I mean, the Brits that take themselves a little less seriously than American capital J journalism.

Ben:

Yeah, a lot less

Ben:

seriously,

Brian:

going back to the, the David Blaine, remember when David Blaine was doing his stunts like in the early

Ben:

Yeah, sure.

Brian:

he went to, he went to London and did this thing where he was like in a box over the Thames and he was starving himself.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

And so of course the tabloids have a remote controlled helicopter that is like dangling a cheeseburger in front of them, you know?

Brian:

And like, there is that aspect that I think can be good, like I actually think,

Ben:

Yeah, they think journalism is really fun and it's about, and, and, and entertains about entertaining people.

Ben:

And by the way, it can be about confronting power in a very intense way, but with, but with a sense of humor about yourself and kind and without a real, I think often without a sort of quite as elevated sense of mission as American journalists, you know, for better and for worse.

Ben:

And I would say there's a lot about this moment when you, you and I talk about it and I hear you, I heard you talk about it on the show the other day and I've heard other, you know, Like kind of media journalists on podcasts talk about how well look like tough, you know, the days of wine and roses are over and these, you know, it's and sort of side with management here and I've been like in management long enough.

Ben:

Like I have this terrible impulse to side with management in these conversations.

Ben:

there is this reality that if you go in and you tell your room full of journalists that the days of wine and roses are over and you guys are busy, you're in a business and you have to figure out the business and we're going to optimize for margin or something.

Ben:

Like most of them have to suck it up, but the people who do not have to suck it up.

Ben:

are the best or your best journalists who are going to leave.

Ben:

And I think that's a real problem with this approach right now is that there's this Impulse in these newsrooms and this is the times is not doing this and they're benefiting from it and they're picking people off from these other newsrooms, but you have these this message from the top that's basically like we got to get serious.

Ben:

No more fooling around.

Ben:

This is a business, but it's a talent business.

Ben:

You just can't go walking around talent businesses talking like that.

Ben:

I think

Brian:

Yeah, and that's going to be, that's, that's going to be a long term challenge.

Brian:

I mean, we've talked about this before.

Brian:

I think our last podcast, you objected to the term influencer journals.

Brian:

I don't think I

Ben:

I think I said I flew through up in my mouth when you said it,

Brian:

I believe that was, it's a

Ben:

but also that it's kind of accurate.

Ben:

But obviously, yes, it does represent a real trend.

Ben:

Right.

Brian:

so do you think it was a, was it a short term, mistake, I guess a long term mistake to, to go oppositional, during the Trump era?

Brian:

Obviously 2016 was an insane time.

Brian:

and, lots of Lots of things happened after that, that I think in retrospect will seem very strange,

Ben:

you know, I think the media made some mistakes, but I think, you know, you have these right wing populist movements whose core move in part is to attack the media and to sometimes say things that aren't true in really loud ways and, and, and to try to create that confrontation.

Ben:

I

Brian:

but is it more, do you think it's, it's, it's, more strongly held than the normal working the refs situation, because I mean the role of quote unquote the media as the refs has also changed quite a bit.

Ben:

Oh, for sure.

Ben:

But then there's always been working the refs, but Donald Trump's, you know, the way he used CNN is essentially the opposition candidate.

Ben:

Was different and new and it's not that I don't, I think it's easy to go back and say people made mistakes, but there were, these were, you know, these were, there were a bunch of, particularly in the early days of the Trump White House, a bunch of crazy stuff happening that the Washington Post unearthed the administration was furious at them about, and there wasn't really a way around that.

Brian:

So when you get a question from someone who isn't steeped in this that says what.

Brian:

what is going on at the Washington Post?

Brian:

How do you, how do you summarize it?

Ben:

I mean that I think they had found this sort of singular mission in covering the White House and that and didn't and the rest of the organization had remained kind of adrift trying to get traffic over here, doing some Metro coverage over there, but without a clear sense of mission.

Ben:

but that Marty Baron was a incredibly strong editor who led this very aggressive, fair, tough Washington coverage that captivated a huge audience for a period.

Ben:

And then when that period ended and the tide went out.

Ben:

They didn't have, they had not built much else and had, had an idea a lot.

Ben:

And they also, and I think it's a huge problem when you're owned by a billionaire that there's that, you know, you have an audience of one and they'd done all this flashy.

Ben:

We're going to be a tech company stuff obviously was fun to talk to Jeff Bezos about.

Ben:

They built a CMS that they were licensing.

Ben:

They built ad tech products that they were going to license.

Ben:

And I think, you know, and, and that I think has not really turned into a real business and was their big bad.

Ben:

And was a bat that made, that I'm sure was super fun to tell Jeff Bezos about, but that is different, but, but pleasing your billionaire owner is not always the same as running a business

Brian:

Yeah, I remember they were talking, talking to us a lot about, you know, building an ad server for Kindle ads and things of that.

Brian:

Anytime, Neil Vogel has a good line that says anytime a media company says you're a tech company, run away as fast as you can.

Brian:

because it generally doesn't, it doesn't work.

Ben:

a big part of the problem is that your customers are other struggling media companies for your cool ad protect product, right?

Ben:

And so,

Brian:

Yeah, shrinking market.

Brian:

how about the journal?

Brian:

Totally a very different situation.

Brian:

I mean, a journal is profitable.

Brian:

I think it's, it's almost like a, harder challenge, I feel like to, to make changes when, when things are going okay.

Brian:

Because, yeah, look, a lot of people, in this profession, when the, when you come with the idea of, well, we have to expand profit margins, you're like, what are you talking about?

Ben:

Yeah, that's, that's a less inspiring.

Ben:

Right.

Ben:

Right.

Ben:

When you say, Hey, we're losing 70 million a year.

Ben:

Everybody does say, all right, we got to fix that.

Brian:

yeah.

Ben:

when you're saying we got to, we got to drive margin, little, little, little less inspiring, but you know, the journals in a funny place.

Ben:

I mean, it's in some ways similar, right?

Ben:

nobody was gonna mess with the core news gathering and when it felt like they were living through history.

Ben:

And in fact, when Jerry Baker, the editor was seen as being you.

Ben:

You know, to not taking Donald Trump's sort of.

Ben:

You know, challenges to democracy seriously enough.

Ben:

He basically got fired by the newsroom.

Ben:

And so now, you know, but also the journal is a perfectly good business.

Ben:

And you can see why somebody in the proprietor might say, well, this should be like an amazing business.

Ben:

It's the Wall Street Journal.

Ben:

It's most important business publication in the world or ought to be, you know, it should be a booming business.

Ben:

And I do think it's always been sort of an under, you know, It's doing fine, but it, but it didn't, it didn't do what the times did and really kind of take advantage of the digital digital transition to become something much bigger than it had been.

Ben:

And it has, I think it kind of typically rests on its laurels and sort of glides through in a way.

Ben:

They brought in a British editor.

Ben:

I do think to cut cut partly to cut costs and increase profit margins is inspiring for the Murdoch family, which is obviously an inspiring cause that we can all get behind.

Ben:

but also to do the thing that I think Murdoch has been mumbling about since he bought the place, which is shake it up, make it less boring, make it move faster, make it more on the news.

Ben:

And do you think a lot of The great journalist at the Wall Street Journal feel that Emma has done that and that there, and that there are elements of what she's done that have really worked and are really, you know, have, have made it more of a reporter's paper and less of an editor's paper in a way, and, and sped it up.

Ben:

And they've done, you know, they do great stuff all the time.

Ben:

But I think there is, you know, but there's also when you're doing that, this question of what is the identity of the journal that you're, what are you trying to hold onto here?

Ben:

And then just more broadly, like it's just really hard to build good culture when you're cutting costs.

Ben:

And I think it's under, I mean, it's not like a big, it's not a theoretical question.

Ben:

Like it's no fun to be in a place when your friends are getting laid off.

Ben:

And even if you didn't think that they were in the top quartile or whatever, like it's, it's just a, it just hurts morale.

Ben:

It drives people to your competitors.

Ben:

And I, and I don't really think there's a.

Ben:

I mean, it's just, it's, they're, you know, fundamentally they're cutting costs and it's tough to be a really inspiring, fun place to be when you're doing that.

Brian:

and there's the drip nature of it.

Brian:

I mean, look, there's, everyone says it's best to get it over with once and then move on, have a bad day, have a bad week, rather than trim here, trim there, but a lot of times, The latter ends up

Ben:

Yeah.

Ben:

And they are.

Ben:

And they're sort of, I think, you know, they're, they're a complaint.

Ben:

The management there is complaining a lot about union contracts that were obviously in fact negotiated by them, you know, and so at some point that is what it is, but they, but they have these kind of last in first out rules that make it not as easy to manage as perhaps it wasn't some non union titles in the UK.

Brian:

Yeah, you were at BuzzFeed when it unionized, right?

Brian:

Yeah, what is your take on the the union's role in this time?

Brian:

I mean, I always say you can't say anything bad about the unions.

Brian:

They'll come after you on twitter You have to shut down your twitter if you that's that's like the new kneecapping, but obviously there's a role for

Ben:

I mean,

Ben:

I will say we're so deep into the kind of like backlash moment that union organizers were having to turn off their Twitters at the Twitters at the New York Times last week because they were criticized or one somebody they were criticizing Times journalism about Gaza and Max Taney has a kind of interesting piece about the rifts there.

Ben:

You know, I mean, I guess I have a sort of, you know, like you have to be an optimist to be in this business, I suppose, and I do think that you could imagine and you have totally not seen the unions play a really constructive role in particular vis a vis the tech companies.

Ben:

I always thought that, like, as in other industries, like auto, the management and labor had this very, very clear united interest.

Ben:

Around the industrial, the structure of the industrial landscape and putting, you know, when there were these tug of wars over revenue, could have, there was an opportunity to sort of present a united front that didn't really work out.

Ben:

I mean, I don't think that it's been a particularly happy story.

Ben:

You know, over the last few years and, and I don't think the folks, I mean, the Times Union is currently in this very, then the, the News Guild is currently in this huge fight with the Times and Reuters in particular, who many of his employees feel like they're paying, they're paying a disproportionate share of the bills, but they organize these new newsrooms that get to vote on how the money is spent and what share of dues there are.

Ben:

So there are these bitter fights about, I mean, I don't know, but bitter, but pretty normal fights about.

Ben:

You know, normal labor stuff.

Ben:

I mean, it's honestly, these are stories nobody reads when we write them.

Brian:

Yeah.

Ben:

So I'm going to stop talking now.

Brian:

but it seems like there are a symptom of, I mean, it's difficult to run a newsroom these days.

Brian:

Would you want to run one of these big newsrooms?

Ben:

No, I mean, it's incredibly fun to start a newsroom and to build from scratch, but it's, it's very, I think it's very hard to run an institution these days.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

Why, why do you think that is?

Brian:

I mean, there's, there's a, there is a generational element, I feel like, but, you know, part of it is just, I think journalists are difficult to organize in the best of times.

Ben:

Yeah.

Ben:

Good journalists are sort of right.

Ben:

Or not great.

Ben:

They're not always great employees.

Ben:

But that's okay.

Ben:

I mean, that's great.

Ben:

Jonah Peretti, because I just, I should disclose, I was, the News Guild were the, our counterparts, you know, who organized the BuzzFeed newsroom, when I was there.

Ben:

but I remember Jonah Peretti saying to me once, this always stuck with me that, you know, journalists, you don't really work for your employer.

Ben:

You work for the Guild.

Ben:

and I don't mean the news guild.

Ben:

I mean, like you're like, like a medieval guild you know, you'll within the certain parameters, you'll do what your employer requests usually, but there are definitely things where your employers like do this and you're like, no, I'm going to take my tools and go back to the guild hall.

Ben:

Sorry.

Ben:

And I think that's, you know, call it journalistic ethics, whatever you want.

Ben:

It's a profession in that way.

Ben:

I suppose it's like, it's like lawyers.

Ben:

It's like certain financial professionals.

Ben:

They're just stuff that we won't do.

Ben:

And it's something that is sort of mystifying to people running other kinds of businesses where your employees just work for you and you can say, do this and then they'll do it because in newsrooms, it's like.

Ben:

Well, they, you, they work for you, but you can, and you can suggest or request that they do something and they'll like really take it at a very serious advisement and if you're a better editor or a better boss, you'll hopefully be like steering them in good directions and they'll respect that, but it isn't like a normal workplace where you can tell people what to do, which I think is quite frustrating for managers sometimes.

Brian:

I found the fact that the Post is creating a third newsroom fascinating.

Ben:

Yeah.

Ben:

They're creating, I think it's a marketing stunt, but what do you think it

Brian:

Why do you, well, I mean, I, I, well, I mean, Matt Murray, obviously there was, there was moving chairs and, and how, how that transition quote unquote was, was handled was, pretty messy, from, from Sally Busby to,

Ben:

So I think it was, it's sort of a less than meets the eye, organizational shift, which is lots of big newsrooms, their social media editors and their video teams are sometimes embedded with the desk and sometimes they're over in the audience hub.

Ben:

And that's sort of a very boring, bureaucratic choice about, do you have the social media editor for the business team sitting with the business team or does she go sit over with the head of audience and social media and the video folks And, and, you know, Will Lewis, his previous startup, was a essentially kind of social media team without a newsroom attached that produced a bunch of short videos that tick tock and stuff and marketed itself as an agency.

Ben:

And I think we're basically talking about, it's called the news movement.

Ben:

I think we're basically talking about taking the existing social media and video editors at the journal who are currently sitting with the business team or the politics team or whatever, having them all sit in one together in one place.

Ben:

Over on the left side of the newsroom, putting a very senior established prestige editor on top of them.

Ben:

So we say now you're a senior established prestige newsroom, not, not the social media and video team that you were yesterday and then calling it a third newsroom and then selling something out of it.

Ben:

Or maybe just telling Jeff Bezos, see, we did something dynamic and tech related, but I don't, I think it's actually not a great leap forward in the history of journalism, but hopefully they'll create a bunch of really cool and brilliant social media stuff.

Brian:

I don't think it's a great leap forward.

Brian:

I do think it speaks to, again, from an outsider perspective, how unoptimized these organizations are.

Brian:

Like, they're not massive organizations to be this matrix.

Brian:

The fact that, commerce content is created in a completely different, You know, area, then the, the core news content is, would be strange to someone from outside.

Brian:

And again, all these things sort of layer on top of one another, like we were talking about, people working for the guild, not for the organization.

Brian:

And I feel like at this time, it becomes a real drag.

Brian:

all these things add up to, on top of one another.

Brian:

Yeah.

Ben:

When you're trying to make really dramatic change in an organization where you're the thing you're waking up in the morning worrying about is that it's losing 77 million dollars a year and, and that's oddly not urgent to your very matrixed, complicated newsroom.

Ben:

I do think it probably makes you crazy.

Brian:

yeah.

Brian:

So you're a year and a half in now with Semaphore, I think a little bit more than a year and a half.

Brian:

I'll ask you the typical question, what's changed now versus when you launched?

Ben:

You know, I think we've, you know, it's, you just, you launch with a bunch of theories and some are true and some aren't.

Ben:

I think we had a intuition that the events business would be really positive for us and a real kind of hub, but I think we didn't anticipate how, just what a, you know, how much, what a sort of like center of journalistic and commercial heat that would be.

Ben:

You know, we had this world economy summit last month, month before that was in Washington, where we had 14 events over two days.

Ben:

And these, you know, finance ministers from six countries, a bunch of White House officials, bunch of CEOs made a lot of news, moved to the markets.

Ben:

and it was also this hugely commercially successful event and most complicated thing I've ever been involved in personally.

Ben:

But also, but it, but just we're operating.

Ben:

That business at a scale that I didn't anticipate, honestly, and we're all kind of clinging with our fingernails a bit, but in a way that feels, you know, really like exciting, the newsletter business has been really good as, as I think you would expect, I mean, I could see the newsletters were, we did not invent newsletters, but I think we do them well.

Ben:

And people seem to like them.

Ben:

you know, we took a run at video, made some amazing stuff, but I think like a lot of other publishers found that's, that's a very hard place right now to get traction.

Ben:

So I think that, you know, I think that's, those are, those are a few of the things that we've learned.

Ben:

I do think that there's this opportunity now, and you know, you've talked about this a lot in this, that so much of the opportunity is in essential, in niches, in kind of, you know, what you might call a kind of business to business space, and a lot of our energy goes into doing, coverage of media, of technology, of politics, of finance, which are the kind of core, I suppose, kind of power verticals, and doing it at a real, doing power

Brian:

there's money, there's still, there's always going to be

Ben:

Yeah, doing that.

Ben:

And if you do that at a really high level, you can both.

Ben:

Build a business.

Ben:

And you can break big news because if you're writing stuff that is of interest to the leaders on those and really in conversation with the leaders in those sectors, you're writing some of the biggest stories in the world.

Ben:

And so that's And I think we've been pretty decent at kind of trying to occupy the high end of those spaces and then kind of draw connections between them, have a kind of highest common denominator conversation, which has been really editorially satisfying, I would say.

Brian:

Yeah, but how is it different like running this kind of organization versus Buzzfeed News?

Brian:

Because again, Buzzfeed News is a totally different animal

Ben:

I mean, the biggest, you know, I wrote a book called Traffic, right?

Ben:

And we thought about traffic all day.

Ben:

And I still, like, I hit that Parsley link, like some kind of weird dead limb, phantom limb, which is like twitching over here.

Ben:

you know, it's one of a number of reasonably important things, right?

Ben:

To have good, to have a bunch of readers.

Ben:

And I think we're doing pretty good on that front, but it's not, you know, it's not what we're oriented toward.

Ben:

We're oriented toward having like deep relationships with this core audience.

Ben:

you know, who are really at the center of these stories.

Ben:

And so, and, and meanwhile,

Ben:

just watching the dinette, watching like the dinette,

Brian:

What are the numbers you look at then?

Ben:

you know, I mean, I mean, it like, you know, the email number, like the, you know, growth of email newsletters, but not just random growth.

Ben:

we're not like going on Facebook and buying random emails so that we can tell you that we have a zillion readers were, you know, obsessing about where we acquire people who really are going to want the product and open it and are deeply engaged in that subject, which is awesome.

Ben:

Thanks.

Ben:

different.

Ben:

And you know, events have been a great place for us to build audience for the newsletters, actually, which I hadn't totally expected.

Ben:

you know, and I think we're in this really nice feedback loop with that audience, but it is, yeah, but it, but it's just not that kind of business of random scale anymore.

Ben:

I had this interesting conversation with somebody at a company that, let's see, I don't want to sort of.

Ben:

Identify the person, but it was a, you know, a publisher that does newsletters.

Ben:

And they were saying that a few years ago when they had tens of thousands of subscribers to their newsletters, it was actually like a, among other things, a lucrative business.

Ben:

And they then invested in buying lots of audience on Facebook, have hundreds of thousands of subscribers to their newsletters.

Ben:

And now.

Ben:

Can't sell it because advertisers are like, huh, who are these people?

Ben:

They're random people that you bought on Facebook.

Ben:

And if like we wanted to buy audience on Facebook, we'd buy audience on Facebook.

Ben:

And that is so different from the Buzzfeed days when it was just all about scale.

Brian:

Yeah,

Ben:

I mean, the other big difference, which goes to that saying is just that, you know, I look at our traffic and Facebook is just not a meaningful refer and the end of Buzzfeed, it was really always the first refer.

Brian:

yeah, when you look back on BuzzFeed News, could it have worked or is it always sort of because of the macro environment,

Ben:

I mean, the core bet was that you could build a news organization on the back of social media, and that was wrong, right?

Ben:

I think that just, that's what Jonah and I thought.

Ben:

We then made a lot of mistakes, including spending too much, just way too, more money.

Ben:

We just thought that it could support a bigger business than it could.

Ben:

I mean, there were lots of mistakes that we made.

Ben:

But that kind of core bet, that the social media ecosystem was kind of going to evolve into something like cable.

Ben:

where there were business models for content businesses.

Ben:

I mean, nobody cracked that.

Ben:

There are individual creators doing okay, but there are no news organizations running that way.

Ben:

And so I don't, I think that it was fundamentally this macro thing.

Ben:

I think we could have seen that a lot sooner and tried to turn it into a smaller, more subscriber driven thing.

Ben:

We had this great newsletter that we launched in probably 2015, written by this guy, Elamin Abdel Mahmoud, who is now a I recently learned a very important Canadian cultural figure.

Ben:

great, great guy.

Ben:

Check out his show on CBC.

Ben:

and wrote a great newsletter.

Ben:

And the newsletter really got traction.

Ben:

we could just feel the audience.

Ben:

And, but we didn't, we had no idea what to do with it.

Ben:

And obviously, in retrospect, we should have been trying to build, like a, a, you know, a business with a smaller but more, You know, but, but very plugged in audience.

Brian:

So how different is it now with building Semaphore in this more with less era?

Brian:

I don't know the types of people you hire, like what are the differences in approaches from back when you're building BuzzFeed News to what you're doing now?

Ben:

I mean, I think when we were building BuzzFeed News, we considered Twitter and our sort of competitive advantage for a little while is that we figured out that Twitter was the front page of news and just like set it that clearly.

Ben:

And I told, you know, Rosie Gray and Zeke Miller and these great reporters I hired in 2012, just think of Twitter as your front page.

Ben:

If it's already on there, don't write it because it's already on there.

Ben:

Break news.

Ben:

It can be small news, but break stuff that people on Twitter are curious about.

Ben:

answer their questions.

Ben:

And that's how you build a news brand and news organization.

Ben:

And it totally worked.

Ben:

and in the kind of journalists who did really well, we're often journalists with this very, very sort of sixth sense sensitivity to social media and sense of what was being talked about all the time.

Ben:

Still useful skill for sure.

Ben:

But I think that kind of microscope matters a lot less.

Ben:

Actually, you know, it's hard, much, much harder to cut through and to cut through.

Ben:

You need more velocity, more sort of weight to a story.

Ben:

I do think original reporting scoops still just You know, there's no, there's no, replacement for that.

Ben:

if they do call it news and it has to, there has to be news in it.

Ben:

But, but the, the, but the, the thing that the audience wants often is a direct connection with an individual journalist, which is so different and also just help navigate.

Ben:

I think if like people 10 years ago thought wow, this is, opening of social media is so delightful, and the fact that instead of just being stuck reading one publication, I have everything at my fingertips.

Ben:

It's wonderful.

Ben:

Now people hate that, and are looking to publishers to give them an alternative that synthesizes all this stuff coming from all over, and so a lot of our effort is going to Is now directed toward synthesis.

Ben:

And we have this product called Signals, which is just really about saying we're, because I think the breaking news ecosystem is so broken and so many organizations are doing this thing of something happens and you write like a really quick one sentence story and throw it on the internet in the hope of getting the Google link.

Ben:

And then maybe you fill in some more words.

Ben:

'cause Google wants words or something, or some SEO expert told you it did.

Ben:

but that, that is just not a good piece.

Ben:

That's not a thing that is helping anybody understand the world.

Ben:

And so we've been, I think our approach has been the inverse, wait a bit, figure out what the facts are and then get, find people expressing really thoughtful, informed analysis, often the dis, you know, disagreeing, if we can find it and, and give you something that reflects what kind of almost used to be the best of the social media experience, which is, here's what happened.

Ben:

Here's how to understand it.

Brian:

So you're making aggregation great again.

Ben:

We are making aggregation great again.

Ben:

I believe I prefer the word distillation.

Brian:

Well, that's the thing.

Brian:

I mean, aggregation moves on, right?

Brian:

I mean, I think aggregation was frequently done for algorithms and, it always drove me crazy when business insider would, in my view, rip off like a piece of original content, put it into a slideshow and get 10 times the traffic.

Brian:

Just drove me nuts.

Ben:

Yeah.

Ben:

Yeah.

Ben:

Yeah.

Ben:

But it also has a very long history in the media business.

Ben:

The Associated Press began aggregating.

Ben:

So I think you, you know, you want to do it really well.

Ben:

You want to add intelligence and, and, and, and also be, make sure that, and not, there is that sense of we are, and it's a little hard to put your finger on, right?

Ben:

The like, they just stole our story.

Ben:

What the hell?

Ben:

Versus oh, cool.

Ben:

They linked us.

Ben:

And it's a bit about humility among other things,

Brian:

And the fact that like, I think anyone in any.

Brian:

Any walk of life should remember that you know, most people don't care like I

Ben:

re but it's not a, yeah, that, that's about being a good citizen in the news ecosystem, not about the reader.

Brian:

So let's talk about being good citizens.

Brian:

these AI companies and the AI deals that are taking place.

Brian:

I think there's roughly two camps and really your business model depends on which camp you're in.

Brian:

One says there's, there's little choice.

Brian:

There's not much, I mean, my, I believe there's not much leverage that publishers are bringing if they ever had it.

Brian:

At least they now know that they don't have any leverage and money that goes to straight to the bottom line.

Brian:

Great.

Brian:

Great.

Brian:

Don't, don't bank on it.

Brian:

Don't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't extrapolate it into any 10 year plan if anyone can have a 10 year plan.

Brian:

the other is, you know, the Charlie Brown, With the football, gift that we kept running on any platform story for five years at Digiday.

Brian:

what's your take?

Ben:

I guess I, I think, yeah, I found Jessica lesson's argument pretty persuasive that if you can afford to avoid doing these deals, it is too early, basically.

Ben:

And that there's a real risk in a deal that is basically like, Hey, here's some money.

Ben:

Stop complaining, as opposed to a deal that is a clear value exchange and it's just too early to figure out what the value exchange is.

Ben:

'cause these companies don't have businesses yet.

Ben:

And so I do think it's this current round of deals is a sort of hand wavy, leave us alone.

Ben:

Here's some goodwill kind of a deal.

Ben:

although that said the details matter a lot and a lot of them are quite short term and don't actually preclude the publishers from turning around and suing in two years and don't necessarily sign away, you know, and concede all the rights questions.

Ben:

So I don't know.

Ben:

We'll see, we'll see how it plays out.

Ben:

I guess I, Do you think that there's a lot of different ways the AI industry can go?

Ben:

I mean, I think the notion that it's going to be this kind of incredible monopoly business, like the social and search platform business.

Ben:

Not is not for sure.

Ben:

It could be, you know, a huge business that loses money or a product that gets really commoditized.

Ben:

And so I think those questions that are sort of hovering around what kind of a business is a I make it hard to figure out how the news business and how the media business plugs into it.

Ben:

I mean, I guess my own view is that, you know, it's in some sense, it's like in the way, the way that you experience it.

Ben:

if you look at perplexity, taking whole news articles basically last week, it's just, it's distribution.

Ben:

And it doesn't seem to me that it's written in stone that the distributors should get 90 percent of the revenue and the content should get 10.

Ben:

that's what the last era of media was, but not the one before.

Ben:

I think, I do think that publishers ought to be pretty greedy here And if you're the New York Times and you're looking at these platforms, I do think you're saying, wait, this is a lot of our information.

Ben:

They should have low margins for rejiggering our information, and we should get most of the profits.

Brian:

Yeah, and a lot of these deals are for, I mean, they're looking backwards to some degree, and I think what's unknown is how valuable news that's new will be.

Brian:

In this because they they need to keep learning.

Brian:

They need to be up to date and they they took all the stuff so

Brian:

I can understand, you know, look, not all the money is going to compute a lot of it's going to lawyers and so if a publisher is looking at they're like, Oh my God, let the New York Times take on this battle.

Ben:

Yeah, but it is true.

Ben:

They're just literally running out of training data, and they're trying to figure out whether you can create, you can basically use AI to write new words that it can then train on.

Ben:

There is some interesting and promising research in that direction, but they're going to have basically used all the words up like this year.

Ben:

And so, Maybe there then is relatively more value to new information.

Brian:

Yeah, but it's not changing your I mean you're still believer in in words as main output of semaphore.

Brian:

Mm

Ben:

Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a misperception among people who aren't in our business that we spend most of our time, typing.

Ben:

that journalism is just typing.

Ben:

but actually, most reporters spend as little time as possible typing.

Ben:

And most time gathering information that is not on, that is not yet on the internet.

Ben:

And in some sense, like the core thing the great journalists are doing is taking things that are not on the internet and putting them on the internet.

Ben:

And that's not really, I mean, I think, you know, there are probably AI tools that can help you do that better, but that's not something that I think is immediately threatened by AI.

Ben:

And I think the kind of worst and least valuable and least sort of socially valuable and least fun forms of journalism are the ones where you're writing 11 blog posts a day about, you know, like cool things to do in Seattle and maybe based on your reading of TripAdvisor.

Ben:

And I think like probably I can do that.

Brian:

Are you using a AI and, and at seven four in the newsroom?

Ben:

Yeah, we, you know, we have a, we do have a, a deal with Microsoft and OpenAI, although it's not a, it's a different, it's not around, The corpus of text, like we're new, we don't have a lot of text.

Ben:

And so I fortunately didn't have to, didn't have to weigh that decision.

Ben:

but I mean, these things are incredible research tools and, and they're sponsoring our, you know, our use of open AI for this, this tool that we're using for one of our sort of value propositions is, is trying to make sure that you're getting a global point of view on stories and searching, even though machine translation is amazing.

Ben:

Search across languages is hard.

Ben:

Like, if I said to you, like, Hey, could you see if there's anybody saying in Japanese, Chinese or Korean talking about yesterday's news?

Ben:

that's a non trivial challenge.

Ben:

you could, I suppose, translate into Korean and Google and Korean, Google, but that's really hard.

Ben:

And we, in OpenAI, allowed us to build a tool that allows you to search across multiple languages for analysis of stories.

Ben:

And then we're not, copying and pasting their, their stories.

Ben:

Open AI text, but it's an amazing research tool.

Brian:

Do you think the lo when you look long term, you'll have to build a far, smaller newsroom in order to, can you cover more ground with fewer people?

Brian:

I mean, you look at like, Klarna, you know, they, the, they got the CEO of Klarna is like, we're stopping recruiting.

Brian:

we're gonna need 20% fewer people in every area.

Ben:

I think it really depends what kind of what people in your newsroom are doing.

Ben:

I mean, I do think, you know, things that I guess you could call AI have been chipping away at copy desks for a long time.

Ben:

Like, I don't think Grammarly is going to be out on street corners gunning down, you know, You

Brian:

Copy editors always

Ben:

people minority report style, but I do think copy editors are kind of getting screwed again for sure.

Ben:

and their production jobs.

Ben:

I mean, I do think this, you know, I mean, if you, I mean, before the previous wave of the Internet put a lot of drivers and printers at the business, and I do think it's continuing to kind of chew its way up that ladder of production and take out a lot of production tasks, which if you're running a big newsroom, I mean, you have a lot of people.

Ben:

You really, have to worry about.

Ben:

These are people's jobs.

Ben:

If you are starting a thing from scratch, I mean, for us, it's a huge advantage.

Ben:

I mean, it just means there's stuff that we can do much more inexpensively and use that money to hire journalists, which is what I'd rather do.

Brian:

Yeah.

Ben:

Actually, that's unfair.

Ben:

Those people are

Ben:

journalists, but to hire reporters,

Brian:

what other advantages do you have starting from scratch?

Brian:

Cause it is, it seems like a great time to start from scratch.

Brian:

but just from the outside, I look at what's going on in these, in these big newsrooms and like, Oh my God, there's so much going on.

Brian:

That's threatening from the outside world.

Ben:

Yeah, it's a great time to start from scratch.

Ben:

It truly is.

Ben:

I mean, partly because the landscape is, because the distribution landscape has changed so radically and you can put your energy into reaching people one to one, doing events where you would have, as opposed to trying to, you know, feed a kind of social media beast.

Ben:

I mean, just, it's a very different way of thinking.

Ben:

the other big change, which we've talked about a lot, is, is around, you know, just the readers and attachment to individual journalists and wanting to amplify the voices of individuals versus a kind of faceless brand.

Ben:

And then, you know, there's space for some of both, but it's certainly if you are.

Ben:

You know, a great reporter at the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post, give me a call.

Ben:

Let's talk about how to make your byline bigger and have people know who you are.

Ben:

I mean, I think that's a real, advantage for, for startups that are built in this particular moment.

Ben:

When, and I, and I do hate these words, like the influencer and creator and all that.

Ben:

But in personal brand, right?

Ben:

Like everybody sort of just rolls their eyes in, in, in the sort of hard journalism world.

Ben:

But at the same time, that is, that is the direction of travel for the industry and figuring out how you can do that in a way that kind of, you know, where you're not turning over your journalism card to, you know, at the door.

Brian:

Yeah, speaking of that, I was, I was intrigued that you're, you're reading ads now.

Brian:

I mean, was this something that you would have thought of when you got into this profession?

Ben:

You know, I think I'm, I'm very, I love breaking stories.

Ben:

I'm not, I don't have sort of ideological views on, you know, on, on, on this kind of stuff on, on the business.

Ben:

I think it's really important for journalists to have very, very strong ideological journalism and be pretty agnostic about revenue,

Brian:

I just mean, like, actually being, like, I think one of the interesting things with podcasting is

Ben:

right?

Ben:

Is that it's like early days radio when you're reading the ads yourselves.

Ben:

Yeah.

Ben:

Yeah.

Brian:

Well, yeah, because like in, in, in print or text based journalism, I mean, nobody, very few journalists, I mean, outside of some lifestyle categories are, are, are writing the ads.

Ben:

Yeah, I mean, I am glad that, I mean, in our case, I think actually I read the ads in the first one, but my colleague, Rachel Oppenheim, was perhaps slightly more forcefully and enthusiastically reading some of the ads going forward.

Ben:

but we did, I mean, I was concerned when we started talking about audio that I would, and I got beat up when I said this before, but that I was going to have to talk about green juice and actually, in fact,

Brian:

you're talking about Google instead

Brian:

that I couldn't get more awkward to be honest with you

Ben:

I'm talking

Ben:

about.

Ben:

Advertising.

Ben:

Well, it's talking about, it's talking about advertising with the, with the, with this, with the, this very senior Google ad exec who's genuinely totally wired into it.

Ben:

So it's, it's pretty, I don't know.

Ben:

I think it's, I think you could do worse.

Brian:

Yeah, no, I, I'm not precious about it.

Brian:

I don't have a problem.

Brian:

But,

Ben:

Thank you.

Ben:

I, you're my, you're my ethical North star, Brian.

Brian:

Oh, I don't know what that means.

Brian:

I don't think that was an insult, but I'm not sure.

Brian:

We'll just leave it there.

Brian:

We'll leave it hanging.

Brian:

Ben, thank you.

Brian:

It's always a pleasure.

Brian:

Fun to

Ben:

Yeah.

Ben:

Thanks for having me on.

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