One of the most interesting experiences of my time. There was going to Trump
towards see Steve Bannon, who had built breadfart into or helped build breakfart into
this machine to support Donald Trump, And he was so curious and confused why
we hadn't done that with Bernie Sanders, Why we hadn't turned BuzzFeed just into
a machine to support and promote Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. Not because he
had some idea a lot of maybe he liked Bernie, I don't know,
but mostly just because that's obviously where the traffic was. Welcome to the News
not Noise podcast. I'm Jessica Yellen. Ben Smith is a celebrated and feared
politics and media reporter. He is a new media entrepreneur, and he is
unique in the political press for his willingness to take risks on new ventures and
tell old ventures what they're doing wrong. His career tracks the dizzying changes in
the media landscape over the last fifteen years. Smith was one of the first
reporters at Politico. He went on to become the founding editor of BuzzFeed News,
as a must read media columnist at The New York Times, and is
now co founder of a global media outlet, Semaphore, Smith is out with
a new book, Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion In the billion
dollar race to go viral. It chronicles the rise and decline of BuzzFeed and
Gawker, and the online ascent of right wing populist figures like Andrew Breitbart and
Ben Shapiro. Here we dive into the forces that changed the press, how
the web and Facebook got the media addicted to virality, clicks, and traffic.
We explore what could come next and where you can turn for trustworthy news
and information today. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Ben, Hi,
congrats on all the things on Semaphore, on this book. It's great to
see you. Thank you so much for having me, Jessica, and congrats
on what you've built. Thank you. You know, I was trying to
remember when we first met, and I think it was either in late two
thousand and seven or two thousand and eight, when we were both covering the
presidential campaign. You'd just gone to Politico then, is that right? Yeah,
the Politico. It was this new thing that had just launched. Yeah,
And I think at the time, everything we were covering and the way
we did it felt pretty intense, but in retrospect it was way less noisy,
and I wonder, how how do you sort of capture that or explain
what was different then from how we do things now. Well, in a
way, I mean, you were this big shot reporter for CNN and people
were lugging cameras around, and Politico was in a way to the beginning of
the chaos and the noise. I think like our advantage was that while you
were bringing your tape back to the truck and winding it up and doing whatever
those TV people were doing, we were just like blogging and putting things on
the Internet really really fast and stressing everybody out. And I could certainly feel,
as the person who was sort of bringing the speed most of all of
the Internet into this more traditional campaign structure, just how disruptive it was,
how much it kept people on their toes, And there were certain candidates and
political staffers who figured it out and adapted and used it to their own advantage,
and others who were very discombobulated by it. We'll talk about speed and
disruption first. I want to give people just a sense of you in your
career. I think one of the great things about being a journalist is you
often find yourself in a room where you have access to either extremely intimate moments
or real power, or moments when history is being made. If you had
to make a sizzle of some of those moments in your career, what would
be among those moments? Oh, my gosh, I mean I I you
know, I came up covering New York politics and sort of rise of Mike
Bloomberg, which not that not that interesting or intimate, I wouldn't say.
And then it was lucky enough to cover the Obama Clinton campaign of OA,
which was, yeah, an incredible ride and one of those things where you
find yourself stumbling into the gym at six thirty am in a Tumwa, Iowa
and there's Barack Obama on the StairMaster. And then and then went over from
Politico, where I covered you know, his the you know that campaign,
to BuzzFeed, which was the strange, you know, idea that this cat
website was gonna do political journalism. And I went over there and covered the
the Obama Romney campaign, which felt very exciting for the time in retrospect,
the most boring presidential campaign the United States for Busfeed and then did also you
know, all sorts of other stuff there and you know, really kind of
in a way like brought the internet fully into journalism and journalism into the internet.
You know, lots of things was proud of there. Also, it
was ultimately ended really badly and they shut down busfeed News last week, which
makes me quite sad. We're going to talk about that. I want to
start first with other news from the week, which was that Tucker Carlson is
out at Fox, Don Lemon is out at CNN. The loudest voices at
each network is now gone. You're not just a figure in the media and
a person who's built media companies. You cover the media. Do you think
their departures mark a move away from extreme bombast, perpetual outrage, or do
you think their work will actually look quaint a few years from now? You
know, I do think that the big mainstream outlets, to the degree agit
you could call Fox mainstream as well, are trying to move away from,
you know, essentially the Trump berea, which is which is you know what
defined figures like Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon, who are by the way,
very different from each other, but I mean, I think, I mean,
aren't you know, aren't you say of it? I mean I think,
I think there is a broad social sense that, like nobody, that
level of divisiveness and bombast is really tiring and unhealthy, and I do think
there's certainly an effort to move away from it. But it's also very seductive,
and I don't know if it will succeed. Well, let's see who
Fox names as Tucker's replacement. That'll be some indication if we're headed to more
or less noise. So, Ben, your career has tracked the evolution of
new media and new business models for the press. For everyone listening, I
think this conversation is an opportunity for people outside the media to understand some of
the pressures on the press and why the news has changed so dramatically in the
last ten to fifteen years. The book you've written, Traffic, is largely
about BuzzFeed, where you became founding editor in chief of their news division.
It's since shut down last week. As you mentioned, I remember, at
one moment, BuzzFeed was the envy of all media because it had this massive
reach going back to its earliest days. What was BuzzFeed's genius forgetting eyeballs and
how did that change the way we did the news? Yeah, I mean
BuzzFeed was I think the founder of BuzzFeed, this guy Jonahretti. The thing
that he saw before everybody else was this tidal wave of social media that you
know, didn't just transform journalism, transformed all of our lives and sort of
came crashing through society and had the idea that you know, a sort of
news organization of the future wasn't going to try to get you to come to
its website. It was going to distribute its content through these huge new platforms,
first of all Facebook, but also Twitter, also Interests, also Google,
and you know, I think there was an idea that in a way,
those things were the new cable. In the eighties, cable had been
laid into the ground, and these companies like ESPN, CNN, MTV had
built this new way of telling stories that was defined, you know, that
was rooted in this new medium and this new technology. And I think what
he thought, and what we thought, with the people who poured hundreds of
millions top dollars into this project, thought was that there would be a new
wave of media companies for these new pipes, these new digital pipes. There
are ways in which legacy media has actually started to emulate BuzzFeed or and it
still does. You know, traffic really matters. Clickbait often competes with deep
reporting. Would the press be where it is now if there had never been
a BuzzFeed? You know, I think BuzzFeed was better at understanding what people
on social media wanted and what contemporary consumers wanted than our competitors. But I
think that ultimately what the you know, what these outlets are doing is responding
not to some technological trick, but to what people want, for vetter and
for worse. I guess is it the press's responsibility to sometimes give them what
they need and not what they want, oh for sure, And in a
way, just the decision to do news and to try to I mean,
it's easier to it's easier and cheaper just to make stuff up and tell you
exactly what you think, and it is to go gather facts and check facts.
There's a constention of us Feed where we really knew what the story was
that would go most viral, but if it wasn't true, we weren't going
to publish it. But you know, we could feel that, probably very
tangibly. I mean, for me, one of the most interesting experiences of
my time there was going to Trump Towers see Steve Bannon, who had built
a breakfart into or help build breakfart into this machine to support Donald Trump,
and he was so curious and confused why we hadn't done that with Bernie Sanders,
Why we hadn't turned BuzzFeed just into a machine to support and promote Bernie
Sanders over Hillary Flynt. Not because he had some idea a lot of maybe
he liked Bernie, I don't know, but mostly just because that's obviously where
the traffic was. The people who performed the best are intent agnostic, and
they just give the audience what it wants in the short term. Absolutely,
Let's talk about Facebook, because it's been a pretty destructive force for the press,
and I think you see that it's sort of distilled in the BuzzFeed story.
On the one hand, Facebook did drive reporting out to a much much
broader audience, but it decimated or kneecapped the business model. I think newsrooms
are still struggling to figure out how to survive financially in a world dominated by
social media. How was BuzzFeed in particular helped and hurt by Facebook. And
what is that? How is that a narrative of a microcosm of what's happened
to the media at large. Yeah, and buzzed it was closer to Facebook
than any other media company when I when I got to BuzzFeed, they had
just turned down an attempt to acquire them by Facebook, and the Jonah who
ran it was going to come and run Facebook's newsfeed. He did not.
He stayed outside, but he talked to Mark Zuckerberg all the time, and
we had a very clear handle on what they were trying to do and vice
versa. And that gave us just this enormous reach and into the you know,
to this huge audience a lot. But but what it didn't prohide was
revenue. Ultimately. I mean, I think that one of the core misunderstands
and the mistakes that the media made was the idea that traffic, which and
then the people clicking on our sites and looking our sites, that its value
would go up. That it was sort of this digital commodity like oil,
where like, if you had something, you'd be able to sell it.
But the problem is that valuable commodities are limited, you know, they're scarce.
And as Facebook and Google built these enormous stores of traffic, the small
amounts of traffic that we had didn't really have any value, and the price
of our traffic kept going down instead of up. And that's I mean,
that's fundamentally what kind of you know, hit these business models so hard and
they stopped paying for media content. News content, well, Facebook, Facebook
never wanted I mean these One of the big the reasons that that that metaphor
that it was going to be like cable never panned out was that Google and
Facebook and others just profoundly believed in relying on user generated content and liked a
lot that user rated content was free to them. And we're basically hostile the
idea that these media companies, We're going to stand in the middle and try
to build the next MTV or CNN on their back like they wanted one hundred
percent of that revenue. You left a hot news outlet to join BuzzFeed and
to found their news vertical. At the time, you did not everybody understood
when you did that. What was the I'm sort of curious, what was
the dream vision in your mind, in your most evangelical moment. What did
you think an outlet with that much reach and those resources could do with news?
Well, I mean, such is funny to sort of try to put
your head back into twenty eleven. But one of the things that was happening
then there was this new thing called Twitter, and if you were a journalist,
it was so much fun. Your sources were on there, your colleagues
were on there. It was this very frank, real conversation and you were
able to break news and see other people break news. And the notion and
I was sort of hooked on it, and the idea that you build a
news organization that was just directly connected to plat, to Twitter and to Facebook
and to where his authentic conversation was, rather than try to drag the conversation
back to your own sight, felt just very felt like the kind of journals
that I want to do, like very transparent, just speaking directly to your
audience exactly where they were, responding to their questions when they had questions,
none of the kind of artifice and you know, the built up there's something
so wooden about the old newspaper and television media of the of the early auts,
which and I think it is another thing sort of hard to put your
mind back. We're talking just after the Iraq War, after the Great Financial
Crisis, there was a sense these institutions had really also discredited themselves. They'd
failed, they'd missed the story. And you felt that at a buzz at
a buzz feed, at a place that was new and fast and where you
had more direct connection, you'd be more responsive to what was happening in the
moment and more responsive to what our audience wanted and was interested in. That's
certainly where we've gone. I mean, doing the news on social media,
you're constantly hearing from the audience, and it is really helpful and substantive.
You know, you see what they don't understand. People's smart, good questions,
often better questions than the sort of official questions. So that was sort
of the dream when you went. And in the end it turns out that
the news division couldn't turn the profit that the company needed and it's been shut
down. So what made it harder to do news in a traffic first environment
than you expected? Well, I mean, I'd say the broader story of
all these companies isn't so much about news, is that they wedded themselves to
these social platforms that are falling apart. I mean Facebook is struggling. Twitter
is really struggling. People are watching TikTok, which is a different kind of
a thing that's not social, in the same way they're watching Netflix. I
mean, it's just the world has changed a lot, and companies that made
a big bet on Facebook are all in trouble, I think, basically,
but news specifically, you know, I think particularly as news and digital news
became the substance that we were covering, became so toxic and divisive and polarizing
and polarized. It was pretty hard, I mean, have been hard anyway
to build a good advertising business on there. And I think we spent more
money than even a good advertising business would have supported that. I think that
kind of Trump era scared also scared a lot of you know, the kind
of revenue that you could have used to build a stable business away. I
mean, it was a really it's kind of a toxic wasteland. I just
always think that it was the Trump era also became so toxic because of social
and how news was already being done. Like there's which came first, Like
could Trump have succeeded in the way he did. Were we not already doing
news in a social trafficky way. It's an interesting counterfactual, But I think
sometimes the media give ourselves too much credit. Like if you think with this
vast global wave of right wing populism that from the Philippines to Brazil to the
United States, to Britain to China have come up with, you know,
in the absence of Facebook specifically or specific Facebook product choice is like probably,
yes, you know, might it have been different and played out differently without
this kind of media also, but I think it's hard. I wouldn't want
to say it's quite that straightforward. Well, let's talk about that. In
the book, you explained that right wing media has been better at using and
winning on social and digital media than the left. You talk about bright Bart,
who I didn't remember that bright Bart had sort of been Matt Drudges,
Aaron boy in a way online Aran boy, and then he went to work
for Ariana. Like what a figure from bright Bart to Steve Bannon to Ben
Shapiro and even that a proud boy co found advice They know how to build
really airtight online ecosystems. Why and what's different and better about what they do.
Well. I think I wouldn't say this is true of like all political
conservatives or anything, but there's this kind of right wing populism that is about
crossing the lines, driving outrage, pretty unconcerned with facts and rooted in anger.
And I think that you know, and that particularly in kind of mid
century Facebook and mid mid decade Facebook, that was exactly what people would share.
And it's also what the system Facebook built specifically amplified. They were looking
trying fear, how do you get people stay engaged and stay really connected,
And they were looking at signals that you were really connected to the content,
like are you sharing it? Are you writing comments? And so what they
would do is you would post something incredibly divisive on your page and I would
see it and I would comment kill yourself. And they would see that as
like wow, that's great engagement and show it to more people. So they
effectively tuned the algorithm and the platform to accelerate the rage, vitriol and even
I mean borderline violence content. Yeah, that's right. I mean I would
say like human nature also fed that like that. A lot of that is
in US and in our politics, and wasn't invented by Facebook, but it's
certainly for a period the algorithm was like very specifically amplifying it. But as
we pointed out at the beginning of our conversation, when with Tucker and Going
in particular, you know that people have kind of gotten exhausted by that bombast
and rage and that it really leaves us with such bad feelings you don't even
want to go back and re engage. Do you think we're at a moment
where we could be pivoting away from that kind of brand of content winning apart
from cable news on social in the media in general. Well, I think
we're pivoting away from I think people are spending less time on social media.
I mean TikTok is, to my mind, not exactly social media. Then
that is where a lot of the time is going. It's it's a more
leaned back, one way experience. But yeah, and so I think that
stuff is I think we're going to look back at a lot of that.
It's like, oh, that's what the twenty tents were like, And I
think it's not in the news business entirely clear what comes next. I think
the problems are clear. People feel totally overwhelmed, and they're looking for mostly
individual voices, not sort of faceless brands who can help them steer through the
news. I realize I am describing what you do, but I do think
that that's, you know, and it's funny like journalists in particular, when
you say words like influencer and personal brand kind of like tend to like throw
up in our mouths a little bit crne, But it is that. I
mean, it's you know, I think that's just sort of how the world
is organized now. So people are more likely to connect with an individual they
trust and who can kind of r and keep that thrust, who's open to
different points of view a little less polarizing. I mean that's our hope.
Well, let's talk about Semaphore. Because you ended up leaving BuzzFeed. You
went to the New York Times, where you instantly started making news and got
everyone's attention as always, then you found it an outlet semaphore that's constitutionally buzzfeeds
opposite. Semaphore is about reporting plus context on issues of global importance, nuance
over clickbait and an elite audience over viral sharing. That's a little bit the
old news model do you think that the only path to survival for news then
is going to a sort of smaller, more elite audience. I think that,
you know, what a lot of people are looking for now is in
set the antidote to the thing they were looking for ten years ago. I
mean, I think people feel really, really overwhelmed and do not want to
go to these chaotic platforms. He's increasingly messy, canadic platforms to try to
sort their way through. They're looking for someone who can help. It's probably
a person, not a faceless institution, who can help them put the news
in contact. Who's going to bring it. You're going to give you new
information to tell them in a transparent way, you know what do you think
of that information? But also bring in other voices that might disagree and try
to sort of do that service of pulling the this chaotic system together in a
way that is useful and interesting and informs you and doesn't leave you feeling they've
been manipulated. I'm curious from your experience at all these places, do you
think there's a way for news outlets broadly, not some reform particular, but
broadly to get eyeballs and clicks without leaning into negative sensationalism and outrage or do
you think to some extent they all have to push these buttons to survive and
win. I mean, I think you develop a relationship with your audience,
and you should you know, and you tell them the things that you think
they want to want and need to know. And obviously sometimes those are horrifically
negative things. The world is full of tragedies and catastrophes. I don't think
anybody is asking to be shielded from that. I think people don't want to
feel their being manipulated. And that's a little hard to put your finger on,
but you know, when you see it, that's so true. It's
my whole case for what I do. And at the same time you see
that as other media outlets keep doing the manipulative thing, it gets them traffic.
So it's kind of this tension the media is living inside of. And
if you're running a newsroom, that's something that all these newsleaders have to constantly
navigate. If you look at a place like Vices, just downside their news
BuzzFeed is closing news closed at Fox Prime Time, which is where they make
their money, but where you have the most bounbassed and outrage and conspiracy is
at war with daytime where there's actual reported information. Are we at a place
where the forces, the investors who own a lot of these major companies are
so determined to squeeze profit out of every corner that it's necessarily going to keep
news wedded to that model as well. I think that's probably true. If
cable tell vision, yeah, you know, we are headed into a world.
One of the things about Facebook was it created this kind of monoculture where
everybody was, every publisher, every journalist was sort of competing for space in
the same on the same channel, which was Facebook, which had a certain
set of incentives. I think we're just headed into a much more splintered world
where people are getting all sorts of different kinds of things from different places.
You do, and I actually think that's probably healthier. That is probably more
like what it used to be. I mean, it can get, it
can be, it can has its own risks, it can send people into
silos where they choose their own reality. But I don't think in the end
it felt particularly healthy to everyone screaming at their top of their lungs in the
same room. No, I agree, we're headed sort of into like valued
communities where you can sort of find your people and your interests together. Yeah,
which feels cozier and safer at a chaotic time. We're also headed into
twenty twenty four, which is going to be extremely chaotic. What do you
predict for the media in the twenty four cycle? And if if you had
to give this audience five places where you think it's worth their time their money
to pay for content to understand what's going on in twenty twenty four, what
outlets would you suggest that they followup? So I'm not sure it is going
to be that chad like. It looks like it is Donald Trump and Joe
Biden kind of lumbering toward when toward an inevitable contrat Like maybe that'll change,
but it's almost the opposite of the chad. It seems sort of boring.
I hate to say that, but with deep fakes and AI and concern about
what's real and not online, I tend to think some of that is overstated,
and I think people and consumers and the consumers are pretty sophisticated about about
what they say, particularly in the big high stakes stuff. You're not going
to fall for a deep fake of Donald Trump, you might fall for a
deep fake of your spouse, you know, on the phone scam. I
think to me like that and maybe even in a city council race, right.
I think the more attention, the more like focused, high level attention,
is the harder it is going to be to insert that kind of digital
past. I think people are exhausted by at the last two cycles, and
I'm sure by the time and people have very strong feelings about Donald Trump,
I don't think they're like changing their minds at this point. And I'm sure
by the time twenty twenty four comes around, particularly if he is on the
ballot, people feel incredibly strong way about voting. But I'm not sure there's
a really interesting, heated debate about Donald Trump. I think people kind of
know what they think and aren't always super interested in talking about him all the
time. That's true. I have to put a trigger warning up before I
report on Trump. Good Good. What are a couple outlets you think are
worth spending money to get your important news content from spending money? Well,
some force free, but I think it's important. I think you should go
there as well. I mean, I think I'm going to give you such
boring answers like I think The New York Times is you know, which where
I used to work, has all sorts of problems, but is doing a
pretty good job covering politics. I think there are sub stacks that give you
thoughtful, interesting individual perspectives from pretty you know, diverse you know, from
a diverse range that can be pretty interesting, and you feel when you pay
money you actually know who you're paying, which is nice. I don't know,
actually, for whatever reason, I think The Financial Times is right now
the best newspaper in the world, and that is the thing I pay money
for. Most of the characters in your book are guys, and most of
the investment money in new media flows to guys. Both Tucker Carlson and Don
Lemon made chauvinism kind of part of their brand. You say they're very different.
They are, but that is also true both of them. I think
there are some breakout women, but would you agree that they are the exception
more than the rule, and if so, does that need to change.
I actually was surprised in the reporting of the book because the two characters who
are sort of the central threads are men, but actually women were the ones
who did most of the work. I'm sure you'll be. Well, that's
always true to learn. And who created a lot of this new media,
you know, the sort of bloggers at both at BuzzFeed and a half,
those who kind of shaped these forms were mostly women, and and you know,
and to me, yeah, and I think sorry, the question was
is it good if women do the work credit? I would say, would
you agree that though the money and acclaim flowed to the men more than the
women who did the work, with the exception of Ariana and a couple other
women, Yeah, I guess I would say, actually, more broadly that
like the style of really bombastic populist politics that dominated the last several years is
like very like specifically about masculinity. Like it's not just incidentally about that.
It is this sort of jaw jutting, chest thumping, sort of wife adoring
at your side style of politics that all over the world is led by a
certain kind of guy. And who were the end a television host to sort
of go along with And I want to I mean, I don't know,
I hope that will change. There's also neuroscience that shows that style of communication
connects well with the male brain and not with a female brain. So maybe
maybe all of this is going to shift. So tell us about semaphore.
You told us a little bit, But what is it aim to do,
why is it different? And what lessons from new and old media did you
learn that you're going to put to work there. So, I mean,
our sort of horror goals to make journals and really transparent, To both have
the journalists themselves front and center. You know who you're hearing from, you
know what their facts they've gathered are, you know what their opinions are,
and they're going to and then and then also to curate and distill the best
of everything else that's out there and have them bring into the story in a
very literal sense, like here is a great piece that disagrees with my opinion,
here's other important, notable stuff to read. And our stories are kind
of structured to do that. That runs through all our coverage. And then
the third pieces is that we really are kind of born globally and see a
world where both the stories are very global. If you want to think about
social the stuff we've been talking about the rise of the rights social media,
you kind of have to understand these as global stories. They're not primarily local
or American story, and so we launched in the US and in Sub Saharan
Africa, and have you know, big aspirations of going elsewhere. I think
one of the big lessons I learned from the previous era was not betting off
more than you can chew all of punts. And so we're proceeding fairly cautiously.
Well, you are also launching a book tour at the same time you're
juggling a newsroom. So I am not proceeding personally that cautiously. I know
how busy that makes you. Well, Thank you Ben for your time and
for your thoughts on the media. I think it's really helpful for the audience
to get your perspective. You've been there at the creation of so much.
Thank you, Jessica. It's so great to see. He is a co
founder of Semma for an author of the new book Traffic Genius, Rivalry Delusion
in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. It is on sale now.
Go get your copy. Thanks for listening today. If you liked what you
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