Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision in global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE, and at ICE exchanges and clearinghouses around the world. And now, welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King, of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
We're here in the library on a Monday morning, coming off kind of a throwback weekend. The end of the week was dominated by wall-to-Wall coverage of the doomed submersible OceanGate Titan, going to, and finally resting near the wreck of the Titanic, with five souls aboard. And I have to say, as one of those weeks when I shook my head at the frenzy over five people, what with the Secretary of State Tony Blinken, trying to resuscitate our most pivotal bilateral relationship in Beijing, and frankly, the fate of millions of people hanging in the balance every week in Ukraine.
My son was flying back from Wyoming on Friday night, and it fell to me to drive out to Newark to retrieve him around midnight. After watching the Red Sox pull off a quick tidy win in Chicago, my wife went off to bed, leaving me alone for a few hours before I had to head to the airport, and naturally started to kill times staring at my phone, imagining I'd course through a cesspool of mindless tweets, emblematic of where the platform has been headed over the last couple of years.
But this night started feeling a little different. The ex-ambassadors, ex-generals, PhDs, and odd varieties of Kremlinologists started filling my feed, opining on clips of video from the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, purportedly showing mercenaries, the Wagner Group, taking up strategic positions on the sidewalks, surrounding Russians' own regional defense headquarters. Was this a mutiny, a coup, a civil war? Everyone had a hot take. Hell, I even listened into Twitter Spaces hangouts when I was on the cell phone waiting lot at Newark Airport, given that none of the cable news networks had well, news to speak of.
The next day, Saturday, was different. Old, reliable Wolf Blitzer was on the air, from London, of all places, and given that I don't really watch cable news anymore, faces I hadn't seen on the air for years, like Ben Wedeman, popped up on my screen, from Kyiv. A picture was beginning to form of, well, perhaps the cracking of the Putin regime, and I was riveted on my sofa before the tube, just like the old days, the O.J. Simpson chase, shock and awe from Baghdad, both of them, Obama's victory in Grant Park, January 6th. Suddenly, makeshift Google Maps of marches on Moscow replaced the flashy news graphics. Who was this Yevgeny Prigozhin? I was actually learning a lot, at long last, watching television again.
I took a glance at my tweets and there was Ben Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Semafor in concurrence. Also, "Remember CNN?", he wrote. "Pretty great this morning," he said, but then there were other tweets from Friday night, suggesting we might be missing something. Chris Bury. One of the great correspondents from ABC's legendary Nightline wrote, "At ABC, we had foreign bureaus in Beijing, Beirut, Berlin, Cairo, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, London, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo, and now, only London is left." And then there was this, from Martin Indyk, the Ambassador to Israel, when I worked at the Clinton White House, he wrote, "There's a coup attempt happening now in Russia, and I can't find any news channel that's reporting on it. Anderson Cooper is in Newfoundland. MSNBC is obsessed with Trump 24/7."
And then just as soon as it began, it was over. Prigozhin was shunted off to forced retirement in Minsk, the Wagner mercenaries started to fold into regular Russian forces. The Today Show, just this morning, was focused on weight loss pills, and the top of the fold on Ben Smith's Semafor, a focus was on the failure of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to penetrate the entertainment scene through their 20 million deal with Spotify. That's NYSE ticker symbol SPOT, by the way, with the banner headline, Hollywood is Leaving Podcasting to the Podcasters, following on the heels of the Wall Street Journal reporting on Saturday, a similar story, Harry and Meghan Produce a Hollywood Flop: Themselves. All in one weekend of the modern media.
In a minute, we're leaving podcasting to the podcasters of Wall Street. We have in the library, Ben Smith, the Semafor Co-Founder, The New York Times Media columnist, the former BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief, the OG writer for Politico, and now the author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. That's all coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
In the library is someone with us I've admired for a long time, Ben Smith. Now, if Ben could be doing all the resume of his own roles at once, perhaps if he could be cloned a couple of times, then perhaps our media might be in better shape. But alas, we only have one of him, and his only job at the moment, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Semafor, and squeezing in time now to be author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, his own frontline account of a media dream gone somewhat sour in the first two decades of the 20th century. Ben Smith, welcome Inside the ICE House.
Ben Smith:
Thanks for having me on.
Josh King:
How was your weekend, watching all this?
Ben Smith:
Oh, I mean, I definitely spent the weekend reading Telegram the whole weekend, which is, it's a messaging app that was where all this news was unfolding. I speak pretty bad Russian, and was sort of making my way through it until I realized that the premium version of Telegram, has really sweet machine translation, which is like one of the great wonders of the age. And so, and then realized that, oh, everything I was seeing on Twitter was translations from Telegram. It was actually kind of this interesting moment of Twitter being this sort of broken secondary platform, where all things played out elsewhere.
Josh King:
Given what you think might be your duty to inform the 343,000 some odd Twitter followers that you've got, what was your thinking of what you had read, what you were going to share, and what you retweeted, and the stuff that you quote tweeted?
Ben Smith:
Yeah, I don't think I think of Twitter as a kind of duty to followers, at this point. I mean, I think it's any more than Reddit, or Facebook, or something else is. I mean, I think it's a platform among others, but I thought a lot more about what was going on in Semafor, and so, sort of tore up the top of the media newsletter I read on Sundays, and we had rolling coverage through the weekend. Although that coverage, like everybody else's, stopped very abruptly when Prigozhin said that, "Actually, according to the plan all along, we're rolling back to Rostov-on-Don, and then back into Ukraine, and nevermind anything." And I think every journalist then spent about a day in the place that as we record this, we still are, which is scratching our heads, and waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Josh King:
Bring us into this sort of virtual war room of Semafor. You talk about tearing up the front page. How do you actually do that in this day and age? What were the steps that you guys had to take?
Ben Smith:
Oh, for sure. Well, first of all, I mean, I was up at 6:00 AM Saturday, I guess, sort of grabbing people who were in London and elsewhere, just to do rolling coverage of what was going on. I think the thing that we don't have a bunch of reporters in Russia, wish we did, but nobody does. And in fact, again, a lot of this stuff was coming out in Prigozhin's own videos and comments, and we have a partnership with Meduza, which is a great independent Russian site. And so, they had man on the street interviews in Rostov-on-Don. And so, we were trying to pull all these things together in a way, I think that we weren't going to provide the definitive TikTok, but we were going to try to get you a sort of kaleidoscopic view on this situation, and that's kind of how we see our role in the ecosystem right now.
Josh King:
If you had to do a postmortem now, just 24 hours in the rear-view mirror, how do you think you did, and what did the traffic tell you from how people are kind of engaged or not with it?
Ben Smith:
Oh, that's interesting. We're a tiny little news startup, and so, I think it's very hard for us to see the whole ecosystem. When I was at BuzzFeed or at The Times, really, you could see the big title flows, so I'm always a little hesitant to draw conclusions from what we're doing, but we were kind of looking at the stats. I mean, I think one thing that was really interesting, which my colleague wrote about over the weekend, was just we're in an environment where there are fewer and fewer kind of shared experiences. Mostly, I'm watching one Netflix show, you're watching another.
I mean, the sub story, which I mean, as you say, was not the most important thing that happened in the history of the world, but also is a very specific kind of thing, a race against time to save somebody's life, that always dominates the media. I mean, CNN got it started in the '80s with, in a way, Baby Jessica. It was this huge moment, the rescue of this little girl, and that it sort of proved out the value of 24 hour news to people, and they covered it like it was the biggest story in the world, and the missing plane. I mean, I think the kids in the cave, I think that is a totally human instinct to be totally riveted by this.
And then to me, this Russia story reminded me of during the Arab Spring, waking up early and just being totally glued to CNN, in this case, and then to the BBC. It was really interesting to watch, particularly FOX, just totally make it an American story. And MSNBC also, there's a lot of talk about how Prigozhin was primarily interesting, because he'd been behind some Facebook misinformation in the United States in 2016. And I do think there's this kind of parochialism to the US media, more than ever, maybe, that you really see in big stories like this, where it's the stories like, "How is this about us?" And then on FOX, of course the hosts were saying that, "This must actually be some kind of complicated Biden conspiracy theory in which Biden is lying to us about something, and behind it all ,pulling the strings," and it's like, this was really not primarily a story about us.
Josh King:
Not primarily a story about us, but I am interested to follow up a little bit on what your analysis was of the title flows of The Times, and particularly your old place, The New York Times. What do you think David Carr would think about everything today, and what would Brian Stelter think about his old network's performance against the backdrop of the current chaos?
Ben Smith:
I mean, I think a lot of people at CNN, they're always relieved when something like this happens, in a way, as horrible as the news may be. They just have muscles that no other American television network has. As the person you were quoting was saying, nobody else really has sprawling foreign coverage. NBC has some of it, partly they have kind of a global network, but CNN is still just when something like this breaks, has really well-informed people who have been in some closet for the last six months working on their prep, doing pushups, or doing whatever. I don't know what these folks do, but they are there when real big news breaks, and they sort of shove aside all the sort of Trump debate panels, and are incredibly good at that.
Josh King:
And Carr, what would he make of today?
Ben Smith:
David Carr was The Times Media columnist for several years until he died in the early 2010s, mid 2010s, I guess, and it was such a different moment, and the thing he brought to The Times was this enthusiasm about the internet, and about new media, and this kind of optimistic interest in it, at a moment when The Times and when sort of everybody in traditional media was incredibly freaked out by the internet still. And so, David wrote broadly kind of curious, optimistic stories about these cool new technologies, and a lot of us who were working on that side kind of loved him, because he was the person who was telling The New York Times reader, and by extension, The New York Times management, like, "Hey, this Twitter thing is pretty cool. Check it out." He also had a very keen eye to nonsense, and saw through a lot of stuff. I do think, I mean, a lot of that utopianism though has really kind of darkened.
Josh King:
Yeah, we're going to talk a lot about the darkening of that utopianism, but first, maybe in a Carr-like way, from an optimistic standpoint, give us a quick state of the media startup landscape. We had your own Liz Hoffman here a couple months ago talking about her book Crash Landing, but also the experience of moving from a legacy media organization like the Wall Street Journal, to your Brave New World. And there's Semafor, there's Puck, there's Axios, The Information. As long as you don't need to print a newspaper or magazine, are we in sort of a golden age of journalism, or is it the last gasp of investment?
Ben Smith:
I think a lot of different things are going on at the same time, and don't have a very simple answer. It's a moment when consumers feel very alienated from the media writ large, feel like they're overwhelmed by the amount of incoming, like they know really what to trust. Those are the problems at Semafor, we're sort of thinking about solving all day. How do you do journalism in a way that's more transparent, that brings together lots of different sources, so you don't have to spend all your time sort of sorting through the infinite internet?
I mean, the broad moment though is that people are really soured on social media, and the notion that social media was a fun, interesting way to consume news has become replaced by the consensus that it's a nightmare way to consume news, a consensus that's shared by Facebook executives, who no longer provide you news on Facebook. Those problems for this, I think set of new startups that you mentioned, are a real opportunity to kind of launch yourself into this post-social media world, to talk directly to sophisticated readers who you're really serving. Whenever there's a change, I think that's profound, there's an opportunity to start from scratch into this moment.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about changes that are profound, and people who have sort of figured out their place, and also maybe their profitable exit, you got Business Insider and Politico, they got sold to Axel Springer for 450 million, and a billion, respectively. Axios got sold to Cox for 525 million. The Ringer sold to Spotify for 250. That makes winners out of people like Robert Allbritton, Jim, Mike, and Roy at Axios, and Bill Simmons at The Ringer, but there's also a lot of wreckage on the landscape, people like Carlos Watson and Ozy Media, Shane Smith and Vice. What separates the successes from the failures?
Ben Smith:
Two Things. One is that some of the publications you mentioned, Politico, in particular, built a pretty strong business model. They have this pro sort of high-end subscription model for detailed coverage of Congress that's of interest, particularly to lobbyists who pay for it. Very strong business, very durable business. There's always a question with with acquisitions of what do they look like in a few years? I mean, though I would say, I mean I ran into Daniel Ek actually last week, the head of Spotify. I think he's very happy with The Ringer deal, for instance.
Josh King:
I've been a big fan of the original storytelling and the convening power of people like you, Kara Swisher, my best friend, Mark Leibovich, and Bari Weiss now, under her own free press banner, and what they did with the witch trials of J.K. Rowling was pretty amazing. But you had all these huge platforms of one of or another kind at The New York Times, each one of you. What was so restrictive about life at the Gray Lady for some, and what precipitated the exit, and how did A.G. Sulzberger and Times management try to stanch the bleeding from the talent that walked out the door?
Ben Smith:
There's this famous line I think Jill Abramson said to some reporter who was getting too egomaniacal and asking for things that, "The New York Times is always the prettiest girl at the dance." I mean, it's true. This is the most important news brand in the world, and if you as a journalist think you are bigger than the brand, you are wrong, right? And so, they're navigating this world in which individual journalists have more autonomy, want to do more, but they're in a pretty unique place to do it. I'm writing this book about 20 years in the internet, and realized one of the real winners of that period is The Times. They then kind of absorbed a lot of people, me, Kara Swisher, Ezra Klein, who's still there, Bari, as you say, people who had come from more raucous corners of the internet, in some cases, didn't necessarily share the values of The New York Times particularly.
And so, I don't know, I think for different reasons. For me, it was really, I mean, it was an incredible job there. It did not feel restrictive. I have zero complaints. Writing about media is a very weird thing to do. You wake up every morning and punch one of your friends in the face, and eventually, you run out of friends that way. But I think having that column was... I don't know, it felt that I could do it well, in part because I figured I wouldn't be there that long.
Josh King:
I mean, it's pretty tough to deliver something seriously punchy every week.
Ben Smith:
I don't know, every week. A lot of reporters do it every day.
Josh King:
Yeah, it's true. You say if one of the real winners of the last 20 years was The Times, what seemed to be a winner and now seems to be a loser, is The Washington Post. It rose like a phoenix through the ashes of Marty Baron and Fred Ryan. Will Jeff Bezos have enough attention span to execute a rebirth of The Post?
Ben Smith:
I do think there's a bit of a curse to being owned by a billionaire. There are great nonprofit news organizations, but to run a nonprofit well, you are constantly kind of having to fight this natural gravity that your stakeholders are not your audience, they're your donors. And I think in effectively, nonprofit organizations, which is to say money-losing organizations run by rich people, there's a similar risk that senior management thinks about, "Well, our business model is to lose Jeff Bezos's money, so who do we want to please? Jeff Bezos, not the audience, necessarily."
And I think there was an enormous amount of drift at The Post, and the Times was posting incredible coverage of Washington, of Donald Trump, of all sorts of stuff. They have zillions of reporters, but the tide came in and The New York Times rose on it, particularly of this kind of accountability coverage of the Trump administration. The tide then goes out, and The Times has built this pretty robust media business across a whole bunch of different areas, from gaming, to food, and The Post really hasn't, and there's not much left there. And so, I think, but I don't know, but they also have the richest man in the world behind them. I'm sure they'll figure it out.
Josh King:
So, back to the business of Ben Smith, what's the path to profitability, and maybe the potential exit for an idea like Semafor? What's the journey been like so far, beyond the creamy look of your webpages and what you outlined at the beginning of our conversation? What differentiates what you're doing from what some of your competitors are doing?
Ben Smith:
I mean, we are really thinking a lot about consumers, and I think not so much about our competitors. I think the problem isn't so much that it's not a landscape where consumers are in love with what they're getting, it's a place where people are feeling really overwhelmed. I mean, I think we are certainly building around kind of individual journalists presenting their journalism really transparently, and around this idea that we aren't the sort of ultimate arbiter of truth, that we're going to bring in different perspectives from all over, we're going to bring global perspectives, we're going to bring in the most insightful voices of our competitors.
And I think, I mean, that's something that's very hard for places like The New York Times and the FT to do. They're definitely going to email you in the morning 17 links to New York Times articles. Even if it's possible that there are a couple pretty good articles in other publications, you will not learn that from The New York Times. And so, that actually is a competitive advantage, I think in this landscape. It's sort of strange to imagine that your organization is the only one publishing anything worth reading. And so, I think we both are trying to deliver scoops and insight from individual journalists, and then on the other side of that coin, read a lot, read the internet, so you don't have to, as a service.
Josh King:
Are you having fun doing it?
Ben Smith:
Oh yeah. I mean, it's hard work, and there are definitely days when I'm like, "Ah, remember when I was a columnist? That was pretty good." I mean, when we were columnists, there were weeks when you get a 40-minute interview with someone, and then you write about it, and that's your week's work. I mean, that's pretty good. Not so much in this job, but other weeks, you work extremely hard.
Josh King:
You do have the benefit of having you and Justin having collected a lot of real good brain power and collaboration right around you. An ulterior idea is Mark Halperin's been spending the last couple years building this Wide World of News newsletter that he's sent out free to all these subscribers, with his individual pitches every day, and now he's gone behind his own paywall, but he's still doing it just himself through all of this. Do you see a path for him with the kind of prices that he's trying to put to his product?
Ben Smith:
I mean, think that it's certainly a moment when individuals who have the right kind of metabolism and stamina can do incredibly well on their own, particularly if you're kind of in the analysis business. I would say, I mean, Matthew Yglesias is kind of the king of this, but there's probably a couple dozen people doing incredibly well on Substack, and I would think a few hundred doing okay. But it's very tilted toward that, it's a real kind of power law distribution. But I think for reporters who want to break news, and occasionally get into big fights with powerful people, you need the legal support, the brand support of an organization, but you also want the sort of connectivity with your audience that you get from a Substack-style newsletter. I think, I mean, Liz is certainly very much in that model, as are a bunch of our other reporters ,and I think that's, to some degree, from a recruiting standpoint, what we're trying to offer.
I do think, I mean, there's this sort of cliche in media that there are only two things that can happen in media, bundling and unbundling, and they're always both happening at the same time, but I do think there was this kind of incredible unbundling into Substack, and success of individuals. I mean, lots of my friends have done that. You get pretty tired, it's hard to take a vacation. Let's say you have X dollars coming in from subscriptions, but Substack takes a little piece, and the payment processor takes a little piece, and you got to have healthcare, and maybe you pay somebody when you go on vacation, and pretty soon it's like, oh, you're running this tiny little business that is you, and that's pretty exhausting, and you don't have an editor. I think there are interesting ways to rebuild sort of bundles and coalitions of journalists that aren't maybe traditional newsroom structures, but I think there will probably be some rebundling of some of those voices.
Josh King:
Before we get into talking about Traffic, let's just go hyper-local for a minute, because I know it's something that you've spent a bunch of time thinking about. In a couple of days, you are giving a talk to the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, so reports the Southern Illinoisan. Simon is an interesting, mostly forgotten figure on the American landscape. I worked for him right after graduating from college in '87. This crusading journalist who started small newspapers in Southern Illinois, got elected from the Land of Lincoln, and then ran for president in 1988 As a senator. I think Paul would probably rue the current landscape of local news. Is there any model you've seen where the cohesion of small towns can be kept together with some kind of a reliable, credible news source, rather than this wasteland of social media platforms?
Ben Smith:
You asked earlier, "How's the news business doing? Is this a golden age?" And there are areas, actually, like finance and business news, I think tech news, media news, where there's lots going on, national reporting, but really, almost all of the bad news about media is in local, and it's most of the jobs in journalism. The main reason that you've had this just catastrophic drop is because of the rolling, ongoing collapse of local news. And there are green shoots and leaves, there are nonprofit organizations like THE CITY, here in New York, the Texas Tribune that are doing really good work. If you're in a very small town, there are entrepreneurs doing newsletters. My wife runs a small media company in Brooklyn, called Brooklyner. You can build a small business that way. But the New York Daily News had not that long ago, within living memory, had like 30 reporters in its Brooklyn Bureau, right?
And these newspapers, people forget, they were incredible businesses. They built these huge, beautiful towers next to City Hall in every city. They were throwing off so much cash, they would have these big investigative teams, because they could afford it, why not? If you wanted to sell a mattress to somebody in Akron, or whatever, in Toledo, you had to advertise in The Blade, and they could charge you whatever they wanted. And that business model is so dead, and it's so hard to see what replaces it, and I do think local news coverage has sort of clung its way back to bare bones functionality, but very hard. But I do think that in a way, there's this kind of expectation of these really robust local newspapers that were everywhere and that were covering every community board meeting, that if you had a tip, you could call them, and I don't actually really see a path to replacing that.
I mean, yeah, and then there are these platforms, I mean, Facebook groups, Nextdoor, again, Citizen, which I find kind of creepy but interesting. I live in Ditmas Park in Brooklyn, and I came home the other day to find the door open and the dog gone, which is a nightmare, and the first thing I did was open the neighborhood Facebook group to ask if anybody had seen my dog, and the first thing I saw was a picture of my dog and somebody saying, "I just found your dog," which is amazing. And your local newspaper couldn't have done that, by the way.
There are niches that these groups work in, but the thing is that on the editorial side, print is not the greatest way to get local news, and you can localize much more with GPS. There's lots of incredibly interesting, innovative, technical things you can do. I mean, Citizen is technically fascinating. You open it up and if there's a crime near you, you can see it. Unfortunately, it always looks like you're in the middle of a hellscape because that's their model, but it's not a technological issue, I's a business model issue, and it's really, really challenging.
Josh King:
All right. So Ben, let's turn to the last great wave of media startups from the early decades of this century. I've read your voice through all of your bylines at Politico, at BuzzFeed, and The New York Times, and now at Semafor, and it's a little jarring to read the narrative non-fiction voice that comes right at you from the first chapter, the bet about Cameron Marlow and Jonah Peretti. What was it like to take that voice out for a spin, so different from the kind of things that you've written?
Ben Smith:
I've never written a book before and as you said, I haven't written a lot of narrative. I mean, I guess I sort of feel like if you're going to get people to read a book, you really have to tell a story. And so, the book is a story and a narrative, it's not 300 pages of analysis. That seems like a hard thing to ask anyone to read.
Josh King:
Did you have to teach yourself a method or an approach, or wrestle with this thing because it was maybe a little alien?
Ben Smith:
No, the thing is chapter by chapter, that's a length at which I can write, but the notion of having a deadline in two years, and 100,000 words to write, as somebody who's really lived in subdaily journalism, and cranking stuff out in 20 minutes, and then if you get it wrong, somebody says, "Hey, you're an idiot, you got it wrong," you say, "Oh my God, I am an idiot," and you fix it, and you correct. And that was actually the most terrifying part to me, to put this thing out into the world and just if there was something catastrophically wrong with it, there's no way to fix it. I mean, it's because it's printed. I found that very stressful, actually.
Josh King:
But then visualizing a place like the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, and hanging out by the Charles River, and you weren't there, you weren't an eyewitness to it, but just being able to sort of paint that verbal picture.
Ben Smith:
I mean, I certainly talked to all my favorite writers before I tried to write it, and got the advice that you're really writing scenes, and that you don't have to worry about being comprehensive, but you have to pick these compelling moments and compelling characters, and follow them, and that's what I tried to do.
Josh King:
So, tell us then about this kid, Peretti, who feels trapped in school, and then gets up the snark to write to Phil Knight's Nike, and then goes from MIT Media Lab onto Katie Couric's sofa to tell the story on The Today Show.
Ben Smith:
Yeah. So, Jonah Peretti, it's funny, and you'll probably remember this jargon, but it's a little embarrassing to use these words even now, but I think he would've been, in the late '90s, what you would've called a culture jammer. There was this sort of anti-corporate Adbusters-driven movement on the left that you sort of see play out through media, but it's kind of a forgotten moment. So, I think his previous stunts had been defacing billboards, basically.
And so, yeah, he was bored at grad school, and saw that Nike had this new high-tech promotion where you could put a word of your choice, like your name, on your sneaker, by going through the internet, which seemed very cool and high-tech. And so, he tried the word "sweatshop," and the customer service rep told him that that was an inappropriate word, and wasn't in the terms of service, and he had this long back and forth about whether or not this was, in fact, in the terms of service, and finally said, "Okay, I understand you're not going to put the word 'sweatshop' on the sneakers, but would you please instead send me a picture of the seven-year-old Vietnamese girl who made my shoes?" Which ended the conversation.
And so, he thought he was clever, right? When a young guy, in that moment, thought he was clever. He sent it to Harper's Magazine, hoping they would publish it, because that's where clever things like that went, and they turned him down. So, he emailed it to a few friends, and then had that experience, which you may have had in your life, of some random thing you do just suddenly goes everywhere, and it's crazy. And yes, and as you said, a month later, he's on The Today Show, debating a spokesman for Nike about sweatshops, about which Jonah knows nothing. The spokesman for Nike has the presence of mind, actually, when I watched it again, to say, "I'm just glad that people are talking about our great products."
But the thing that Peretti took away from it was, "Huh, there's this new method of distributing content." He didn't have a printing press, he didn't have a broadcast tower. He was not also trying to control it, but he sort of saw through the haze where we would be now, which is that information travels, regardless of gatekeepers' decisions. And so, he started sort of playing around with that idea, and trying to replicate that moment.
Josh King:
Compare Jonah then to Nick Denton, this Jewish kid from London with the establishment blood running through him. This "student of status" as you write, founder of First Tuesday, who would ultimately create Gawker. How did Nick and Gawker tap into the zeitgeist?
Ben Smith:
Yeah, Nick had this totally different view, and the reason I wrote about these two guys in particular in that moment was because they both had a really clear sense that this internet thing wasn't just some interesting toy, that it was going to swallow everything, and they had very ideological views about what it was going to be like. Jonah sort of imagined that it was going to be kind of like this positive, progressive, countercultural force in which people shared things that made them laugh, and that they enjoyed.
Denton saw it totally differently. He saw it as a way to strip away the hypocrisies of media. He came out of British media, which was much less staid than American media, found American media incredibly boring, had the idea that the internet was where journalists could print the things that they had only said to each other in bars before. Which at times, meant really kind of direct, honest, revelatory writing about anything from feminism, to the Iraq War. At other times meant just publishing sex tapes because you could, and led to some pretty dark places.
Josh King:
It's pretty interesting now what Keith Olbermann is doing with a reboot of Countdown and the segment that he often runs toward the end of his shows, Things I Promised I'd Never Tell. He's actually more interesting now as a podcast, than he ever was on MSNBC. I don't know if you've listened to it at all.
Ben Smith:
I have a little. He had a thing with Ros Atkins, this very interesting British journalist that I listened to a bit. I mean, it's an old concede of, well, you go out for a drink with a journalist, and they're full of these super interesting stories, and then you read them in the Washington Post the next day, and it's incredibly boring, and you're like, "Where did that person go?" And one of the problems is that also sometimes people didn't print things because there was a legal risk to printing it, because it wasn't true, because it was cruel and pointless, and-
Josh King:
And we'll get into that, for sure.
Ben Smith:
... the Gawker people, I think developed kind of an ideology that those who were false, it was a false consciousness, and you sort of were ideologically required to print everything that hit your inbox.
Josh King:
At about the time that I was leaving Washington, D.C., for a grownup journey to the world of corporate PR, there's this woman, Ana Marie Cox, who's arriving under the banner of Wonkette. Seemed huge at the time, but why couldn't it endure?
Ben Smith:
It's interesting, because Nick Denton started a series of sites, Wonkette was one, which was sort of savage coverage of Washington sex scandals. It was the thing it was best known for, it wasn't the thing it did most, but there was a young woman writing a blog about her pretty disturbing relationships with powerful guys in Washington, and Ana sort of elevated her, and ultimately, she outed herself and outed the people involved. But I think it was one of these things... I mean, I don't know why Washington is so immune to good gossip coverage. It sort of is, isn't it? Because it was one of these blogs that kind of fizzled from the start.
Josh King:
In terms of telling the kind of journalistic stories that people think are going to be very exciting in theory, but don't end up to be, I mean, Traffic is full of the real deal. You have two sort of éminence grises early in the book, both familiar to the NYSE for helping to bring a lot of companies public, and that's Arianna Huffington, and Kenny Lerer. You point out their obsession with Matt Drudge, and I've been pretty obsessed with Drudge for basically 25 years. How has Drudge endured?
Ben Smith:
Oh my God. I mean, such a funny thing. I was just looking this morning at the site, the top headline is From Vlad to Worse. He sort of shaped this early political internet, and a lot of the more commercial sites that I'm writing about were launched... I mean, the Huffington Post Case explicitly is kind of a left-wing counter to Drudge, but there is something to be said on the internet for never trying to grow, never trying to change. Some of the things that have endured on the internet are the things that have changed least and never taken on any costs, never raised any money. That's certainly true of Drudge.
I mean, he really is a very brilliant assignment editor, and he just has an incredible eye for stories, and if you get below the political stuff, which at various times, different people really, really hated, I mean, he was very right-wing and anti-Clinton, he was pro-Obama, and then he was anti-Obama, and now he really hates Trump. I mean, so it's all over the map, but kind of the right, and he's a very brilliant editor, obviously. And it's interesting, because as social media sort of falls apart and Twitter becomes less useful, my colleague, Max Tani, said to me the other day, he's like, "I went to The Drudge Report the other day just to see what was going on in the world." For a long time, Twitter was for what was going on in the world, and The Drudge Report was just like, "I wonder what Matt Drudge is thinking, because he's so interesting." But actually, there's sort of an opportunity now just to... I mean, I find myself going there just to be like, "I wonder what happened yesterday?"
Josh King:
As a person who, by habit, watches the first 18 minutes of The Today Show every morning, this is such a key phrase from your book: "Television producers looked at the Drudge Report to decide what to put on the air," and it is so true. Does you think it still applies?
Ben Smith:
No, I think that was a power that social media took from Drudge. I mean, that was sort of Twitter's biggest strength. That's what Trump realized, I think, was that he didn't tweet because he thought there were a lot of Twitter users he was persuading, but he did tweet to program television, and television would just basically be composed of people reading his tweets out loud.
Josh King:
After the break, more with Ben Smith, a Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Semafor, and author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. That's all coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Back now with Ben Smith, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Semafor, and author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. Before the break, Ben and I were surveying the modern media landscape, and beginning Ben's journey through Traffic, pausing at the unique story of Matt Drudge. And I want to pick up then where we just left off, and tell me about this odd relationship between Drudge and Andrew Breitbart with the simple page of links when they're driving the agenda in Washington, New York, and LA, but these two guys barely ever spoke, they just texted. Matt was getting rich, and Andrew was sort of Matt's bitch.
Ben Smith:
I mean, that's Andrew's line for it. Yeah, I mean, Andrew Breitbart, who was this sort of founding father of the current right-wing internet, had this very strange job where he was this kid who was working, he had this terrible job at CBS Entertainment, I think, and before the Drudge Report, he was reading email newsletters and Usenet stuff, if you remember that, that was sort of the predecessor to Drudge, and saw how interesting and brilliant Drudge was, and basically became his sort of intern helper guy and was paid, I think he told people, kind of irregularly, but had this kind of enormous power.
But it was hard to explain who he was or what he did, and I think he was at some Super Bowl party when the famous halftime show nipple exposure, so he coined some phrase describing it, put it on the Drudge Report. 20 minutes later, that's the phrase everyone on television is using. The people at the Super Bowl party with him were like, "Who are you?" It's this sort of funny kind of power, but he came with this real anonymity, and he tried in various ways to sort of dig out of it, but always had this very complicated relationship with Drudge, wrote a memoir in which he didn't mention Drudge, which was the thing he had done for the last 15 years and had made him relevant.
Josh King:
A big phrase at the time was "Silicon Alley," and I remember showing up in New York for what seemed to be the trailing edge of it. All these street addresses that you point out in the early part of the book are just blocks from around where we're sitting now. Compare SoHo to Sand Hill Road at the time.
Ben Smith:
Yeah. I mean, it's hard to get your head back to this place, but there was this moment after the tech bubble collapses, in sort of '99,2000, 2001, and the stock market crashes, and there's this sort of conventional wisdom that Silicon Valley is dead, and innovation is happening on the East Coast, and there are these new companies, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, in Silicon Alley, Insider. Some of them are media companies, some of them are sort of media adjacent, Etsy is one, Foursquare is one.
But I think the theory at the time was, well, they're like a little more connected to culture and media, and it makes sense that they're in New York, not San Francisco, and this is going to be the next big wave of startups. And there certainly was some investment, but there was this moment when it felt like, "Oh, maybe New York is the center of the tech scene in Downtown Manhattan," and I think people drank that Kool-Aid a bit. I mean, I think almost immediately, Facebook is launched, a whole 'nother wave of... Google proves itself out, and then there's this huge new boom there, and that little micro-mythology gets erased. But that was that moment, and I think it was part of the energy of that scene, for sure.
Josh King:
Talk to me about Peggy Wang and the founding days of BuzzFeed, the realization that a headline like Photoshopped Images of Non-Existent Apple Products might actually compel someone to be curious and click on it.
Ben Smith:
Yeah, the early days of BuzzFeed was just this notion that there were things buzzing on the internet, and that you could find ways to quantify them and show them to people, and Jonah hired this very smart woman, Peggy Wang, who just cruised around writing about all the weird stuff that was hot on the internet. And there wasn't a good place to find that, and particularly, kind of memes and web culture were not really comprehensible to most media people. I think journalists and people who thought of themselves in journalism didn't even know what that was, and it was just this sort of burgeoning web culture that had come out of message boards, and BuzzFeed, in a way, was sort of a translator of that into a larger audience.
Josh King:
Perhaps in the recent midterm elections of 2022, the ascendance of Peter Thiel could've plateaued with his chosen candidates in various elections falling way short of the mark, but bring us back to when Thiel's upward march was just beginning, Batton, when Denton and Owen Thomas tried to stop him in his tracks. Why were they so obsessed with Thiel? It's sort of like Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen obsessing over Trump during Spy's heyday.
Ben Smith:
Yeah, and Peter Thiel was one of a number, but not the only important rich guy in Silicon Valley. Thiel's version of it is that he wasn't upset about being outed, he was mad that Denton had commented on the post saying, "Why is this guy so weird?" But and Thiel then launches this insane decade-long secret vendetta to destroy Gawker, successfully.
Josh King:
Ultimately successful. So, by the time the 2008 election rolls around, I was far from D.C. and New York, actually living in Hartford, Connecticut, but as an elector for Barack Obama from Connecticut, I certainly was infected by his buzz. We should probably give listeners a primer on how politicians learned to love the internet, and the evolution of how traffic got monetized.
Ben Smith:
Yeah. I mean, I think those are somewhat different things, so steer me if you'd like, but it was just sort of presumptively true that the early internet was for progressives. Howard Dean had done a lot of digital organizing, and you didn't really need to explain it. The internet was where young people were, and young people are progressive. And so, obviously, the net roots are going to be left-wing, and then maybe there's some Boomer right-wingers hanging out on sites called Free Republic, but that felt totally secondary and out of it, compared to these just... Again, it was just the demographic and the age of who was on the internet, but it felt, and people believed that like, "Oh, the internet is this progressive zone."
Facebook, as you said, a Facebook executive goes to work for the Obama campaign. Obama, as late as 2011, visits Facebook, and he doesn't have to say out loud, "Well, I'm visiting you because you're a bunch of liberals." I mean, it's like visiting Madison, Wisconsin. It's like where students are. And it took a while, I think it took until the Trump campaign, really, for everyone to see, oh... As the entire population gets onto the internet. There's also, I mean, the sort of tools, and the techniques, and the platforms, the internet in that moment, are really best suited for a kind of right-wing populism.
Josh King:
So, on the monetization piece, probably a good way of thinking about it is that one name that we know quite well around here is Jon Steinberg, who was one of the first guests on this show back in 2018, sitting in the seat you're sitting in now, when he was dressing up a company he'd founded right here on the floor of the NYSE, called Cheddar for Sale. But how did Jon become Jonah's secret sauce to help turn BuzzFeed into a business?
Ben Smith:
Yeah. I mean, Jon was this incredible deal guy, and salesman, and sort of operator who was the president of BuzzFeed when I was there, and really helped, and with Jonah, convinced the ad industry that there was this new opportunity to market to social media, which is now conventional wisdom, but gave BuzzFeed this huge lead, and edge, and excitement in the 2010s, and helped them build a huge business. I mean, the specific problem there was that they were building on other people's platforms, and ultimately, Facebook absorbed the revenue that... Facebook was not interested in letting other companies build businesses on top of it. They wanted to be there in the ad business, they were our competitors, and they owned the platform.
It's interesting, because if you really pull it back, one of the questions I've gotten a lot about the book is just like, "What was anyone thinking investing all this money in companies like BuzzFeed and Vice, hundreds of millions of dollars?" And the answer is really about that they saw the evolutionary path of these differently. And a lot of the people who were leading those investments, people like Ken Lerer, and Tom Freston, had been at MTV in its earliest days, seen the rollout of these cables, this new sort of distribution network, and then the rise of media companies that were partners to the cable operators, and the cable operators knew that they had to split the money. And often, there were disputes, but a lot of the revenue that the guys with the wires bring in was going out to companies like Viacom, MTV, Comedy Central, ESPN. And that was a deal everybody could live with, and I think that the big mistake of that era of investment was imagining that social platforms would be like that, that at some point, they'd realize they needed professional content and pay for it.
Josh King:
Most books, Ben, with a bit of a hint of memoir, give an early entrance to the memoirs, but the first person "I" in Traffic doesn't make an appearance until page 157. Why, as an author, did you give yourself so long to show up, and what, as Ben Smith, were you doing up until then?
Ben Smith:
Yeah. I mean, the answer is just because I wasn't really an important, meaningful part of the story until then. I'd come up covering politics, and I'd been an obsessive reader of Gawker, in particular, and had stolen a lot of its tactics, and style, and way of thinking about writing, but I was breaking news about politics. And so, it was a bit of a parallel world, and I went to Politico and it launched, as you said, which was, in a way, kind of professionalizing these digital publishing tools. But always again, in parallel, and I wasn't at the parties Nick Denton was throwing his loft in the early aughts. I was maybe hazily aware of them and wished I'd been invited, but was pretty busy. And so, and then maybe the most fun part of the book for me was going kind of reporting out stuff I'd been vaguely aware of in the aughts, but not really part of or connected to at all. And yeah, and so that's why I'm not in that.
Josh King:
You and I both share an interest in food served at business meetings, and you dispensed with both the business ends of a lobster roll pretty quick in that meetup with Jonah, but what about the Bored At Work Network struck you?
Ben Smith:
Yeah, so when I met Jonah in 2011, he sort of hit me with all this jargon about the social web, which I didn't really understand what he was talking about, and I looked at BuzzFeed and thought, "This is a cat website, I don't get it." What became clear to me, probably because my wife was like, "You're an idiot. This is what's going on," was that I was a blogger and reporter who had been living on the web and had seen the energy move to Twitter, and I loved Twitter. I was happy when my stories would go viral on Twitter, but it also meant people weren't hitting refresh on my blog in the same way, which was also fine with me.
But the notion that Jonah described of a world where people sit down at their computers and type in facebook.com, and twitter.com, that the job of a media company is to get your stuff into those platforms, rather than to get people to your homepage, felt very intuitive to me. I mean, it has changed again, but for that decade, that was sort of already where I was living ,and the notion of building a news organization whose front page was Twitter, in some way, was pretty exciting to me.
Josh King:
So, now you're on the job at BuzzFeed News, and you're hiring. I can rattle off some of the names that you mentioned in the book, Zeke Miller, Rosie Gray, Andrew Kaczynski, McKay Coppins. But share your strategy for both hiring talent, and what have these names meant to political journalism since they were all part of your newsroom?
Ben Smith:
Oh, yeah. I mean, in that moment, the sort of stars of my generation just like weren't going to come to work for a place called BuzzFeed. And so, I wound up trying to find the most talented people who were too young, really to get a real seat at the table that presidential campaign, but who really wanted it. And so, I was able to sort of allow them to skip the line a little. And so, yeah, no, these are all really people who've had incredible careers since then. Yeah, so one of the real joys of the whole thing was that.
Josh King:
We focus a lot, even these days now, on Bob Iger, and I'm curious then what happened during that conversation between Iger, Kevin Mayer, Ben Sherwood, Jonah, Kenny, and you and that negotiation for Disney to actually buy BuzzFeed, and how do you think the world might've been different for both Disney, NYSE ticker symbol DIS, BuzzFeed, and you, had the deal gone through?
Ben Smith:
Well, obviously, Jonah and I would've had more money if we had sold the company for a lot of money, but the reason we didn't, I think was because, well, I mean, I was against it. Your friend, Jon Steinberg was for it, as he will remind you. And obviously, I think any normal business operator would see this as an enormous mistake of us not to sell it, but I think we had just started building this thing and felt we had a lot of momentum. I think Jonah, in particular, had a vision of himself spending the next several years sort of explaining the internet to corporate executives, that just was not what he had signed up for.
Disney did then turn around, and basically what was happening here was this booming digital space, and Disney, and NBC, and places like that couldn't quite figure out their role in it, but felt like they needed to have a hedge in there. And so, Disney basically took the same amount of money, and turned around and bought Maker Studios, which was a middleman company that was consolidating demand on YouTube, and bringing in all different YouTubers, and just promptly collapsed, and I think no longer exists, and that money was written off. And then I think a couple of years later, Disney sees, "Oh, okay, we know what our digital platform is. It's Disney+. We sort of now see a digital future, it's video, it's our library, it's our brand. Makes sense." Some details to work out, but this was this period where they couldn't quite figure it out. It's hard to see how that acquisition would've worked out.
Josh King:
That acquisition was not going to fly. In the end then, why did a legacy institution like The New York Times, under A.G. Sulzberger, thrive, while these promising upstarts like BuzzFeed and Gawker collapse?
Ben Smith:
It's very hard to get around just this core bet on social media, that social media would ultimately wind up in business with media companies in the way, that cable was in business with media companies splitting revenue, and that social media would endure the way cable is endured, and it turned out, I think neither of those is true. Social media seems to be kind of unraveling, and it certainly was never going to get away from user-generated content.
Josh King:
As we wrap up, Ben, will the story of the Steele dossier ever die down? What's its legacy going to be? The original traffic on it was unbelievable.
Ben Smith:
What's its legacy going to be? I mean, I think it's very complicated. When we published it, Trump called us, "A failing pile of garbage," and liberals celebrated it. Now, I think it's the reverse. I think conservatives are relieved that this thing, which turned out to be largely nonsense... Not largely nonsense, was out there to be debunked, rather than sort of hanging around in the shadows, and I think a lot of Trump's critics feel like it set an impossible standard of corruption, like if he's not being blackmailed by the Kremlin, well, then it's fine. I don't know. I mean, we published it in a way that I think is still... I mean basically still think the publication was the right call and much less utopian about the consequences of it, but I think then the notion that we all know that there's a secret document that says the president has been compromised by the Russians, but that you're not allowed to see the document, I think is pretty untenable.
Josh King:
So, then as we let you go and head back into the wild world of Semafor, what do you think the future is of this long sort of expensive journalism that you talk about that you love, the ilk of David Remnick in all these years, the work that he's done at The New Yorker, what Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic is doing, commissioning 15,000 words by Tim Alberta on Chris Licht?
Ben Smith:
Yeah. I mean, I think in a way, I mean, one thing that is happening now is there's a swing back toward these trusted brands, which is great. I mean, I think those are two publications that are thriving, for sure.
Josh King:
What should we look for from Semafor over the next weeks and months?
Ben Smith:
I mean, I think hopefully big stories that are surrounded by a level of context and a sort of kaleidoscopic set of views you're not going to get anywhere else.
Josh King:
Kaleidoscopic set of views you're not going to get anywhere else. We can use that here at the New York Stock Exchange. Ben Smith, thanks so much for joining us Inside the Ice House.
Ben Smith:
Thank you.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Ben Smith, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Semafor, and author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us, and if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected], or tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash, with production assistance and engineering from Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.
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The information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources, and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
