Big Technology Podcast - The Social Media Era Of News Is Over — With Ben Smith

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Ben Smith is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, and the author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral (available for preorder now). He joins Big Technology Podcast for a discussion of social media's divorce from the news industry, and what it means for the platforms and publishers. We talk plenty about Semafor, including how it's working to build an audience, distribute its work, run a business, and get scoops. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss Elon's Twitter, chatbots, the lab leak hypothesis, and Trump's potential in 2024. Yes, we cover a lot. Hit play for a fun listen!

LinkedIn Presents Welcome to big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Ben Smith is our guest today. He's the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semaphore. He's also the author of Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion in the Billion race to go viral, which is coming out in May and already available for pre-order, and he's formerly the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, where I worked for him for five years. Now, so much of our information, so much of our news, is mediated by technology, and that tech,

in many ways, determines the quality of what we see. News organizations respond to incentives, and when those incentives go away, they shift gears. When Ben and I worked at BuzzFeed, it seemed like the future of news would flow through social media platforms. But now, the news is increasingly moving through different channels like podcasts and newsletters and the web. And Ben's new organization Semaphore is adapting. I wanted to speak with Ben about this shift for a discussion that I hope would be interesting to anyone who consumes content or creates it and anyone who's thinking about building an audience. We also analyze some news in the second half and that's really fun, so stay tuned for that.

My conversation with Ben Smith right after this. Hey, Ben, welcome to the show. It's nice to see you, Alex. Good to see you two. It's been, it's almost been two years since we spoke on the podcast before. And I feel like that was maybe like the first month or two of the show. So hopefully this is going to be a more professional experience than that one was. Yeah, congrats. How's it going? How's the show is going great? Yeah. Yeah, the show's great. I could use podcast advice. I'm thinking of starting a podcast. Yeah, for all I think you definitely should. People do listen. It's, it's, it hasn't dropped out of the top 15 on the tech news charts for Apple. all over the past month, which is cool. And I think, thank you. And within, maybe within the next month or so, we'll hit a million lifetime downloads, which was always a goal. So I think that, you know, and you can hang it up. Well, here's a thing with podcasts, right? They are extremely difficult to grow. But once you build a good one and you sort of find your footing, then people

tend to come back. Like if listeners are listening now, you know, maybe there was a point where you said, oh, okay, like I'm getting something out of big technology podcast, and then all of a sudden becomes a habit, and it's something that you want in your weekly diet. Well, if any of your listeners have advice on my podcast, which I was thinking of called big technology, you know, I'd really love to hear from them. Yeah, we're actually about to adopt the semiform on big technology substacks. So, you know, it's this exchange of ideas is really... It's called convergence, yeah. Exactly. Yes, convergence. So I reached out to you early or late in December because, you know, you wrote something in one of your newsletters that sort of seemed like it might be interesting to speak about, which is that you said, and let me get the exact quote. You said that we are seeing

in the end this whole social media age and news. What we're seeing is the end of this whole social media age and news. I'm very curious about that because obviously like when we were at BuzzFeed, social media and news seemed like a really good match. And now you're saying that it's the end. So what does that mean? Yeah. And I think, I would say, like, it's so much clearer now that that's true than it was in December even. But, no, just to go back, right, you and I work together at BuzzFeed, which we built totally on social media. The idea was, like, what if you built a news organization entirely on social media? What if you imagined, which seemed crazy in 2011, but Jonah Peretti is good at seeing around corners,

that the whole internet was Facebook and Twitter, and you weren't worried about getting people to your website or your app, or much less subscribe. You were worried about punching through on those platforms. And that really was where people's attention were it was how people like to consume news, say 2012 to 2016. And then after 2016, you know, some of the growth continued, but a lot of consumers, I think, really soured on the idea that it was kind of fun and harmless to mix up news, entertainment, personal stuff, you know, fact, emotion. And it started looking for places that delineated them more. And so, and I think in a way, like, that was the hinge. And it's, you know, and I think if you, you know, if you look at that landscape now, Facebook has basically gotten out of the news business.

I mean, I think the biggest surprise to me. And I knew it, like intellectually, having covered it, but having come from BuzzFeed to, you know, where I spent a lot of time thinking about traffic to the Times, where I spent a couple of years. And, you know, I looked at traffic, but I wasn't responsible for it. To then, to some of four, the biggest change is Facebook, you know, barely exists for news. consumers, the way, you know, and it's the way it was for many people, for many publishers, the whole internet for a long time. And that's a deliberate, reasonable business decision Facebook has made just to get out of the business. And meanwhile, Twitter, you know, I think, you know, I think

social networks, it's pretty, I think inevitably probably live and die. They're like, you know, like other social establishments like nightclubs. They just don't stay cool forever. But I think, you know, Twitter, obviously, over the last six months has made a bunch of decisions that have accelerated that. And it's kind of, you know, you go on Twitter now, and it's like there was a bunch of conflict in the Middle East last week. You shouldn't see, it wasn't on my feed. Maybe I followed the wrong people or I tweaked something in my own settings that prevented it from doing the thing it used to do, which is just tell me what's going on. And now all Twitter seems to be good for is telling me, A, what Elon is tweeting, and be like what's going on on Twitter, which is kind of interesting. I care about Twitter.

I've been there a long time. but I used to use it to know what was happening in the world. And it's kind of ceased performing that function. And so I think that's a huge opportunity for people who are trying to do that job, which is certainly what we're doing. Yeah, I don't think that it's just your settings, by the way. It's definitely felt the same way for me. And as it becomes less interesting for people who are producing news,

then there's obviously just going to be less incentive to post there and then less incentive to consume. And I wonder where it goes. There are other things that it could be good for. I mean, I think if I was, you know, when I made CEO of Twitter, I just think the obvious business for it is sports gambling. Like, it's such a huge growing business. Twitter remains an awesome place to watch a football game.

Just like that seems to me the path of least resistance for them to build a business. But, you know, but news obviously is going to go is going elsewhere, which is now this is my opportunity to tell your one billion listeners that they should sign up for semifor.com because, you know, we're trying essentially in some ways to fill that gap. to provide us, you know, a way to tell you what's going on in the world that isn't, you know, algorithmically mediated that's not trying to kind of play on, you know, your fears or scare you and just to try to inform you in an intelligent human way.

Yeah, and I want to get to that, but I want to ask one follow up in terms of, yeah, yeah, spell it out, go ahead. Everyone's going to know, but. That's the M-A-F-O-R. Okay, great. So you have, I think you have comp sitting in the room, so you're getting points here. yeah it's okay so no this is good this is good we want to get people the word out about what you're doing and we have some questions about some before you know on the way but let's just talk a little bit about

this this movement and it's interesting that you mentioned that it was first the consumer decided that they didn't really want this type of news on social media and then the platform and my impression was always that it was the platform first where like this stuff was driving lots of engagement maybe it wasn't driving engagement to traditional sources maybe it was was driving engagement to, like, some of these alternative sites. But the platforms seem to have just made a decision that it wasn't worth the headache, Facebook in particular. Yeah, yeah.

I think that's a really good point. I mean, it sort of went in both directions. But the headache was that what consumers said they wanted and the way they behaved weren't the same, that, you know, that consumers were obviously expressing themselves in various ways, including both Republicans and Democrats through their elected representatives to say they were really unhappy with what Facebook was doing. doing, well, at the same time, by all the Facebook metrics, like they were loving it. They were just like clicking and sharing, right?

It is really interesting. Yeah, how people will express certain preference with their words, but then do something completely different with their actions. Yeah, it's interesting because I think in the early days of BuzzFeed, Jonah and I, but really, Jonah, kind of one of the things that we liked about social media was that at least we thought that what you do in public is different, you know, that people behave better on Facebook than in the privacy of the Google search box.

Like in a way, the pre-social Internet, you know, was because it was private in some way didn't force you to be your best self. And the theory of social media for a time was that, well, you know, if in private you're searching for porn in public, Like you're sharing, you know, GoFundMe links for victims of earthquakes because that's how you want to be seen.

And that social media would in some way encourage really kind of pro-social behavior. I think that didn't really pan out. Why do you think that happened? It's interesting. You're right. And I think it was probably an overly optimistic view of human nature. And kind of neglect, like what it really wound up enabling was this like incredibly profound tribalism. Right. So how do we change that and where do we move from here? I mean, obviously you're trying to do it with semaphore. But is the answer, is the answer, newsletters? Like, that's, you guys are deep in on newsletters or is it something deeper than that?

Yeah, I don't think, I mean, I think, you know, I like, you know, I love, I love email. Yes. Sending emails for 25 years and fully enjoyed it. And I do think news are a great delivery mechanism for news. But I don't think, I mean, we certainly don't think of ourselves as a newsletter company. I mean, I think it's more. It's the place right now where a lot of people are consuming news. And it does, I think, offer a kind of an antidote to the kind of endless, chaotic stream of social. Like it's a kind of finishable, concise, hierarchical, you know, structured and not personalized, interestingly, thing. So it has a real editorial point of view. I mean, in a way, what it's, newsletters are a way of bringing the values of print, although I think not the sort of, I think you go wrong when you try to like bring the actual forms of print onto the internet, but in a way to bring kind of the older values associated with print around curation, for instance, into a digital context. But I don't, but I think newsletters are, I mean, for us, like we, you know, we're trying to sort of deliver a set of values around transparency and a global point of view for which newsletters are a great way to do it, but, but we think.

you know, video. The web remain pretty good ways to do it. Right, but it's interesting because... Maybe podcasts. Actually, I think podcasts are, I think part of the reason people like podcasts like this one is actually because they do deliver some of those it's a very different value proposition than like share this and, you know, rally the troops.

No doubt. And it says come along with us for this journey on the next hour or 50 minutes or whatever it is and get deeper into the nuance than you could in an 800 word article. So I think, and it's also, yeah, it's an audience asking for something versus an algorithm pushing it to them. Most often, I mean, there's still some algorithms in the podcast apps, but I think the newsletter and the podcast thing really go well together. Yeah, I wonder if you could use AI to deliver like infinite versions of this podcast with, you know, simulacrums of our voice, you know, that told each individual listener exactly what they wanted to hear. It would probably do better.

Yeah, well, it will happen. I was on TikTok earlier today and there was some dumb video but like something that was like kind of benign like maybe a nature video being narrated by Barack Obama and it was definitely this wasn't his nature series. It was something completely different, but someone obviously realized that you have the Obama voice on TikTok it's going to do better than their voice. So we're getting there. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So the reason why I focus a little bit on distribution, which is like the newsletter thing is because.

You know, it's tough. I think it's tough right now to just put something out there on the web and then let it and assume it will find an audience, right? To me, it seems like that's impossible. So how do you think about distribution? I mean, when you talk about video, right, like, is that a YouTube strategy? Like, where do you think the distribution that's going to get news to like a more level-headed place? Where do you think that the way to get that is? I mean, I would say, I think it's going to be less homogenous is one thing. Like, I do think for the sheer scale, particularly the scale of Facebook and the kind of centralization of the news cycle around Twitter, like kind of had everybody chasing the same thing. And in a lot of news organizations, I think Quartz really comes to mind for me. This launched with a very distinctive voice and then, you know, in email, and then wound up chasing Facebook like everybody else and getting kind of homogenized into something closer to BuzzFeed. honestly, like BuzzFeed was built to do that. Like, so I don't really have regrets. I mean, that was sort of what BuzzFeed was for was building on social.

But, you know, other organizations, I think, got sucked into that vortex and lost their identities a bit. And I think you're about, you know, you're going to see everything from long form podcasts to, you know, Twitter only aggregators to everything in between find lanes. But I think it's not going to be as homogenous. And that's probably healthy in terms of distribution. But I totally agree. much more kind of arid landscape out there when you're just trying to find you know trying

to hit numbers like and and for us I mean you know one thing that one you know one good trick in the news business is having news as as you know from building that newsletter like you break news and people have to read you and you know what like even and you sort of it's a little it's pretty um it's a bit agnostic to distribution even like if you write it on a napkin and put it on Instagram, and it's a really good scoop, like, people are going to, like, download Instagram or they're going to, like, take a screenshot and look at it. And so, but the web is, I think, remains a great way to distribute, you know, real hard news that is new and revelatory, or that adds real context. And so that's where, you know, so we build a, I think, a web audience I'm

pretty happy with around that. But it's, but it's certainly not the old, you know, the, the old days of Facebook when you sort of, there was instant scale. I mean, the place that we found that is TikTok. And that does have that kind of wide open quality. And my colleague Joe Posner, who created the Explain series for Netflix when he was at Vox, is I think one of like the great kind of brilliant video journalists has, you know, has been essentially working both on, you know, quite long-form stuff that goes on YouTube and elsewhere. And then on, you know, this very direct, informal style of journalism that does, you know, does really well on TikTok, not only on TikTok. But I think, you know, we had a really thoughtful piece about why all those buildings

collapsed in Turkey. There was essentially an interview with a Turkish engineer that, you know, a couple million people watched. And that's like, that's a pretty effective. I mean, that's pretty, I mean, that's a platform that is, you know, delivering something, you know, people want to them. And mostly it's, it's always going to be more nature videos than hard. news, but there's millions of people on there interested in hard news. And so we've been pretty pleased with that. Most definitely. I've been trying the video stuff as well. Like we do the podcast and put clips on YouTube and TikTok and some other places. And one of the things that I found is that even still, like we're trying to put the most level-headed stuff. And I thought

there'd be a market for that. But even still, like the things that end up traveling the most or the things that inspire like the most outrage. It really did change my mind. I think I used to have a more like the more of a view of these the critics on social media were a little over their skis but like putting out the content on on a place like youtube for instance and it's just like you really struggle to break through when it's kind of more more level-headed but when it lets an audience jump down someone's throat then it's really the thing that goes bananas there but it's good that you guys got some informative stuff moving yeah yeah i mean it's a big it's it's a big world, but, but, but, but, but, but I, but I, but I, and I, and I also think that, that, you know, video,

audio aren't always the best ways for communicating information. Like, I think text remains, that's pretty good rated technology for communicating dense bits of information. Can I ask you about how you're, you know, like, you guys are building an audience. I want to ask you about, like, how you envision your audience, how you know your audience. And, you know, it's one thing to have, like, a product manager-focused newsletter and then UK, my audience is product managers. But your audience is big and broad. And when you speak to them... Actually, it's actually, oddly, it's 100% product managers.

Okay. Well, we've got to take Lenny Richensky and give him a heads up that this is coming for them. But it's a good business, by the way, if you're just going product managers. But yours is definitely bigger and broader. And how do you think of... This is an issue I have also. Like, my audience is broader.

It's not just one function within tech, but it's still tech. How do you think of the person that you're speaking to when you put your stories together? Like, who are you envisioning? Yeah. I mean, you know, this is a really interesting question, I think, for us because we, you know, we have these that genuinely vast global ambitions. And I think a lot of people made fun of me when we, you know, when I quit my job with Justin to go do a news site for 200 million people. Right. Who speak English.

although I was probably too narrow and I think that is our long-term ambition is to reach people all over the world and not with the same product we launched in the US and in Africa and intend to you know in a responsible way scale in a number of other markets

but of course you start somewhere and in a way I think about it as a reporter in a way you start writing for your sources like you have to be read and your subjects. You know, if you're doing journalism that has a kind of impact on the world, it's, you know, it's, the people who you're writing about have to kind of notice that you're doing it.

Because you're revealing, usually at best, because you're revealing things they didn't want revealed, or that they were super interested in about their, you know, rivals. And you're in there, you're sort of in their ecosystem. And I think, and if you're having that kind of highest common denominator, straightforward, open, and fair conversation with, you know, the central actors on beats. You know, because we are abroad, but we're actually, in a way, we're launching kind of deep in a series of spaces, politics, media, finance, technology with Reid Albergati and Luis

Mazzakis' semaphore tech newsletter, which I am also plugging here. And, you know, and ultimately kind of each of those is reaching an audience that, that in some ways is sort of a little bit deep and narrow, but there's a, when you're in that conversation, when reads breaking stories about, you know, kind of the inner workings of chat CPT, there's a big audience that is interested in hearing that inside conversation, as long as it's delivered in a, you know,

plain English, transparent, kind of non-trady way. And so I think that's where we see that as kind of the core first audience of sort of pretty influential key people in a given space and broadening out from there. That's interesting. So you're asking, what would the principles be interested in and then trying to go get those stories? What are they generally interested in? I mean, they're interested in what's really going on. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, I think big, you know, every, you know, I mean, I think that, and that's true at any of the highest level of any of these beats, right? It's huge amounts of money moving around. It's these important decisions made by powerful people. It's gossip, which those same people are super interested in. And it's all sort of in one fabric. It's not easy to tease.

It's not easy to kind of separate them from one another. It's personalities. And I think that's sort of what compote, you know, that's what makes the news. And we're certainly trying to break news as well, you know, to do both, to, you know, to break big stories. and then to do a pretty good job of giving our audience, you know, at a moment when these social aggregators are kind of breaking down a sense of what are all the best things to read everywhere on this topic so that you don't

because I think there is this behavior that drives me crazy as a consumer where, you know, you read a story in a publication that you love and respect, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, like a great BBC, a great global publication that obviously employs lots of great journals to do a good job. And your first instinct is to then Google the terms in the article to find six other stories about the same thing and kind of try to triangulate what really happened by like looking at all these different sources, which is not a healthy or useful way to consume news. And so we're at least trying to kind of bring into, like if we're going to write about something and the Times has done a great story about it, you know, as Max Tani did yesterday about News Nation, we're going to, you know, put in links to those competing stories.

So I think partly as a gesture of transparency, because we know that you're not going to sort of take everything on faith. You are going to go looking for other sources, but also just as a service. Right. I like that you guys do the London. Was it the London review of substacks where you highlight the best stuff on Substack? They're in London. They read Substacks. Yeah.

And yeah, and I totally agree with you about including the links. Like it is, if I'm a reader and I'm checking in on a story, I want to know what's influencing the author, what they're reading. I do it in every edition that I put out a big technology. It's just like go ahead and read some more good internet. Like you, as a reporter, you're doing this work anyway as you research. Right, totally. So why not share it with the reader? Right, and it's funny.

Like, when you're writing a smart beat reporting newsletter, you can't pretend that you're the only publication in the world. If you're the New York Times, you actually can, and you can go around sending your readers 17 links to New York Times articles. But like, and maybe you even think if you're the New York Times, that the 17 best stories that day were written by the New York Times. I don't think anybody really thinks that. And so if you're trying to serve your audience, you know, you should be trying to find

the best stuff from everywhere. Agreed. So how do you, N7,4, get your scoops? I mean, I'm not asking you to reveal sources, but. No, I have like this now-med simplest tactic for getting scoops, which is I just ask people for scoops. I probably, when we work together, told you to do that. Of course.

You just call people up, you say, I just started this new news organization. we have like a worthy cause, but like we'll totally collapse tomorrow if we don't break news. So please help. And I depend on the kindness of strangers. You did this tweet. Including your audience. Please help. B. Smith at somofor.com.

Jesus Christ. I mean, but you did this tweet. It actually, this tweet was like, I need a story for this week. Who's got one? And you end up getting a pretty nice scoop from it? I did that once. Yeah. I used to do it more like when Twitter was safer and nicer.

Right. Yeah. Anyway, I copied it and it did the same thing for me. Ended up getting like a pretty important scoop. It's nice. I mean, it's also, it's sort of, you know, it's, you know, it's funny. When I started as a city hall reporter in New York and I didn't ever written about New York and didn't, it had grown up here, but didn't. But literally just called everyone I knew, which weren't that many people at first, because I just moved back to town and said, like, hey, do anything I can write about?

And most of them were like, it's like my aunt. Like, why are you calling me? doesn't know, like really random people. But most people, you know, do have some connection to the new, you know, to our interest, know what they're interested in, have heard things that they'd like you to check out. And I think on a, so I think it's actually broadly true. Like I think if you're a general, good general assignment reporters in medium sized cities across the country are just talking to people in their community, picking up stories. And then I also, and then I think, you know, beats are communities also. And so if you're covering a beat, in particular like beats like technology like politics people really know what your job is and i find that there's a thing that reporters do where it's like they sort of befriend somebody sort of in bad faith to use them as a source and think that they're tricking that person into giving them stuff when like people actually would rather you're just ask them you know you can be straightforward about what your role in the world is and you can become friends

and you can build a warm relationship based on a kind of honesty about what, you know, the fact that you're looking for news. And instead, and I always find that kind of more transparent than the other way around where you build these warm relationships, you know, and kind of pretend that you're not partly there to do your job. Totally. Yeah. Is it, so when you do the asking, is it, like, how do you know who to ask and when to ask? I mean, that's sort of the other side of the question, right? which is like you can be present all the time or you can feel like you have like a pretty good sense as to like where the next big news story is going to go and do you do then go ask people I don't know I think I'm not that's I'm more in the sort of numbers game school of journalism where you just try to talk to lots of people and and I do think that like you know sometimes like the most important person in the world has a really interesting story but often I was down

in Washington recently you know sort of meeting a bunch of government officials and it is remarkable, it's not, certainly some of them have access to classified intelligence and know things that you don't, but you do get into these rooms with very powerful, well-informed people and very quickly realized that, like, everything they're talking about is something they saw on Twitter yesterday, that you also saw on Twitter yesterday, and like maybe they misunderstood it. I feel like a lot of what's happening now in sort of the politics of Silicon Valley are like, it's just sort of, I mean, there's not like they know things that aren't on Twitter. It's just people talking about the same stuff.

And ultimately, like, at some very crude sense, the job of reporters is to find things that are not on Twitter. And so, and often the people who know those things aren't the people who are supposed to, aren't like the powerful central people. They're people who are curious and have noticed things. Or there are people who, you know, just pure outsiders who are smart and can kind of deduce and watch things. Or people who are, you know, you know, taken for granted inside organizations and know a lot. Yeah. Okay. I just want to ask you a couple of business questions and then we can take a break. First thing that, you know, is just a natural curiosity is what's going to happen with SBF's money in semaphore.

And it's a kind of a down economy right now. So are you actively trying to fundraise to try to replace it and how's that going? You know, I feel like we've talked about this in public and I and I just in great, in great detail. And I think Justin wrote a, like, 17-paragraph email about this. And I could Google it up and tell you. But I just want to be really careful on how I talk about it. So I just want to kind of refer back to that because obviously it's a really serious thing. Yeah. Okay.

That's fair. And nothing on the fundraising stuff either. No. No, it's not something I'd want to talk about. Although, I mean, we feel really great about where the business is. And actually, from my perspective, having been at a number of media startups, the New York Sun, in its day, but then more recently, Politico and at BuzzFeed News when we launched. The place I've been have been startups that were, and this is, I mean this like, you know,

I had time of my life at Politico and a BuzzFeed, but it was really, they were started by journalists and only journalists who, and the basic theory was build a big audience, or in Jonas' case, not a journalist, but really kind of a content person, a genius at how the internet worked, but not an experienced media business operator. And I think, you know, with both Politico and BuzzFeed, there was a sort of, okay, we're going to find a big audience and a business will follow, but we're not really sure what shape that'll take. And in fact, the transition from, okay, we have a big audience to figuring out what shape the business takes is pretty painful. And I think one thing about this and probably part of the reason I was drawn to do it with Justin is I think he's really the best media business operator of his generation. And it's been, I don't mean to call him old of our generation.

A couple years older than that. And, you know, and so we've built a business, a really robust one at launch. And aren't really sort of functioning like a venture-backed growth, you know, growth company that doesn't care about revenue. And that's actually, I find that incredibly reassuring. And it's made me feel really good about, like, recruiting. Yeah. Okay.

So speaking of ads, what happened with that shell ad on the climate newsletter? I mean, is there more detail that? I mean, I think it was Shell, it was some sort of... There was an oil company, yeah. Oil company. You know, we have, we have, keep guessing. No, we have, you know, honestly, we have the same standards around advertising of, you know, the New York Times has, which is to say it's totally independent from editorial.

And which isn't to say that people don't get upset about weird adjacencies that feel awkward and look bad. And there's also simultaneously a legitimate, well-organized campaign to try to persuade media companies, really primarily focused on the New York Times to not take advertising from energy companies the same way they don't take advertising from cigarette. at companies and we kind of and like this isn't you know honestly this was not a something i had written it's something i because vaguely aware of as a media reporter but hadn't never gotten around writing about but it's obviously an interesting debate that we walked right into the middle of a bit unawares yeah yeah well the ads look i mean the ads overall they look pretty good um they're stacked throughout the site which is cool to see and you guys are gonna yeah i don't i take no credit for that but it is yeah i do like

I am glad to have ads. And you're about to do a conference? You just announced, was it your first conference or? You know, we have a big event. We've known a lot of events. We did a media event last summer. And we did a huge Semaphore Africa Week event in January when the African leaders were in town to see Biden.

And we have a close partner in Gallup, the polling organization, which provides a ton of data for us and kind of insight and also has this beautiful convening. space in Washington where we've been doing these things. And we have something called the World Economy Summit happening in April on the sidelines of the IMF World Bank meeting, which is a bunch of big interviews. I mean, I think Justin, this is less my experience, but Justin, my colleague Steve Clemens are kind of invented the events business in Washington. And I do think the secret to it, it's, you know, it's sounds so dumb to say.

It just has to be really journalistically ambitious. You have to get real newsmakers, ask them. real questions and that's what and i think there's a kind of a tradition inside journalistic events often of having them you know be kind of a like a you know redheaded stepchild of the newsroom and we're trying to keep them really close to the newsroom and do them well yeah they're super cool and yeah i know i think that there are some subsects that are starting to have events eric newcomers about to have one in san francisco maybe that's something that we do at some point we gave it a plug yeah I mean, I think, you know, TV and podcasts are sort of cousins of the event business, right?

I mean, I think what you're doing, you know, it makes sense because you build, you've built a community, people listen to this and you feel like they know you. And so for you to invite them somewhere and have a conversation like this, yeah, I think is, feels sort of natural, I think. Yeah. Well, everybody stay tuned for some news. Maybe we can make some in the coming months. Ben Smith is with us. He's the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semaphore. also the author of Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral.

That is a book that's coming out in a few months, but it's already available to pre-order, and it's going to be one that you're going to hear a lot about. So I suggest go to Amazon, whatever site you use at your local bookstore and signing up because you're not going to want to miss this book. All right, we'll be back here in a bit to talk a little bit about the news of the moment, and it's always fun to hear what Ben thinks about it. So stay tuned for that. Hey, everyone.

Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business. tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app,

like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on big technology podcast with Ben Smith. He's the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Semaphore. He's also the author of Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to go viral. And he was a colonist for the New York Times. I noticed that in your intro of me, you didn't mention that I was the former editor of Alice Cantorwitz, but that's a very proud distinction of mine. Well, what we do is we usually do this. We record the show.

And then I do a longer intro at the beginning, which people who are at this point have heard at this point. So yes, I definitely mentioned the fact that Ben hired me at BuzzFeed News and we worked together for... After, Joe, do you remember the first, oh, God, we don't need to go into this. We can. But we've been talking about a job and I'd been talking to somebody else about a job and it's before I hired you, but I wanted to hire you. But I had somehow confused you with the other guy who was fluent in Russian. And so, and also had an Eastern European name. and I needed really quickly a Russian translation at some point and called you out of the blue.

I think you were assuming we were probably well into job conversations. Yeah, we were on references at that point. Yeah, we were checking your reference and I called you. I would say, do you speak Russian? And you said, no, and I hung up on you. Yeah, and then I didn't get the job. It was not my goodness moment. Sorry, but no, it was okay.

I mean, it took, what, a year and a half until I actually did get the job with you guys. I waited way too long. Getting a chance to work with you and work at Bussey was definitely life changing for me, learn how to what news business was all about, learn how to break news and made a bunch of good friends. So thanks for hiring me over there. Yeah, that was a great time. It was a great time.

So we have a little bit of time left. Maybe we can talk, run through some of the big headlines and can I get your take? First of all, what do you make of Elon's Twitter? I mean, it doesn't seem to me to be going well. Like, I think the decision to amplify his own tweets is really strange and sad. But also I think that, you know, Twitter in its, I don't know, I think the notion that Twitter could sort of be a permanent global public square was already really falling apart. Like I think he was right that they had a real problem, that, you know, that it was a business that was losing money, that it was, you know, socially toxic in various ways, that it was, I think, suppressing more conservative voices than liberal ones was probably. true. I mean, I think, you know, I think some of the complaints were real, but part of it was just that, like, one company had set it up as this kind of self-up is this kind of global quasi-speech government was, I think trying its best. And one thing you see in the Twitter leaks is like that he's been, the Twitter files that he's been leaking. You know, often they make the right call when they're under pressure, either from Democrats or from Donald Trump to censor someone. But it's, you kind of just don't want anybody making those calls or the notion that one single company is making those calls for every.

country in the world just seems untenable. So I think that, I don't know, I think, I do think that having the service amplify Elon's personal tweets is a very strange thing to do. But I think that it was, it was, it was having trouble. I mean, I'm going to miss it. Like, I already kind of miss it. Yeah, I also, I miss what it was. And, you know, I'm just being able to open it up and know what's happening in the world.

Like, that's literally what I used to before. I like news. Yeah. Yeah. So I wonder, like, what you think about the Twitter files, because because of the reasons that you're outlining, right, the fact that Elon used Twitter to amplify, is using Twitter to amplify his own tweets and is now, instead of a group of people making decisions on speech, we have one billionaire doing it. People have largely dismissed. Well, but it's not, it's just much less relevant than it was. Like, it's just not the global central public square it was a year ago, even. Yeah. And people have, like, dismissed the Twitter files out of hand because. of this. But do you see any significance in the Twitter files? And do you think it should have been a bigger story than it was in the mainstream outlets? Let's see. I mean, I think, you know,

when I was at the times I wrote about, it was really more about Facebook. But, you know, there were really strange. There were, there were obviously incorrect content moderation decisions they were making under pressure. There was a situation where the, one of the, a woman who ran the Black Lives Matter Foundation was accused of, of, like, misspending its money to buy an expensive house. I think this later really did bear out in the reporting. And Facebook, like, blocked the story on the grounds that it was, you know, mentioning her house. And there was a rule against mentioning houses or something. But it was really clearly that they felt like this was a bad story about a good person.

And, like, that one just struck me as kind of outrageous. And I think to the extent that that's happening in English, in what feels like an arbitrary and kind of unfair way, it's happening a thousand times more in other languages. Yeah, and I think you had people who were, to me, the thing that was most interesting in the Twitter files was the extent to which the, you know, these folks at Twitter, who I really think were mostly, it seemed, you can kind of tell acting in really good faith and trying really hard to get it right. and sometimes screwing up were really thought and I think a lot about the vaccine thing in particular that their decisions were a matter of life and death

that if they could stop vaccine misinformation from spreading they would save lives and get people to take vaccines if they failed you know people would die I think you step back they tried really hard

they were pretty aggressive at banning people who had you know views on vaccination ranging from like totally batched insane to kind of dissenting in a less sort of out their way. Like America's vaccines rate is pretty bad. You know, lots of people didn't get vaccinated. I talked to a leading social scientist on this and said, well, do you think in the end

it was effective that they got more people vaccinated? And he said, well, you know, on balance, hard to tell whether the effectiveness of deleting things had a higher bigger impact than the perception that deletive. that by deleting things, that there was this forbidden knowledge. So I don't know. In the end, I think maybe we all overstated the power of, in a way, of speech on Twitter. And I think, you know, these elites like us and opinion makers who are on Twitter kind of mistook it for, I don't know, in some ways misunderstood its power. I think like the other thing is the Russian interference stuff, which, you know, and I think at BuzzFeed we were, actually, I know,

Matt Tybee noticed this and mentioned it, but we were always very, very skeptical that these Russian information operations had all that much impact on the election. Yeah. You know, not that they weren't trying. And I would put WikiLeaks in a separate category. That was an incredibly successful intelligence operation

that really did have huge impact. But these, you know, these bot farms were like really fun to write about and really weird and really malign in their intention. But there was just never any evidence that they got Donald Trump elected. Correct. So switching gears to the chatbots. I'm curious if you are looking at these as something that is going to change the game or just kind of a fun feature, like where do you, when you think about, because Semaphore's been doing a good deal of coverage about chat GPT and the whole bunch of them. So what's your view on where they actually take us? You know, I don't, let's see. I mean, we've played a bit with AI starting a few months ago.

with this series we did call Witness that was an artist working with AI to animate people's sort of testimony about, for instance, you know, the war in Ukraine where it's stuff, something that this person couldn't, you know, film because it was something that had happened to her, but she could describe and render her descriptions as this kind of dreamlike imagery. It was interesting. So I do think animation is a place where it's, you know, it's just, that there's, you know, there's, that for, for a lot of individuals, it would be way out of reach to animate their stories. And, and, and I think that is a place where you can see, you know, probably, I think with really skilled artists, AI having a real impact in journalism and in sort of media.

The chatbots, you know, I think there's a kind of quite basically low value work of, you know, right. posts that are designed to be picked up in SEO that you can't really even afford to pay a journalist for. And if you could find, if you could get a chatbot to be accurate, which is not totally clear you can, probably makes sense. My colleague Gina Chua wrote a really thoughtful piece about this the other day. And she's, I think, among journalists, someone who's really thought about this more than others. and her sort of takeaways that like just these are language models.

The thing that they are good at is language. The thing you can use them for is language. Something that, like a real use case that she's sort of playing with. There's not a journalistic use case, but it's a PR use case, which is that if you're pitching a story about the big technology podcast and you have a press release about your success, you could get ChatGBT to write a version of it in the style of the New York Post and send that one to the New York Post reporter to do a story in the style

of the, do a version of the press release in the style of the New York Times, send that to the New York Times reporter. One in the style of BuzzFeed, send that to the BuzzFeed reporter. And like that actually, it was like, right, like that's a totally straightforward PR use case that would be useful. I think the more obvious ones around, you know, if you're a, you know, an HVAC contractor whose English isn't that great, and you want to send polite emails to your clients reminding them that they owe you money, it's good for that. I mean, there's lots of sort of very basic use cases. But I think the things. is, it's not going to go out and do the reporting for you, but there are places where

sort of producing the language is useful. I mean, I'm not, yeah, I think it's interesting. I don't, I'm not that. I do think also that, like, it is kind of fun just to sort of like whack at the tool until it starts saying insane, hallucinatory stuff, but I'm not sure how, I don't know, I don't, I don't quite understand the import of that. Yeah. I mean, I think, if anything, it just shows how good these things are. actually helps Microsoft maybe recruit more people to its API to try to build on it and fix some of those problems. Yeah, but I just think for journalists, like, the thing I would just focus on is

their language models. The thing they're good at is language. And there is also, there are a lot of, I know a lot of reporters who are great reporters who are not good writers or who aren't comfortable writing or who are slow writers. Like if you, you know, and I've never, you know, I think reporting is really, really hard. and if you're someone who can figure out what's going on in the world and like there's some tool that can help you write it up. Like that's great.

Like I think writing is an overvalued skill in journalism. Agreed. And I would use it. Okay, two more things. First of all, the lab leak. Do you think that COVID came from a lab? And what do you think about the fact that like it was somewhat unacceptable in some circles, many circles, to even ask that question or say yes, now that we have.

but now we have the government saying yes. In response to the first question, I am glad that I finally get to put my PhD in virology to use. No, I mean, I'm not the right person to ask, right? No, but I do think there's a kind of tribalism around media that I fell into right in January, you know, right when it started coming out, and Tom Cotton said it could be a bio weapon,

and Matt Pottinger was sort of hammering it really hard. You know, I was like, oh, I can just sort of see how, see the shape of this, you know, I can tell why these people are excited about this story. because it feeds their preconceptions about China. And I kind of like, and then these scientists who seem to not have an agenda are saying it's ridiculous. And I think that was kind of wrong. Like the scientists did have an agenda.

And there was sort of a complicated, too complicated to explain here reason that they kind of were rooting against that theory. And that people who were skeptical, you know, who were inclined to think that China was doing bad stuff. I mean, the bioweapon thing was not true. But, and they walked that back fast. But then, yeah, but the notion of a lab leaks obviously seems really plausible. You know, we're now in this, and, you know, the core things the Chinese just aren't going to be transparent about it. And so unless there's new information, we're in this situation, we're in this part of the news cycle now where I think it's been really clear for, you know, then there was also this incredible sort of independent investigation on Twitter by a bunch of, you know, a mixture of extremely credentialed scientists and just like totally kind of clever outsiders with no technical background who uncovered a ton of. information that both documented the cover-up in the Chinese lab and raised questions or technical

scientific questions and incredibly interesting stuff. And is a media story interesting to a point because clearly there was this kind of tribalism around the story that led Democrats and liberals to reject it out of hand because their enemies were saying it. There was obviously a mistake. Yeah. But I think we're now in this part of the story that drives me a little crazy with stories in general, where there's not new news, but there is new news about what parts of the U.S.

government think. And this is something that, you know, I guess the Iraq War was the first story I cover that had equality of this where you'd get, you know, the Department of State has assessed that the Iraqis are doing X based on open source information. And you're like, wait a second, they just read the same internet thing I did and then used the word assessed. And the Department of Energy yesterday, for instance, like Shift had a assessment with a low degree of confidence that it was a lab leak, which, you know, it's probably where I

am personally. Like, that's my assessment with a low degree of confidence. And they have serious scientists doing it, but it's not clear that those scientists are relying on classified information or on anything that everybody else doesn't know. And so there's this kind of theater of the U.S. government processing public information that is it just doesn't add all that much. Like what's sort of the most amazing about the whole story was that, you know, kind of combative open source investigators on Twitter broke huge, huge parts of it. Interesting. Okay, I can't let you go without asking you about 2024 U.S. presidential election. You've got my vote. You should do it. Thank you. All right. I'm too young. No, actually, I'm not. Not anymore.

No, it's sad. You're not. Oh, wow. All right. Well, let me get the pack together. But where do you think Trump stands in the race? And is it too early to start being paying attention to? I mean, I think that there's this delusive, this kind of wishful thinking and delusion in the media. and among Republican elites that he's going to go away. Dave Weigel wrote this recently for his newsletter Americana that everybody should read. That just that there's this notion that Trump is boring is just like he's gotten boring. And so nobody's listening to him and he's out there,

you know, saying, you know, really in particular the thing, I mean, people, there's people aren't really, you know, he's out there taking increasingly extreme stances on cultural issues, including saying that, you know, an attack on transgender, you know, services transgender people of all ages, which is a real escalation, pushing, I think, his other members of his party to the right and ultimately remains this incredibly charismatic, compelling, entertaining figure to huge numbers of Republican primary voters who love him. And, you know, maybe the governor of Florida is going to be able to sort of,

float over this, but you just have to assume is the, I mean, I think if you're, if any normal betting person would look at the polling and look at the situation and say Trump is the likely nominate. Interesting. All right, Ben, do you want to tell folks where to check out your book so they could pre-order it, but without giving too much details, so we could have you back when it comes out? I don't even know. I think you said it before. It's called traffic. My name is Ben Smith. Google it'll come up. I guess it's Amazon. I actually have done this before. I've ever Rick or been asked that question. But also, please go to Somofor.com and sign up, and then I'll email you about my book.

Perfect. Ben, thanks so much for joining. Thanks for having me and letting me do all these plugs, Alex. It's really nice to see you. Of course. You too. And whenever you want to plug stuff, you're always welcome. And when you don't.

All right, thanks, Ben. And that'll do it for us here on Big Technology Podcast. Thank you so much, Ben, for joining us. Always fun to speak with you. Hopefully we get you back when your book comes out in May. Thanks to everybody again for listening. Thank you, Nate. Go out and you for handling the audio.

Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. Again, we will be back on Friday for a new podcast breaking down the news of the week with Ron John Roy. It's already off to a good start in terms of the news of the week. And I think we're going to have a lot to talk about on Friday. So stay tuned for that. Then we'll be back next week on Wednesday for our flagship interview. And we hope to see you all there. So thanks again for listening.

And we will see you next time on Big Technologies. Podcast.