Odd Lots - Ben Smith on the End of an Era for Digital Media

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

The 2010s saw the rise of a number of digital media startups like BuzzFeed News, Gawker Media, Vice, Business Insider and others who were set to usher in a new era of news consumption, displacing legacy outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Now, by and large, that dream seems to have died. Gawker is gone. BuzzFeed News is closed. Vice has filed for bankruptcy. Insider recently had layoffs. So how did it all fall apart and what is the future for upstart media? In this episode, we speak with Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semafor and the author of the new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, to discuss his experience as the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and how times have changed so dramatically for online journalism. We also discussed what business models work today, the use of AI, and the future of news consumption.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk vanguard marketing Corporation Distributor. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Gio Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, there's been a lot of media news and it's a cliche and I'm sure it's been repeated over and over again in headlines, but we're at like the end of an era for like the era of journalism that we both came up in.

I feel like before we start this episode, we should just get the disclaimer out right away, which is this is probably going to be our most naval gazing episode. ever. Yes. And I think we're even planning on releasing this as like a Friday bonus episode of the week just to acknowledge that it's like, okay, if you don't want to know anything about the media business or Joe and Tracy or all these things that are sort of like endemic to their lives over the last decade, feel free to skip this one. Yeah, this is media talking about the media. But you are right. There have been some things that have been happening lately. Specifically, we've seen BuzzFeed News announcing that it will be shutting down.

I think there was a report recently about vice media potentially filing for bankruptcy. It feels like the end of an era for a lot of these digital focused media startups. No, I mean, it's definitely true. And, you know, as listeners do know, we both started our careers sort of in digital, basically, roughly the same time, basically right at the worst of the great financial crisis. And out of this period came all of these new experiments. and upstart media companies that were supposed to dislodge the incumbent, you know, the blog at FT. At the Financial Times, Alphaville, yep.

I was an insider. And Insider is still chugging. They recently, they did announce layoffs, but of all of the companies, maybe we'll talk about this. Of all of the companies, I kind of feel like they're like the winner that nobody talks about in this whole thing. I noticed you call it insider and not its original name. Have you just erased that from your mind? Do you know what the original name was? Was it not cluster stock?

It was, yeah. Yeah. Cluster stop. Because everyone was like, our business insider, but we had names even before then. And even before then was Silicon Allie Insider. Anyway, it's a pretty pivotal time. And, you know, I guess the question for, was this all a ZERP phenomenon or was this something else or like what was going on there?

Well, I think there is an overlap with some of the bigger, you know, I might be reaching here. But I think there is an overlap with some of the bigger themes we've been talking about recently, which is, I guess, the sort of attrition of tech or the text. drains that we've seen. And the thing that digital media has in common with a lot of the tech industry has to be venture capital financing. It has to be there was a story about what was going to happen in the digital media market. You know, people talked about these big numbers, huge audiences that could now be reached through online publishing. So it feels like there is some

overlap there. Yeah. And of course, you know, when I was a business insider, like there was a really intense pressure month after month to hit new traffic goals. And part of that was like clearly like ad sales right. They're like sort of on some level a function of traffic. But I think the other thing is they're a function of telling a story to your investors for your next round. Yeah, you have lots of lines going up. Lots of lines. And so regardless of whether you're actually profitable or not at any given moment, if the lines are up, you can live because you can get that next round of funding. Classic tech growth story. Exactly. Well, we're going to talk all. about this because we're going to be speaking with Ben Smith. He is the editor-in-chief and co-founder

of Semaphore. Previously, he was a media columnist at the New York Times. And previous to that, he was the editor-in-chief at the aforementioned BuzzFeed News, which changed the world. And he's the author of the new book, Traffic, Genius, Rivalry in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. So, Ben, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Thank you so much for having me. And I should say, like, as a genuine fan and listener of the show. I can't imagine that anybody does not want to know all the details of your lives. I certainly do. Thank you so much for saying that on air. I have a question, which is, why did BuzzFeed News exist? And the reason I asked specifically is that in my mind, as a competitor to it, when I was an insider for several years, my

perception was that BuzzFeed itself was this huge traffic monster, cultural juggernaut, everyone knows about the quizzes, et cetera, and that BuzzFeed news was there to like raise the prestige of the brand maybe for advertisers. Is that correct? Like, why did it exist? So that's partially correct. But I think you have to put your head back to 2011, 2012 when we started it when the kind of thesis that we were working on was that in part that the Facebook news feed was this central pillar of society and people loved it. People loved the idea that quizzes, that memes, that baby pictures from your friends were all mixed up together. And at BuzzFeed, among other things, they'd noticed that on big news days,

their traffic went down. And so both in a functional sense, that was part of this mix that, again, the people liked that this stuff was all mixed together. And so it was part of the mix that I think Jonah and Peretti, the founder, thought people wanted.

But also BuzzFeed was, you say it was a cultural juggernaut, but actually it was struggling for relevance. It was halfway to feel this being seen by advertisers and by the platforms and by everybody else as a media company, halfway to being seen as being like nine gag or like break.com or like a generation of, you know,

cheeseburger, a generation of an earlier generation of essentially meme sites that got wiped out in that era because the platforms considered them spam. Well, I was going to ask, how much did the content mix become a problem for BuzzFeed overall? Because it was trying to do something kind of unusual in the sense that it was trying to do very important

sometimes investigative journalism, you know, hard news, while at the same time publishing memes and, you know, like 10 of the best random products you can buy off of Amazon kind of lists. Yeah, you know, in this moment of, which again, this very kind of optimistic and fresh moment of social media in 2012, it seemed plausible that people liked the mix, the consumers liked the mix, actually, and that the same people who liked memes wanted to get hard news and wanted to get them in the same place, which was to say Facebook slash BuzzFeed. I think, as you suggest in the question,

that really starts to change. Like, news got less fun as the decade wore on, not from some technical perspective, but because in fact, like there was this huge rise of right-wing populism, of left-wing populism, of super confrontational public politics, playing out through people screaming at each other

on social media. And suddenly, this idea that the Facebook feed is this delightful mix of all these different things kind of curdled. And I think that was a huge problem. for us that we never totally found our way out of. Right. So you had this weird mix of maybe the ultra-right talking about fascism and then like 10 clapback tweets that you've never seen before and they kind of sit badly alongside each other. Well, no. More you have a list of like,

you know, things you only knew if you grew up Persian in New Jersey and a bunch of cute cats and a story about Donald Trump. And the reactions to that story about Donald Trump are totally polarizing. Oh, I see. Okay. And yeah, and maybe, you know, and maybe the, I mean, there's always this huge brand problem in question that like BuzzFeed News, it's like calling something like, I don't know, Disney News or something. Like, it's a weird brand. But there was a window in which we leaned into it and people liked it. And then I think the broader social forces changed and turned against that. None of this speaks to the business model or anything else. But that was that was a real, you could feel as Trump rose, you could kind of feel the weather change and feel that brand get worse. Well, man, there's a lot there. I hadn't really thought about that element, though, that, like, basically people just got angrier with each other, you know, at the end of the 2010s than they were at the beginning of the 2010. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the story of Facebook and BuzzFeed was, end of Twitter, and BuzzFeed was a big bet on news being distributed by social media. You know, just on this brand question, though, and we can sort of pivot.

You know, when I was at Insider, I always sort of felt this sort of. like, you know, my boss, then Henry Blodgett, again, winner of this whole era, in my opinion, and completely brilliant media executive. But I also sort of felt like this, like, well, I mean, I guess the question is like, to some extent, if you're like going up against the New York Times or the Washington Post or Bloomberg News, et cetera, does the existence of the sort of like meme side of the operation create some sort of like, hard cap in terms of really how far you can go with like prestige. I mean,

because I got the sense that insider that on some level that you could like win Pulitzer's and do great work, et cetera, but on some level you kind of have to pick one of the other. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that there was a path for BuzzFeed where it's best. Or maybe I'm somebody who I actually like think prestige is overrated and sometimes kind of productive. But there's, you know, there was journalism you could do that was particularly focused on

stuff that. The majority young women who were sharing memes cared about a lot, which could be like sexual assault at massage envy. For instance, was something we wrote about. I think at our best, we were, like a lot of the coverage, you know, was in sync with the people who were reading the site and was really hard-hitting journalism that also overlapped with the interests of regular people reading BuzzFid. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value in fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real.

Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. At Vanguard, institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients. We're talking top-grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, and traders. These folks live and breathe fixed income. So if you're looking to give your...

clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing in subject to risk vanguard marketing corporation distributor. They say abs are made in the kitchen. Cool, but who has time for three hours of meal prep and a fridge full of Tupperware? That's why I started using Factor. Factor delivers fresh, never frozen, ready to eat meals that are dietitian designed for balanced science-backed nutrition. No prep, no cleanup. Just heat, eat, and move on. I've got gym days, work days, super long days, and Factor keeps me on track without slowing me down. It's real food, great flavor, and the kind of meals that actually support the work I'm putting in.

We're talking chicken pesto, steak with veggies, roasted salmon, meals that feel like they were cooked for you, not by you. So, yeah, abs might be made in the kitchen. But thanks to Factor, I don't have to be in the kitchen. Right now, get 11 meals, free shipping, and free sides. for life. Hurry, this offer won't last long. Go to factormeals.ca and use code pro. That's 11 meals, free shipping and free sides for life, but only with the code pro at factormeals.ca. Factor, Canada's number one ready to eat meal delivery service. Talk to us about how we, I mean, the book is called traffic. So I assume you have a lot of opinions on the importance of traffic and how it works. But talk to us

maybe specifically about how that fed, you know, the lines going up on the chart. how that fed into the business model and shaped the offering. How were people thinking about traffic as a monetizable commodity back then? Yeah, and I asked, and you know, I spent a lot of time in the book and kind of a lot of the reporting of the book for me, particularly was on the stuff that happened before I got there, which is to say kind of the discovery of traffic in the mid-aughts by the folks that, you know, your team at Insider a little bit later, but early on by Jonah Peretti, who was then at Huffington Post, Nick Denton, Nick Gawker.

And it's interesting you use the word commodity, because they really did think it was a commodity. It was something where they could, you know, for every individual who clicked on their sites, they could get something like a $9 CPM, which is a pretty good rate then, and sadly now. And they had... CPM is per thousand clicks?

It costs for $9 for a thousand clicks. Yeah. Okay. And they had, I think, every reason to think that, wow, like at this very rudimentary stage of this business, we're getting $9. for a really crappy product, we're going to make that product way better

and we're going to scale it a lot more. And if this is a classic commodity, we're going to make an enormous amount of money. And so there are folks on trafficking. They have different theories about it. Denton, who started Gawker, had this very, both very ideological guys, actually, had this theory that traffic is really to be found

in kind of like ripping the mask off of society's hypocrisy, of your own hypocrisy. If your audience wants pornography, give them pornography. If they want sort of malicious gossip, give them that. There was a... In the doctor family, there was a porn set called fleshbot. But also, if they wanted sort of stuff that appealed to their worst instincts,

give them that, don't make them pretend to be better. And then also sort of rip the mask off traditional journalism and print the stuff, the sort of mean, sometimes gossipy stuff or sometimes hard truths, the journalists say to each other at a bar but don't print. So that's one theory. Jonah's theory was totally different. He saw this kind of just the bubbling of this social media world. And the theory that we had at BuzzFeed.

Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed. Founder of Huffington Post and then of BuzzFeed. And what he saw in this social media world, which also was true for a time, was that the stuff that people would share tended to be very positive. Like you weren't going to go out and, I mean, God forbid, share insane, screaming politics because that would make you look like a crazy person. No one would do that. What you would share on Facebook was, you know, fundraisers for earthquake victims

or lists of cute cats. And so he sort of what he built was around an idea. at first that people were going to be distributing media themselves hand to hand and doing it in a way that reflected their best selves. So there's very different tactical ideological approaches to the internet. This is actually something that I wanted to ask you about, which is it feels like the way people thought about traffic is it's always good. Eyeballs are always good. But it sort of ignores, it feels to me today like one way of generating a lot of traffic is through the hate read. You get, you know, you have something. saying something provocative, you're still going to get a lot of eyeballs on it. But you can't tell whether people are reading that because they think it's a valuable piece of journalism or they're reading it because people like to read those sort of hate-ready, you know, like dog whistle-type pieces. How, like, is that something that you ever noticed? Oh, yes. Is there something I ever

noticed that people hate, yes, for sure. And I would say that if you're, you know, if you are thinking of traffic as a commodity, what you're really selling is the white space. The white space. next to that article. And so you don't care if people love it or hated. The sort of purest logic of traffic, which turned out, by the way, to be not how it worked and I think not how good editors ever quite saw it.

The way I should have phrased the question is, did that eventually impact the business model? You know, I don't think that it's hard to think of a site that really lived on hate reads. I mean, I'm sure I'm forgetting one. There was something sort of similar. Marriage announcement. section of the New York Times.

There's that. I mean, there was a site called ExoJane. Oh, our producer just in the message thought catalog. That's a good one. Yes, there was a kind of writing. And I actually, that was basically about having mostly young women write in a totally unselfconscious way about their personal experiences in a way that was torqued by, often, by kind of sophisticated cynical editors to make them look like horrible people.

So people would attack them on the internet. I mean, that to me is one of the really worst forms of internet journalism and did like lots of damage to these writers in the name of traffic. And more broadly, it was a kind of, I think, and this came out of Gawker, particularly came out of Jezabel, which I, you know, I was not a reader at the time in 2007, but was this incredibly high impact piece of internet history that for a time, I think it's actually kind of amazing to look at. You know, they launch an 07 with this, the first thing they do is offer a bounty for anybody who can find an unretouched, from a women's magazine. And they get it. They get $10,000 and they pay it out and they get a unretouched photo of Faith Hill, which before her freckles and smile lines have been removed.

And really, like, launched this incredibly effective assault on everything that was wrong with women's magazines, the way they distorted the images of people's bodies. There were no black models. And they also published this very, like, frank, revelatory writing about sex and about women's lives. And they also developed this unbelievably intense and pathological relationship with their commentators that sort of drove them totally knots. And the commenters felt they owned them and attacked them. And some of the writing was the kind of writing we're talking about where people sort of expose their own lives and then faced this intense and very personal criticism.

And it got enormous amounts of traffic. And Nick Denton, who didn't really love the content, kept it going because it got so much traffic. But it was both, this sort of early glimpse, both at the power. of that kind of social media age, and then also it had damage, it sort of the emotions it could provoke and how damaging it could be for the writers. I want to jump ahead just like a few years. You know, it's funny because the day, literally the day before the news came out that BuzzFeed News was shutting down,

I was thinking about this sort of now or famous, I guess it was a letter to the editor of the all where someone is like, I hate my life because I don't work at BuzzFeed. I was literally just sharing this article to someone the day before the news. And the psychological hold that I think like in the BuzzFeed heyday had over everyone else in the media was like extraordinary. The pressure to keep up, the perception. And I think it, you know, I think there are reports went all the way up to like, you know, board level at the New York Times, like feeling like what are we going to do about this juggernaut? It's so innovative.

They keep coming up with new story types and traffic and influence and all the young people prefer to get the news there. But what I'm curious about actually is, like, what's the date that peaked? 2015. So it was basically like that all, it was basically like, and why 20, like what happened? Like, what was the turning point in 2015? I mean, to me, you know, BuzzFeed was this bat. And to some degree, all these companies were a bet on that this new form of distribution was durable and that the economics would work themselves out.

And I think everyone now totally rightly can say this was always idiot. maybe it was, but the basic analogy everybody was using was cable. You know, these new form of distribution had been laid out. The people owning the cable lines knew that they needed quality content to populate it. And they reached a economic arrangement

where ESPN, CNN, MTV, become these great businesses. And that's what I think BuzzFeed and others imagined they would become. And I think 2015 was really where it started to become a little clear, A, that these platforms themselves are pretty fragile and sort of susceptible to all these social pressures. And B, that's a lot of, that they weren't going to move away from their total reliance on user-generated content to create a business for publishers.

So just on this note, my impression was always that in addition to the distribution issues that you just mentioned, which we should dig into a little bit further. But one of the big problems here was that the traditional. media companies also just got better at doing what a lot of the digital media companies were doing. And, you know, where I worked, Alphaville, it wasn't necessarily a traffic juggernaut, but it was kind of pioneering of a certain type of journalism, certain experiments with, you know, audience engagement and events and things like that. And what always tended to happen within the financial times was that we would do something new and exciting and innovative. And then that would just get, replicated by the FT itself. And so it becomes hard to sort of maintain the momentum of having

new types of exciting journalism at a constant rate. Yeah, that's a sign of a pretty healthy organization, basically. And but there was this arrogance that really came out of the aughts where we were looking at the New York Times, at CBS News, and it was just, it just seemed so clear that they were doomed, that they could never figure out digital media, that their leadership just was terrified of it, and had no idea it was going on. And I think this arrogance lasted a long, you know, long past its expiry date. And I was, we just published on semifor an excerpt of from my book of when Jonah Paredi goes, is invited into the New York Times in 2015 to tell them how to do their jobs. And it's a meeting, he's speaking to a board meeting. And the interviewer

asks him what he would do if he was named CEO of the New York Times. And he says, well, first, I would ask you for a raise. And then second, I would go into my office, shut my door and cry. Yeah. And I mean, that's a lot of hubris. Yeah. But you know what? Actually, by then, the Times had started to figure it out and they didn't follow fast and in fact a number of traditional media companies I'm thinking of the Washington Post had really screwed themselves

by trying to follow fast. Like they had copied this thing and that thing in blogs and never really built anything. The Times followed slowly and carefully but very, very deliberately and very effectively. And I think suddenly we looked up and yeah, they had copied a lot of our tactics,

they had taken a lot of our best people and had closed that gap and then could deploy their huge advance around brand, around resources. You know, you mentioned the doomed cable analogy and some of like that peak. And one sort of phrase that I think lives rent-free, so to speak, and the head of many journalists, digital journalists is, quote, the pivot to video. And all of these, the pivot to video, we're going to do video.

And my impression... Didn't we just launch a video product, you know? Wait, are we being filmed? I'm still soaking wet. It was raining after. We did we odd lots is in fact doing a pivot to video no it's kind of but my impression is like what happened Facebook came to a bunch of publishers and said we'll you'll go viral more if you do video well there's who was driving this there's higher CPMs and you're going to do really well and so build all these

expensive video studios and you're going to make a lot of money is that basically what happened and then it didn't materialize in the end yeah I find it a little hard to I mean I mean, to be mad at Facebook for this, they just kind of randomly gave a bunch of publishers money. And in some did redeploy their existing writers who weren't good on video to make videos. I mean, you know, there was, there has been in society a pivot to video. There's this widely used product called TikTok, which is relied on short video. So, I mean, I think the notion that news was going to be delivered in video by people who were

terrible at making videos was probably not the case. And it was a sign. I think it came as a lot of. lot of these digital publishers, you know, we're scrambling for revenue trying to figure out how their businesses were supposed to work. And so a pivot was a pretty scary thing. Can we talk more about the distribution channels here? Because I think that's the subtext of a lot of what we're talking about, which is you had this explosion of digital media. But then at the same time, you had a handful of distribution platforms, so things like Google, Facebook, Apple,

that were growing more and more powerful and sort of more concentrated in their own monopoly power when it came to distributing the news. So how much of that was a negative force on the digital media business? Well, it was the digital media business. I mean, it was a hugely positive force, right? Much of the digital media business and certainly really BuzzFeed above all was just all your chips on the table bet on Facebook and subsidiarily, Twitter and Pinterest and others, and that they were going to be your distribution. And that again, like, Jonah Paredes' basic theory, which I think you can argue now, but whether it was true or not, was that Facebook and these other platforms would find that they had a need for quality content to retain their users

to compete against places like Netflix, and that they would eventually start paying for higher and higher quality content as other platforms had through history. And that just did not happen, and that bet went totally wrong. Let's, here's a 2023 question. How old is some it for now? About it? But six months. Six months. Where does traffic come from today? Or where does audience, if you want to redefine that, come from in 20, 23? Because it doesn't feel like many things like go viral at any level anymore. Yeah, it's such a totally different world. I mean, newsletters are really important to us and probably the sort of core of our distribution.

The web exists, and it's a very familiar space to me for someone who's been kind of looking at traffic for 20 years, and that the Drudge Report is a really important. Many people continue to go there. There's a set of kind of, I think it was Asian-style aggregators, Asian, some specifically out of Asia, smart news, news break, little send traffic, flipboard indoors. But in a weird way, it's this internet from 15 years ago before social media existed that has returned. And then, you know, we do a lot of events, which people really like, which is, you know, the most intimate and direct form of audience. So is that the future of traffic

and audience? Is it the sort of smaller scale, develop it organically? Or are there still the big channels? I know you mentioned Judge Report, but is anyone still trying to target? Is anyone still trying to target, you know, Facebook exclusively now. You know, Facebook is just not on our radar as a distribution channel at all. I mean, it's a really, I mean, that was probably the biggest surprise to me in starting a new thing. And I'm not sure there's one future. I mean, I think what we're really looking at is a much more splintered landscape in which

among other things like the web itself and traffic is one of the splinters. Is there like ever going to be another publication that tries to be a, you know, like the thing about insider and the thing about BuzzFeed and the thing about Gawker through all of the various like Gawker subverticles is that they were essentially attempts to replicate or go after the New York Times and to create these all in one news packages, Huffington Post as well, obviously, like destinations that had everything. Like would anyone try that again to sort of like create an all-purpose news brand? What kind of an idiot would do something like that? Well, actually, I mean, you don't have sports. I mean, you know, at some, I know, we are, I would say, I would say, before launch sports.

I would say nobody would try, would imagine that you can do it in a kind of explosive, flip the lights on and reach a billion people in three years kind of a way. I mean, I think, I do think that it's, again, a weird changing moment where what people want is some, people are, if the challenges are different, if like, you know, when we were starting all this stuff, it was so cool to be able to read, read publications from all over and hear voices from all over. now people are drowning in that and are looking for help navigating it. And if you can do that well, that's real value. It does feel like a kind of interregnum where there's some next thing.

We haven't totally seen it yet. They say abs are made in the kitchen. Cool, but who is time for three hours of meal prep and a fridge full of Tupperware? That's why I started using Factor. Factor delivers fresh, never frozen, ready to eat meals that are dietitian designed for balanced science-backed nutrition. No prep, no cleanup. Just heat, eat, and move on. I've got gym days, work days, super long days, and Factor keeps me on track without slowing me down.

It's real food, great flavor, and the kind of meals that actually support the work I'm putting in. We're talking chicken pesto, steak with veggies, roasted salmon, meals that feel like they were cooked for you, not by you. So, yeah, abs might be made in the kitchen. But thanks to Factor, I don't have to be in the kitchen. Right now, get 11 meals, free shipping, and free sides for life. Hurry, this offer won't last long. Go to factormeals.ca and use code pro. That's 11 meals, free shipping, and free sides for life,

but only with the code pro at factormeals.ca. Factor. Canada's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. If Bellfib TV is now streaming, is it still TV? Is it still TV if there's no TV box? If I can stream all my favorite channels and pause and record shows,

That's TV, right? A new era of FibTV. It's streaming, but it's still TV. Well, glad that's settled. Bell, connection is everything. We haven't really talked about the funding side, which I think is important, but we saw a lot of venture capital money flood into the space in the sort of 2010s. What was the story back then? And then fast forward to today, are there any VCs out there?

who are very excited about the future of digital media? I assume there are some, because semaphore got some VC funding, I believe. But like, what is the story now? Yeah, we didn't actually get into VC funding. And I think, you know, that was certainly a lesson. I feel like I learned from that era the expectation of fast, massive returns. And we're talking about digital media, but we're really talking about the news business, the journalism business.

That's a really unrealistic expectation and not something that we wanted to promise that we would in four years have, you know, multiplier valuation by a thousand or whatever VCs expect. You know, these people aren't, well, I don't know. They're not widely seen as idiots. And they were making these big bets on all of the publishers we've mentioned. Yeah, because they imagined that there was a world in which they were companies, you know, in which Vice would be Disney or which BuzzFeed would be NBC Universal and these would go to massive, massive scale.

It's, you know, it is interesting to think back to how could they have thought such a thing. And I think that cable analogy tells some of that story. but I don't really see any VCs anywhere near the media business right now. Can I just a quick detour because we've been talking about Insider and what was Vice? Because I actually like people talked about Vice a lot, but like I never like knew someone who like went to Vice.com. Like what was Vice? I know. You know, I wrote this whole book about traffic and Vice isn't really in it because they didn't get any traffic.

They were a they were the purest best brand of the digital media era. Shane Smith was the best advertising. salesman, anyone has probably of our generation and best equity salesman of our generation. And they did have this brand that really stood for something. They made some incredible mini documentaries that really caught people's attention and defined a style of telling stories. They did not ever really build digital audience. And what they were able to do for a time was to convert that brand into a television production company that made a pretty good news show for HBO. But the television production business, I mean, you think the digital media

business is tough. I mean, that's a really tough business as well, because you can get your show canceled, which is ultimately what happened. Sorry to keep jumping back in time, but I think it sort of informs the current state of the market. There was a moment when Jonah Peretti was talking about, like maybe the media could get together to give them some more bargaining power over the platforms, the distribution channels. Was that ever a viable solution to some of the issues we've been talking about? Yeah, Jonah in particular had an idea that you could basically, if you rolled up enough scale on digital media,

that you could gain leverage against Facebook in particular. I mean, you see why that makes sense. I mean, it's a very classic way of thinking about a market. But I think there is this underlying problem that what these guys were selling was, you know, that it was not a commodity, that scale was infinite, that Facebook, whether or not they, they had access to, you know, high-quality journalism, at least at the thought that they could

reach every single person on the planet forever with their better mousetrap and didn't really need you. Again, I think as you look at social media and you watch it unravel, it's not crazy to think about, huh, like maybe these social platforms should have taken more seriously the idea that they should have been pivoting towards subscription services with high-quality content, since that seems like those are the companies that are now winning. But it also seems interesting that that was never going to happen, and it was crazy to imagine it would. So speaking of bargaining power, you know, I was at insider for six years, and they were very good for my career, et cetera.

I wouldn't trade that for anything, except that they were extremely psychologically and physically demanding. I basically, I work seven days a week. I would get up early on weekends to post. I would probably work 12 hours a day on the weekdays. I would wake up sometimes so stressed out. I would like punch a pillow a few times. And the reason I bring a bargaining power is that I think a lot of people don't like that. And a number of newsrooms have unionized.

And I'm sort of curious, like I left insider prior to that newsroom having unionized. But BuzzFeed News did unionize while you were the editor-in-chief there, right? Yeah, that's right. How did that change that? Was there like a noticeable different in the way like this sort of like post, post, post-post, post-post. that I grew up in. Like, did that change or was there like a, did it shift anything when the newsroom unionized?

You know, I mean, maybe we had already moved a little past the era that you're talking about where you were in a personal foot race with Twitter. Yeah. And you were always second, which is pretty amazing. Like, no one else could manage it. You were the fleetest of foot. It was crazy, but it did seem stressful. I was still second.

Yeah. And I was, yeah, I mean, I was, you know, in that race too at various times. No, I don't think people were, I don't think people unionized because they wanted to work less hard. I think it was a sense of wanting control over your life and your work in this very stressful, chaotic moment in America, not just in, you know, in the news business in particular, and wanting protection against the downside at a pretty gloomy seeming moment. Yeah. But, you know, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, I've had unions forever. I think it's, you know, it's an industry that has a history of pretty strong unions. I mean, I think there's this other challenge right now,

which is that newsrooms, good newsrooms are really egalitarian and feel it. And unions are part of that culture and at the same time, this ecosystem rewards individual journalists who get their, whatever, you know, they hate, we all hate the words like influencer and brand. But in fact, it's an ecosystem that rewards that and figuring out how you blend those cultures, I think, is a big kind of newsroom challenge. Since we mentioned Twitter, it has been interesting watching the slow implosion of Twitter at this time. But both Joe and I, our career, have certainly benefited from that platform. What would be the impact of Twitter, you know, suddenly going away or either becoming irrelevant on the media industry?

I mean, I think we're halfway through that process and you're seeing it. I think it means that as a consumer, I mean, I'm currently, and I don't know if you feel this or if your listeners feel this, but I wake up in the morning and I wanted my main use case for Twitter had been, what is happening now? And it doesn't do that anymore for me. Just like what are the four news stories I need to be watching? I need to go to the front page of the New York Times or the Drudge Report or 17 other places. And actually a lot of it, some of it, like, that's definitely like a job we feel can be done. Yeah.

We're trying to do every morning with Flagship is like, here is what is happening in the world because that is a service Twitter used to provide. They have, what it now provides is this riveting story about itself, which I find very interesting as a long-time Twitter user. Right. That's most of the value now is to see what people are saying about Twitter. Yeah, but it doesn't do that particular thing. And it doesn't, you know, and it's, yeah, and it's just so, so I think as a newswire, as a sort of user, it's become less useful as a journalist. It was a good place for people to build their brands, to some degree still is. I think in certain spaces, I think in economics, in AI, there are really interesting, like, threads of conversation that are still there.

And you could imagine, I mean, I think Reddit is a really interesting example. Like, there's a social network that didn't go away. Actually, it's probably best placed on the internet. But it's also not centrally relevant to news and culture. And I think there's a path for Twitter that is that. Okay, so you mentioned AI. Actually, it's funny. Tracy, I recorded an episode earlier in the day, and we decided that, well, from now on,

I guess there's always going to be an AI question probably in every interview, at least. It's usually going to be, how is AI going to make this worse? But actually, like, as someone who makes my living with words in one way or another, A, I'm pretty blown away by what AI can do. And in my mind, I have a fair amount of anxiety that at some point in a few years, someone could say, you know, I'd really like to hear Ben Smith on the Oddlots podcast. And rather than waiting for us to like book Ben Smith and then get it out a week later or whatever, they just say, what would it be like?

And then they run it through a voice generation thing. And they have like a pretty good version of the Oddlots podcast where Joe and Tracy interview Ben. I'm unironically anxious that this is like a real possibility in like the next few years. Like does it worry you at all? It worries me. I don't think I've quite figured out the scenario that's really going to freak me out because I don't, I'm not sure it's that.

I mean, I think there's already enormous amounts of sort of, you know, copy past a random generated content on the internet and the fact that you could get someone to read it aloud in my voice. I'm not sure who that's for. Like I'm not sure we're, I mean, think there was this sort of Google-centric view of the internet where if you just sprayed garbage content everywhere, you would occasionally make a few pennies. But my concern is that it's not going to be garbage, that it actually will scan the corpus of

all Ben Smith content and be pretty good at sort of figuring out what you were going to answer, that it'll scan Joe and Tracy episodes and kind of be good at figuring out the questions we would ask. I actually don't worry about that. What I worry about is because it will come up with something. predictable. What humans will have to do, what human journalists will have to do is become even more extreme and unpredictable. No, honestly. I mean, I don't think your audience wants that. Like, I think you underestimate your audience. Like, I think if you flagged in advance of this

episode was entirely AI generated from rescambling the corpus of things we've said before, they wouldn't listen. Yeah, I don't know. But I also, and I also, I guess I sort of come from like the sort of scoop world of journalism. Like, I care a lot about reporting. And it, isn't, and that's a kind of journalism where not only is it's sort of a little harder to see AI disrupting it, but also over, you know, over the last 20, 30 years of editors getting worn away in newsrooms, there's been this thing that I've noticed where there's a kind of journalist who was not a particularly good writer. And in the old days of tabloids, like, you know, you were a runner and you had a rewrite guy. And as these Metro newspapers ran out of money,

the first people to go were these kind of rewrite mid-level editors. And it really disfavored people who did not have fancy educations and or were not good writers, but were really great reporters. And I don't know if you have somebody who can really report and can't write and wants to use some writing tools, like that's fine with me.

Yeah, I remember hearing a story, Tracy, from, I forget who was someone at the New York Post talk about how, you know, they'd have the guy go out and it's like, a doctor was found dead in a hotel room with his girlfriend. And then the rewrite guy would be like, okay, doc with gal pale,

like could translate it into New York Post speak. And that's, and that's like literally what Chatchie. is best at right now. There was someone at the FT who was exactly like that. I'm not going to say who, but I imagine it. But he would make it more boring. No, there was someone who was very, very good at reporting and getting the story,

but had to have all of their copy rewritten. Oh, they're legendary, fabulous magazine writers whose names we all know and admire whose editors write every word. And like, what's wrong with that? Like, I think that's a different jobs. It's a great form of news production. It's sort of too bad that it's all been flattened out. And if some of these tools help people write, it's not the most important part of the job.

So one of the things I wanted to ask you was I was reading, first of all, I really want to read your book. I haven't done it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I was reading instead one of the reviews of the book. I think it was the one. Just read the reviews. The one in the hefty. It's like in that movie Metropolitan. Just read the critics. I think it was probably John Gapper or someone like that. But they had a line in there saying that they felt that in the book there was no moral conclusion about this whole episode of digital media. So I guess I'd love to hear from you, you know, here's your chance. a clear moral conclusion. Like, what is the big takeaway of the past 10 or 15 years in digital journalism? It's the old apocryphal Jaun-Lai thing too soon to tell. But I think I don't know about a moral conclusion. I'd say the thing that surprised me most in the reporting was that that world that I was reporting on that we were all in in the kind of early internet, I think was assumed, thought itself to be politically progressive, like without really thinking about it. These were, the internet was where young people got together to elect Barack Obama.

And, you know, Barack Obama pays a visit to Facebook. Obviously, Facebook, you know, it goes without saying that Facebook is a democratic place that is friendly to Barack Obama. And I think the people, some of the people at Huffinian Post totally explicitly, their job was to elect Barack Obama. And I think it was a surprise to me in the reporting to see that the sort of people who created the populist right, you know, the guy of Chris Poole who founded Forchan worked out of BuzzFeed's offices. I don't think he was a conservative, but he built that. Andrew Breitbart was a co-founder of Huffington Post. Steve Bannon comes through and learns from Huffington Post and so on and so on. And then, like, I think the people who thought that the election of Barack Obama was kind of the apogy of this whole moment,

turn around and suddenly actually the election of Donald Trump is the apogee of the moment. And the people who thought they were the main characters actually were the supporting characters. And the main characters were these conservatives who we thought had been hanging around the edges, but actually were the central thrust. One thing that, you know, since we're talking politics, you know, we have the various cable networks on TV, like in the newsroom. And they're on mute, so I don't really listen to them. But one thing I definitely noticed is that, like, CNN and, like, maybe some of the others, they've never been able to quit Trump. I mean, it's like Biden has been the president for, like, over two years now.

And I'm pretty sure at least I see as much Trump pretty much constantly. I don't know. I'm just sort of curious, like, the lasting, like, this very, like, strange. love hate. I kind of think the media mostly loves Trump, even if like the words are kind of anti-Trump. Like I've just like, what like the Trump era and beyond has like done to the media? I mean, the rise of this, you know, reality show star turned would be authoritarian is obviously the biggest story in, you know, in this period of American history. So I don't think it's crazy that the media covers it or that its viewers are very interested in it. And but I, but obviously also, you know,

TV has its own form of traffic, which is ratings. Yeah. And there's a sense in which Trump in 2016 was like sort of providing free syndicated content to CNN that was just putting it on and people were watching it. I mean, Newsmax was competitive with other channels the other day because it just put a Trump speech on unfiltered. And CNN is going back to the well. Yeah. Oh, he's doing like a town hall. Yeah.

And I mean, I mean, I think it's, you know, I think sometimes the media overestimates our own role and our own. power and you know Trump in fact basically was banned from cable. Rupert Murdoch said that he was going to make him a non-person. He was banned from the social networks and he remained very popular because a lot of Republicans really love him and like what he's selling. And maybe we overestimated the role of the media in that. Like they weren't confused about who he was. They hadn't been tricked.

They just really like him. And so it's not particularly healthy for a country. Like when a country is consuming as much news as this country was in the period 2016, 2020, that's like not a great sign. It's probably a more normal country that consumes less news. And we're headed probably to another national panic attack and consume a lot of news. I do remember before Trump won the presidency. I think I was in Abu Dhabi at the time and I wasn't watching cable news. And I remember coming back to the U.S. for a visit and seeing CNN. And it was just Trump, like wall-to-wall coverage of Trump. And up until that point, I thought like,

oh, this is crazy. But then you see him on TV all the time. And you're like, oh, wait a second. But just on that note, I mean, I think the thing that traffic and cable news all kind of has in common and going back to the question I asked earlier about the hate read is a way to get people's attention is obviously to provoke outrage or to play to previously held opinions. Once that can has been opened or once that box has been open, can we ever go back? to that sort of like classic maybe 1950s, 1960s era of, you know, unbiased media coverage, bipartisan coverage that appeals to all types of people, or is that just gone? I mean, I think that specific thing you're talking about isn't so much classic as a sort of temporary product of post-war metropolitan newspaper businesses that were, you know, were these monopoly advertising businesses that wanted to sell to everybody. But I also think, you know, the sort of suddenly the line.

lights turned on when the data from digital media came in and suddenly these people who'd been not only flying without instruments, but kind of sleepwalking. You know, they'd been doing the same thing for years and years and in a pretty, in a declining industry. And suddenly they could, you know, they were flying with instruments. We could all suddenly see in, you know, in exquisite detail, everyone who was reading everything. And it, and in many ways probably, you know, over-torked toward that lesson. All right. I have one last question. It's very self-serving for me and Tracy. But I feel like to some extent, and tell me of you disagree, to some extent, I feel like when you look at all of the big changes that have undergone the news business, in a way, business news is a bit of an exception and that it's been more stable.

And I remember an insider when you, like, I'm a huge admirer and was at the whole time of like BuzzFeed News. But I remember I was like paranoid when you guys launched a business section because it was like, now you're going to come and it didn't really click in my opinion like it didn't really work and generally speaking it does not feel like the level of disruption and sort of like tumbold that many parts of the industry has faced has hit business news quite the same way and the washer journal is still powerhouse and Bloomberg is still a powerhouse etc is there do you feel that that's the case like what was it about business news even at buzzfeed that made it unlike say some of these other categories Well, I think it was more competitive and it was better resourced and you had healthier institutions and that's because business is where the money is.

I mean, I think that's actually why it's a better business than general interest news, you know, just for the literal reason that people are making money on what you produce and so they can, and trading on it and subscribing. I mean, this institution is probably the best example of that. I'm not kidding about the psychological effects on me of those years. I mean, I've like gotten over it and it's not one of these things like, oh, I need a year. of therapy. But like those were like extremely stressful years. And I remember before BuzzFeed launched its business section just being like insanely stressed. I was like my life is stressful enough. And now like the news entity that's the juggernaut of all things is coming after business news and now we're done. Well, I'm glad we didn't we didn't push you over the edge with that one.

Thank you for not. Thank you for, uh, thank you for, uh, Ben, thank you so much for coming on odd lives. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for having me on. Thanks, Ben. That was great. Yeah, that was great. Tracy, That was a lot of fun. I hope the listeners found it fun because for me, actually, like, I could talk about this for hours. Like, there are not many topics that we discuss on the show in which I feel like I have expertise. Like, that's why I'm the interviewer. But like on the digital media business of the last 15 years, which we both in, I kind of consider us both experts. Joe, you know which one of us got more traffic last year? It was you, wasn't it? It was me.

It was like one of those housing store. What was it? You had so mega. I had a bunch. I was just behind Matt Levine. in the traffic ranks. But actually, that's something we didn't talk about is the data visibility. Because this was one of the, like, defining things of digital journalism, which was you could see how many people

were reading your article in real time. And that really helped you focus on the type of content you were producing. There's a lot there. I mean, so an insider, it was on the walls. Like it was on the big... Like a scoreboard. It was on the scoreboard for everyone to see.

That's crazy. It was... I'm telling you, I don't want to totally over-execate. it and say, like, oh, scarred for years. But the stress that caused people to, like, see everyone's traffic on the walls at all the time. It did two things. It drove people crazy. And it turned people into absolute juggernauts.

And you could take someone out of school from, like, Columbia J School or UNC or Duke or Northwestern. And in a few months, they were a traffic monster. But see, this is also why I asked that question about hate reads. Oh, yeah. Because you can produce a headline that will get a bunch of people to click. on it, but not necessarily in a good way. And I feel like a lot of digital journalism was

about provoking that response and not necessarily building up a dedicated audience. Henry Blodgett, what it's like to actually eat a cheeseburger, what it's actually, you know, like those were like hate rage about, oh my God, this is so good. But like, but you know, there's no differentiating

between someone reading something because it's fair and balanced and accurate and insightful versus someone reading something because it's provocative or stupid or extreme in one way or another. Your point is something I'm very concerned about AI, which is if there is this perception that sort of like AI is going to be really good at the sort of commodity normal.

And all these people in media think like, oh, I got to really like, I have to AI proof my career. You have to turbocharge the hot takes to like furnace level. Because it's what social media did. And I think this is one, I don't know, I think it's going to be even more extreme. that's what I think too. All right, on that happy note, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. All right. This has been another episode of the Alld Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway.

And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at The Stallwork. You can follow our guest, Ben Smith. He's at Semaphore Ben and check out his new book, Traffic. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin and Dashle Bennett at Dashbot. And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash oddlots where we post the transcripts. We have a blog, a newsletter that comes out every Friday, and we have a Discord. Discord.g.g. slash odd lots. listeners are in there 24-7, talk about all this stuff. It's really fun. It might even be the future of media. It's really great. I love it. It's a great place to hang out. Leave Twitter and join us on Discord. Unironically that. Go check it out. And thanks for listening. The news doesn't stop on the weekends.

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