Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) @semaforben On The Golden Age Of Digital Media And His AMAZING New Book About It

Episode Date: May 6, 2023

This is the book I've been dying for someone to write! This is how digital media happened for 20 years! Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. Yay to finally having Ben Smith on the pod! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home, this time with someone that you hear all the time on the podcast because I quote from them all the time. Ben Smith is the founder of Semaphore, which you know I've been quoting from a lot over the last few months. He's been a New York Times colonist. He was a longtime head-muck-dimuck at BuzzFeed News. He was at Political Realheads. Remember him as a New York politics blogger. But he has a new book out called Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and the delusion in the billion-dollar race to go viral. Ben, welcome to the pod. It's been long overdue. Thanks so much for having me. I didn't realize we went that far back on the internet, actually,

to the New York politics stuff. Okay, well, okay. I told you offline that I thought that this book, I knew you had a book coming on, and I thought it was maybe some vague thought leadership thingy, you know. Oh, no. No, I'm like a thought follower. Right. No, no, no. You told Nelai that, that this is a book about our childhoods. And dude, this is very near and dear to my heart because I've always been based here in New York City. And so, you know, like I moved here in 2002 for the first time. So even though I've been in tech, like digital media is sort of how I experienced the tech

industry here in the early 2000s. Like my startups were always non-media plays, but, you know, my friends, my colleagues were all in digital media. So, you know, I was listening to the podcast with Kafka that you did with Denton and and Jonah Peretti, and you all kept calling it a scene, but like, it was. It was. It was. There was so much energy. People were doing so many interesting things. So let's start there. Let's describe the scene, the golden era of digital media that this book describes. Yeah, and you know, it's funny. It's a scene I wasn't totally part of.

Like, I was blocking about New York politics and I was in City Hall nearby. But I I was actually copying a lot of what was happening on blogs, but I don't want to sort of claim stolen valor here. I didn't get invited to the parties. But I was super interested in what was happening in lower Manhattan around Gawker, BuzzFeed, insider, Huffington posts, some of it would become Vox Media. And really what it was was a bunch of people who some kind of considered themselves journalists, some didn't, taking these new tools of very simple publishing tools called blogs and, you know,

talking to each other on the internet all day about what was happening, basically. And then also, you know, hanging out together every night at the same four bars in Lower Manhattan. And, you know, I mean, I sort of wrote the book about two of them, who both, again, like, basically lived across Haxton Street from each other, Nick Denton. who had come a british journalist who had kind of fallen in love with with blogging and jona paredes californian who had um sort of happened into what we now call virality when he was a grad student at MIT and he kind of pulled a weird prank and forwarded it as some friends this this sort of famous story about uh him trying to put the word sweatshop on a Nike sneaker and having this long

earnest conversation with a customer service representative, and then forwarding that to a few friends and watching it go absolutely everywhere. Yeah, and the two of them, I think both actually did have incredibly large ambitions and really did see, wow, this is going to, like, thought that this would sort of become the media business and scale and make lots of money in a way that, like, I think most of the people who were blogging and drinking downtown really didn't. Like, they were just heaven fun and making culture. Yeah, I mean, and again, I'm going to put this in the context of, you know, I've for the internet history podcast spoken a lot about how in the valley from like 2001-ish to 2004, it's kind of dead. But in New York, it kind of wasn't, and it was specifically because of

things like Gawker. And the sense that there was a community, there was a scene. You could see Nick every day at Balthazar, you know, like making things happen. and there was a lot of layoffs here in the city, you know, from the post-9-11 recession and stuff like that. But again, it was that sense here in New York sooner than it happened in Web 2.0 out in the Valley, where young people can like get their start, work their way off up the first rungs of the ladder in these sort of digital media startups that kind of didn't die. I mean, double-click. Everybody's stock went down, but Double-click was still a wrong.

around, and there was still stuff happening in Silicon Alley here. So I just remember this scene sort of reviving sooner than the valley scene in the 2.0 era. Yeah, I mean, yeah, and there was this idea that, wow, maybe the center of innovation and venture capital is moving to New York, which in retrospect seems totally ludicrous. At sea gets founded and... Or square. Right, yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. These were kind of media, you know, businesses that were like closer to media, closer to culture.

And, you know, of course, like this is after 9-11. It's the run-up to the Iraq War. News is very contested and rich and important. Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, again, it's you sort of have to put your head back into this moment. And also, I think, you know, the mainstream media, particularly after the Iraq War, is very discredited. Like, people, a lot of regular people are genuinely like, this all sucks. The New York Times sucks. CBS News sucks.

We want something. we're at least open to some totally alternative thing. And by the way, we're all using in our real lives, these digital tools that these big media companies have totally not figured out. You know, we're kind of freestyling here because I was going to get to this later. But years ago, I interviewed Josh Marshall of TPM for the Internet History

podcast. And I don't think I framed the question right to him. This was like five years ago, so even before recent events and things like that. And I might not frame it. this the right way now, but, you know, famously people like to say that Gawker sort of created snark, like the tone that social media and modern media sort of adopted later. But the point I made to Josh is what you just said, which was 2003, 2004, the run-up to the Iraq War, the way that, again, if bloggers are sort of, you know, crashing the gates, sort of the premise

that a lot of folks, bloggers like you, bloggers like Denton, bloggers like Josh Marshall, the premise that they sort of crash the gates with is, we're going to tell you the real truth. The truth that the mainstream won't tell you. And now fast forward 20 years, like, is that the real conceit that this era sort of bequeathed to the internet and the media of don't believe what sheeple, don't believe what the mainstream tells you. Trust me, God. that you hadn't heard of six months ago. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, I think that's like an eternal thing. I don't think that we were the first people ever to say that, but it coincided with the rise of this digital technology that

allowed you to say that at scale, not just in, you know, Ramparts Magazine. And to suddenly look like you were really challenging these big institutions and reaching just as many people as them. Again, another freestyle here is I've thought also that this era was sort of like the last gasp of Gen X. I think you and I are roughly the same age. I'm 45. Like, the early blogs really came out of that sort of zine sort of thing from the 90s. And like, and conversely, I would argue that, you know, BuzzFeed sort of captured was the first to capture the millennial zeitgeist, right?

But so, like, that era, I feel like is the last gasp of sort of the DIY Gen X ethos. Does that gel with you? Yeah, and Galker certainly had this kind of like indie rock, you know, anti-I mean, yes, was sort of opposed to mainstream culture, opposed to sort of selling out in a very, in a very like specifically Gen X way, for sure. So to bring this back to the story of the book, but your story, it because actually the first few chapters of the book, you're not in it. The book is sort of constructed, almost like it's an old-school press barren sort of rivalry between Nick Denton and Jonah Prattie. But you are there in the early 2000s doing New York City political blogging, but then you go off to Politico,

which again sort of comes out of the same sort of energy and milieu. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think Politico and The Verge, actually, in particular, were among the first to sort of see what the bloggers were doing and say, like, oh, like, you could just use the same, like, digital tools. Again, this is painfully simple publishing tools and stick something that looks a little more like standard political journalism into them, just make it faster and more incremental. And essentially, yeah, sort of started this kind of convergence between legacy and digital media. And it also started shifting away from the idea that essentially like blogs and oral commentary, that what bloggers were doing was commenting on and attacking the mainstream media as opposed to competing directly with it.

So putting my, I was kind of their hat on, in my recollection, the chronology is that, you know, Gawker starts to get big in 2003-ish, 2004 to 2006 is sort of like the age of the indie bloggers, at least for the tech site, like Gigamom and what was Richard McManus, is a read, right web, and things like that. But then they're kind of professionalizing, but it's the social media stuff, you know, because Facebook didn't open up to beyond colleges until 2007, I think, right? And so then that's around when Twitter gets started and stuff like that. So from having been there and trying to do this professionally, do you remember a period of where it's just, we're just out on the web and then all of a sudden this social media energy takes over and sort of changes the game? Yeah, I remember it really vividly.

And I think social media and Facebook in particular in those early years really weren't. It was a parallel universe. It was for something different. It was for communicating with keeping up with your friends. And it wasn't for talking about public stuff. And Twitter launches in 06. Facebook goes wide in 07. But they don't immediately catch on and take over.

I think Twitter, particularly in the tech press, and the tech business gets more traction faster. But just to think about it, on election day, Forget about Dig. Dig was actually the first one. And Dig was, and FARC and others, particularly Dig, was really important by the time of the 2008 election, actually. But on the day of the 2008 election, Barack Obama, who's the biggest Twitter account on Twitter at that point, tweets once. Like, hey, remember to vote everybody. It's a very secondary, tertiary communications method, even for this politician whose campaign is very sophisticated about communicating.

It's not yet where any real people are, basically. And then, I mean, and I think in tech, and it moved faster, but in politics, which is where I was kind of living, it was really, like, come the, like, health care fight of 2010, 2011, suddenly, like, I'm writing this blog that had been a blog that, like, you know, people would hit refresh on all day because I would be feeding new information in, and that was very fun for me. At some point, I can both see in the traffic, because I actually had an engineer at Politico, like, secretly embed an extreme tracker, if you remember those, and into my footer. So I had my own little, like, window, live window to traffic. And I could see in that, and I could just kind of like intuit that the people who had been hitting refresh on my blog were now on Twitter. And the sources were on Twitter and the sub people I was covering were on Twitter and the other journalists were on Twitter. when I broke a story because I'm basically addicted to scoops. And when I broke some news, the thing that I wanted to do was watch it travel around Twitter

and watch people share it. And it was a bit real. And the blog started to feel like this kind of legacy space where you got to feed the beast, like writing stories for the newspaper because you have space to fill. And the real conversation was on Twitter for news. And yeah, and I think, so when Jonah Peretti kind of approached me and 2011, I barely knew what BuzzFeed was. And when I looked at it, it made no sense to me.

But when he explained, and then my wife sort of re-explained to me that what it was was not just lots of cats, but in fact, they'd been thinking really hard about what do people share on Facebook and in other places, but particularly Facebook and what they had concluded was lots of cats. But this was a very sophisticated cat-based strategy. It was basically the same thing I was doing with news on Twitter. And you were also starting to see flickers of news on Facebook. mentioning Jonah, so I don't know if people know this timeline really well, but Jonah came from the Huffington Post. You mentioned two people that also don't get a lot of credit for this era, which is Drudge and Arianne Huffington and the whole Huffington Post thing,

which again, Dredge. launches in the Clinton impeachment era, but Huffington Post launches prior to social media. But her whole strategy was to get her famous friends to post blogs and things like this. But Jonah cracked the egg or even before or as social is happening, Jonah is sort of reverse engineering virality at Huff Post before launching BuzzFeed. Yeah. I mean, you know, social, the sort of social impulse on the internet precedes the big platforms. And the blogs were social.

They had comments. All the bloggers were kind of talking to each other across the internet. And I mean, the big move in blogs was I would like attack Ezra Klein. And then I would email Ezra and say, hey, I just wrote this thing attacking you. But as you'll notice, like, I linked really prominently. And if you wouldn't mind when you respond, linking back to me. So I think they were pretty sort of, there's this sort of proto. social web. The Huff Post comment section was a huge social space where people would just hang out and

argue with each other and talk about politics. So there were these bits of social media. Search engines mattered a lot. And Jonah had been, had really like immersed himself in traffic on Huffin Post. He'd built, you know, everybody, there are these ubiquitous dashboards now with, you know, sort of charts where the line goes hopefully up into the right, and you sort of see the orange space underneath filled in and the white space above not filled in with clicks over time or whatever. And he designed the first of those. He and Paul Barry and Andrea Brianna designed that. And there was a sort of top secret data sources when they wouldn't invest it. When people would come into the office, they would turn their screens to the wall because they didn't want to

see people to see how they had like figured out how to quantify what they were doing. But so he had been totally immersed in it. And yes, he, among other things, the difference between what people like to say they wanted, which was like serious stories about the Iraq War and even like, you know, George Clooney's musings, and what they in fact wanted, which was trashy stories about celebrities. It's interesting because what you're also describing is just analytics and data coming into the modern era for writers and journalists and stuff. Like, a thought on that as sort of like the business model, like Denton, I'm good friends with like Joel Johnson, who was with Denton and his, I think, EIC for a while.

Like, this idea that you hire hungry kids, 25 years old, pay them a dollar per post or whatever, you know. But then also they have insight into what works. So they're incentivized. the pejorative now is you're writing for clicks, clickbait, and stuff like that. But also this concept of the audience is in real-time shaping what you're saying and reporting on because you can get in real-time feedback in terms of what gets traction and what, again, before going viral. But literally, this is the thing that I can see gets a reaction. Yeah, sorry. I mean, that is the case. What's the question?

Oh, the question is, I guess, okay, the question I was poking towards was this being the first generation of journalists and writers that have those tools at hand while they're doing the work, as opposed to going into the newsroom, writing up an article and having it published the next day in the paper or on the news at 630 at night, you know, and getting the ratings or something like that. the fact that the writers in real time have the sort of business insight and feedback that it used to be only the management had? Yeah. I mean, I think that varied a lot and it depended on individual writers, sort of which screws we had loose and what management wanted. And one thing that Nick and Jonah both did was really like try to manage through the data and say, basically, your job is to not to write things that I feel

proud about or that I like, but to hit these numbers, which, you know, push you toward, I mean, it pushes you in a bunch of different directions, but certainly not toward, like, you know, deeply reported investigations. And in fact, in two directions in particular, like Nick steered his people to follow the data toward, you know, saying things nobody else would say towards snark, towards sometimes kind of cruelty or sort of exposure. And Jonah had this totally different theory, which was also true for a time, which was that in the increasingly kind of like public space of the internet, the things people would share would be these super positive things, would be, you know, a fundraiser for earthquake victims

or cute memes. Yeah, but like the chapter about Jezebel is really interesting too because, and I think we'll come back to this in a second, but with both Jonah and Nick, there is a... There's a sense of taste. There's a sense of instinctual. There's an audience here. There's something that's underserved. Like, Jezebel has started because, you know, women's publishing, targeting women is a huge business that was underserved at that point in time in terms of online digital. So like, Nick Denton just senses that out intuitively as opposed to we were just talking about the data, but there's no data that would tell him there's a feminist blog could work. He just has a sense that it could.

Yeah, I mean, I think he was looking at categories of media. I mean, I think the degree to which, to some degree, these folks, it wasn't de novo. Like, there's media out there. And Nick, in particular by then, was really in the advertising business. And he was looking at how fat, Vogue and Vanity Fair, or maybe not even L and, you know, glamour and Redbook were with advertisements and was, I think, thinking in a fairly straightforward way, like, I would love to get a slice of the beauty product advertising business. To bring it back to you, we mentioned you getting recruited by Jonah for BuzzFeed News. What was your vision for BuzzFeed News? What were your marching orders? What was the remit in terms of what it was going to be and the role it would serve for BuzzFeed?

Yeah, I mean, I think at first it was actually very clear, and this would seem less clear, was we're going to build a news organization for the social web that's going to be about, you know, it's going to be rooted in the distribution of the social web. So we're only going to do stories that people on Twitter or Facebook want to talk about. We're going to, and we're going to try to kind of answer the questions people have on Twitter, like a variety of story that was so fun for me that was like somebody would tweet, you know, Israel just bombed. There would be like a New York Times article saying that Israel had just bombed Lebanon, say.

And somebody would tweet, like, I wonder. what Hezbollah thinks. And of course now, as well, as Ebola is like on Twitter and we'll just tell you gladly. But there was this gap where like, well, like one of my reporters had the number for their spokesman in Beirut and would call them and he would tell them. And then you'd put that on Twitter and people would be like, wow, like that's the answer to our question. And it wasn't always that literal, but there was a sense that there's this big community that cared about news that had lots of questions and that reporters

had the tools to answer them. And so that was actually a big part of how we thought about it. And yeah, and scoops were, which was the thing I I like doing was also the thing that was most guaranteed to blow up Twitter. And so, you know, I think, you know, at some higher level, I think our initial goal was really to sort of build BuzzFeed's brand and to build an audience that would like come to the front page when there was news that didn't just see the site as kind of something to do when you were bored. But to kind of elevate, I mean, because the other thing about that era that, again, like, I think you've forgotten is there was this other category of meme sites. Nine gag was the biggest. They're something called break.com. And they were, like, a cheeseburger, and like they were kind of had become, they were starting to be seen as essentially spam and garbage.

And these big platforms, which were Jonah realized becoming the distribution layer of the internet, were not going to distribute them. They were, and we're going to cut them off. And it was very important that BuzzFeed not be one of those. Okay. That comes back to this idea of like taste versus data. and I thought of this. There's two different sections in your book that when I was reading it this morning, I was like, there's something interesting here.

So at one point, you know, when early on in BuzzFeed, Zuckerberg and Peretti have discussions about maybe, hey, maybe Facebook will just buy BuzzFeed. And I think he was trying to basically acquire Jonah. This is like when Facebook's only valued at like $100 billion or whatever. And Jonah makes this joke that like, well, we're adding $10 billion in value to Facebook right now at $100 billion valuation. So you should have – I'll only take $5 billion and you'll be getting a deal. And it is a joke and the tie-up doesn't happen.

But so again – so there's that, which is Jonah's saying to Zuck – I'm adding value to your raw numbers, right? So I'm positing that while Jonah has the insight about what makes things go viral, like what he sees in the analytics, he's still coming at it from a sense of taste. The second incident that made me think of this is after the dress happens, I believe, I think it's you and Jonah are at a party at Facebook headquarters and you're talking to Adam Oseri. You get the sense, you guys are like proud that the dress thing happened and it blew up, and

you get the sense that he thought of it as, no, that's a problem because we didn't understand how that happened. So Facebook is looking at these things as pure numbers, as engineers. And someone like Jonah understands the numbers, but he's not thinking of it as an engineer, he's thinking of it again with taste and other things beyond the raw numbers involved. Does that make sense? Yeah, and I'm sorry, the first example was... Was when Jonah is saying to Zuck, we're adding value to Facebook, but Zuck clearly is like,

no, the platform is the value, not what you're doing on the platform. Yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah, in both of those cases, I actually think the Facebook people, you know, and I think often when media and political people look at Facebook, it's sort of like we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and we think that they're thinking about politics or thinking about... culture and media and really they're thinking about engagement metrics and and it's not just taste it's like the notion that there is a thing called media or that they're professional created content is in any way different from any other random thing with the engagement you can

measure um you know just i think it wasn't not how they see the world and i think i mean to me because going back i mean particularly in this particular moment when some of these these companies, including BuzzFeed are really struggling, and looking at how much money investors put into them in the aughts and in the early 2010s, you're like, what were we thinking? What were they thinking? Like what? And this is a lot of in the book that I go into also, but specifically what they were thinking and what we were thinking was that this was a, in some ways, rerun of the 1980s when the cable

wires went down. And, you know, people built this new distribution system called cable, but they weren't going to just put public. access on every channel, even though you probably could have gotten people to produce free shows. They essentially created an economic environment in which CNN, ESPN, MTV could build huge businesses. And which meant that the cable company was having to pay out a huge percentage of what it brought in to these content providers. But that was the deal they made. That was a balance that they struck and built for them a business that, you know, is going into its like fourth decade as a

very prosperous business. Our thesis was that these social platforms, and I think we thought there'd be more. I thought there'd be more. I didn't think it would basically be Facebook and then a bunch of tiny things, but Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, stumble upon, snap, whoever, that they would similar be competing with each other for who is the best content. The broadcast networks were, right, yeah. Yeah, and that eventually, as the medium matured, they'd start to pay for high quality content. And you sort of both talk, like, there are lots of reasons that didn't happen. They tried at times, but I think if you, and you can also argue about would it ever have been a

good idea for them. You know, but if you look at them now as they sort of fade and unravel, I don't think it's crazy to think they made a bit of a mistake there. Yeah, I, you know, reading the chapter about the time when Disney comes in, and, you know, this is when, you know, BuzzFeed is really sort of really writing the tiger and they offer, what was it, $600 million? I'm reading it and I'm like screaming, take the money, take the money. Oh my God. But, okay, so here's, because I'm going to come back to the idea that we're kind of getting

towards, which is the platforms are always capable of rug pulling you. But I feel like, so there's this moment in, let's call it, 2013, 2014, when legacy media is enamored with this. Maybe you guys have cracked the code. maybe this is their entree into digital to, you know, make it be like succession a little bit. But then what happens is at this exact same moment, you have VCs enamored with this, thinking that this is cracking the code for taking media to scale. And so do you feel like there was a double sort of like, it's not stab in the back,

but you sort of, people in the space sort of were like, well, the legacy media is always there and they're going to pay up, but also VCs are going to offer us bigger visions and bigger dreams. And so at that moment, it seems like everything's going in one direction. And the biggest pots of money in the world, the smartest people are all saying it's going in one direction. And so it's like you're led towards this model that was probably always unsustainable, but it seemed perfect at the time. Yeah, right. I mean, right, the same reason, for the same reason that Disney tried to bite us, we really thought we were had a lot of value in that the wind was at our back.

And the venture capitalists thought it for the same reason. I guess I do think you read a lot of stuff, particularly from the ex-Gawker people, because, yeah, I don't know, because they spent a lot of time of Gawker, that will say, this was inevitable. It was all stupid and doomed. And maybe that's true, but I think it's obviously also easier to say in hindsight. And I think there were a lot of contingent choices made along the way, particularly by the platform companies.

I mean, ultimately, the decision-making power was in Silicon Valley. And that it wasn't totally obvious that the platforms would evolve the way they would. It also was then this overlay of the toxicity of news and the Trump era that maybe we could have seen coming or should have seen coming but didn't. Just to put a bow on this VCID, I mean, like, it is sort of the, there's investing fads. You know, Web3 people are having trouble raising money now because AI is the hotness. and who knows what it'll be in 18 months or whatever. But it's also the problem that a lot of startups encounter, which is if you get the fog-wa stuffed stuff down your throat

and you take that giant bag of money, like you're only on one path. There's only one way to go and you fundamentally can't necessarily turn the aircraft carrier around at that point. Well, I mean, these are independent companies and they can disappoint their investors, but certainly the deal eyes wide open with the VCs. And I mean, the people taking the VC's money are not the victims here.

Like, I don't think it's appropriate to be like, I mean, ultimately, if anybody is the victim in a situation that an investment goes wrong, it's the investor, right? Not the not the investee. But it's certainly like a kind of a tacit deal that you're like racing for scale. You are not trying to slow down, create a, you know, 10%, 20%, 30% margin media business that is modest, sustainable, functional. you're racing for massive, massive scale. And with all the risks that that entails. And there were times at BuzzFeed where, there was a very smart guy named Dari Shadda.

I don't know if you ever bounced off him, a business development guy who'd been at Tumblr, who, like he and I spent a lot of time trying to sort of build what would ultimately have been modest, ideally profitable, but not scale businesses around news, whether that was some kind of subscription thing, or whether it was these sort of production deals with Netflix and with Twitter. But the sort of logic of the investment structure and the logic of the business

was to race toward just massive, massive scale. So the other rug pool that people famously talk about, you know, if you build your business on a platform and the platform decides its priorities are elsewhere. Like, the closest I ever got to working in media was the year I spent at TED, which was 2016. And I remember, you know, them... I regret to inform you, but you're kind of working in media right now. That's true. You know, right. So I do have to remind myself of that.

I remember them coming to us and being like, quick, what can we put on video because Facebook wants us to do Facebook live video, right? And then at the same time taking meetings where it's like, okay, what can we do on Amazon's got this Alexa thing? And obviously, we're in audio medium as well. the podcast is great. And so one of the things that is for media companies, all of these tech companies are always, have these new products that are promising the distribution that always promises to be the holy grail. Right. So it's also, I've also thought that, you know, when people bemoan the fact that, oh, don't build your business on top of somebody else's business because you don't own it, I'm like, but no, the point of being a startup is you have

to find where your business model is. is. And you know, you could say that if you build your business off of advertising full stop, you don't really control your destiny, right? So I'm curious what you think about this idea of the original sin was believing that the Facebooks of the world were the key to a long-term sustainable business model. I mean, in retrospect, that is obviously true. But it also was because of a bunch of specific decisions that the companies made and because of ways that the culture broke, that I'm not sure we're totally foreseeable. Yeah, I think that people like to draw these sort of smug generalizations, right?

Like that subscriptions are the only way and that don't build your business on somebody else's business. But I don't know, ask ESPN about how it was to build their business on top of cable. It was fine. And so, and the sort of pendulum, you know, content companies throughout history have built, you know, the movie studios built their business on the distributors. I mean, it's not unusual to have distribution and creation in separate businesses. It just the Internet didn't pan out that way.

Again, I mean, we were obviously wrong in that bet, and I'm not suggesting otherwise. But I don't think it was like, yeah, I guess the question is, were we delusional? Yeah, I would argue not. Which is a reasonable question. Yeah, so, and I think there is, I mean, this is something I feel. like I've learned in the news business, which is like a subset of all these other businesses, that people love to get really ideological about revenue. Like if you're in the advertising business, you're going out there saying that, like,

democracy relies on freely available information. And if you were in the subscription business, you say that the sort of authentic connection to the audience is what makes it all worth doing. But, like, this is people talking their book. The subscription business was working a lot better for, like, until maybe last year than other businesses. And so suddenly there was this conventional wisdom that it was the sole business anyone should be in. And now it's people have realized how hard it is to get incremental subscribers. And like the advertising business is sort of back. But now we're heading into a recession and

the ad business is bad. And like surviving media businesses are ones you typically that have this very boring idea that you should have a bunch of different revenue streams to try to manage them carefully, which is certainly where I am now. I'm going to, I'm going to talk about semaphore at the end here. But let's let's let's let's sort of come, bring it to a landing with talking about BuzzFeed News and this moment. You know, you had a piece about BuzzFeed News. I think it was last week that I quoted from, those of us lucky enough to be building from scratch in this new moment, we'll have to realize that the old way of thinking about

news based in text on the worldwide web and distributed primarily on social media has passed. Like, are we at an inflection point here where the 20-year period you're writing about in this book, we don't know what the new thing is. Maybe it's just TikTok and videos and stuff like that, but do you feel as someone that is doing a media company right now that we're either already in or inflecting to a new era for media? Yeah, it sure feels that way to me. Maybe I'm a little ahead of the game. Maybe Facebook has more tricks up its sleeve. Maybe Twitter is more tricks up its sleeve. But it just feels to me that like the nature of these social networks, which is that they're places you go to hang out with your friends, makes them just incredibly.

fragile. It's just in their nature to be fragile. And once you start kicking at them and bad things start happening to them and people start going other places, it's like a bar or a club. Like, it's possible that a new owner can bring people back, but mostly they left and they're somewhere else and not for any like logical reason, not because the latency is slower or something like that. Their social phenomena. And I think people also, you know, if it was so cool in the wake of the sort of disasters of late 20th century mainstream media to see, to be able to say, wow, I can go read The Guardian, you know, I can read Lamond. I can see what people are saying all over the world on the internet. And now I think people rightly feel like, at least I feel

like I'm just drowning in voices from all over. It's total chaos. And what I want is somebody who can, you know, who can sort of pull this stuff back together in a coherent way. I mean, I think it's partly why audio is working really well right now. I think it's the newsletters, like the ones we do. I think it's in-person events, do some of that. But so I think, like, the pendulum just sort of swings. I sometimes get asked by folks, like, are you ever worried? Like, you know, Vice might be about to go away. BuzzFeed News. Are you ever worried, Brian, that someday you'll never, you won't have enough sources for your show. And I always say no, but I'm going to turn that question on you.

Is my instinct right that journalism is some sort of weird impulse that will always exist, whether there's a good business model for it or not? No, I think you are wrong. I mean, I think business model matters a lot. So, you know, I think it's just, but you do need to sort of like, because there are these, I mean, But I think there are probably more reporters covering national politics than they've ever been. I think the tech and finance press are full of people and are growing and their new trade publications cropping up.

You know, there are lots of spaces where there are probably more journalists. There's a better business than there's ever been. And digital media does allow cheaper to, you know, it's just cheaper to start something and reach people and you don't need to buy a printing press and stuff like that. But the number of journalists in the United States and other places keeps going. down and just the overwhelmingly main reason for that is the collapse of local news. And it's a disaster. It is, you know, we've all sort of priced into the market that it's collapsing, but like, it's still collapsing.

Gannett is still laying people off all the time. The New York Daily News is still sort of three-quarters the way through a death spiral. And so, like, and there was, you know, and it's partly because in the U.S. for sort of particular historical reasons, these metro newspapers were incredible businesses in the 20th century. And it's just totally unclear that there's some model that will ever restore anything remotely like that. And that does mean, it's sort of the base layer of news. It's the stuff closest to home in a literal sense.

It's the sort of, I don't know. So I think on one hand, if what we're talking about is people who want to like me, like, bloviate about the early blogosphere, I feel like there will be lots of us and lots of websites and lots of platforms on which to do it. I think for other things like covering City Hall and covering local courts and stuff, I mean, yeah, there's just, it's a disaster. Well, I want to be optimistic because there's always crazy people like you that do crazy things like start new media companies. So let me take my one stab at doing almost journalism here and ask how semaphore is going and what you've learned from this first year. I'm intrigued that you don't think that what you do is journalism.

That's another conversation. But I remember... I'll tell you what, you want to know why? It's because my family is all professional journalists, like, that went to college for it, that were professors that, like, you know, ran the communication school at the University of Georgia. And since I didn't do that, I never feel like I'm qualified. Oh, I don't think... Yeah, it's not a longer conversation, but confusing to me.

So, yeah, I think what you're saying is that when you talk about interesting stuff, it's not journalism. When you ask the boring tiki-taki questions, that's journalism. Anyway, Samaport's going well. I mean, it is, as you say, like it's this moment of change and mostly like change in what people want, right? Like, I mean, this isn't like about, this isn't fundamentally like a technical thing we're talking about. It's people and I think people feel like massively overwhelmed by the amount of incoming they're getting and also don't really know who to trust and increasingly, you know, for a million social reasons, like more connected to individuals than to institutions. And so it's a good time to try to say, like, okay, how do you start from scratch?

Like, you do build around the voices of individual reporters and in a very, very transparent, like, we're very sort of obsessed with this sort of transparent format where you make really clear what's the news and what's your opinion. And you try to bring in sources from all over so that the reader doesn't feel like they probably trust you, but they should probably Google 17 different stories about the same topic and try to triangulate what really happened, which is like a very annoying thing that everyone feels they have to do. do. All right, let's end with one of those cheeseball questions. That's the easiest question for a book tour, which is why the book, why now?

But actually, specifically, why now while you're also launching semaphore? Well, I wrote the book while I was at the Times, and both was writing once a week, and also it was in the pandemic, so I just had time to reflect. But really, like, because I was so curious, because I felt, although I had been on the margins of this scene that we talked about, that I joined midstream in 2012. heard all these stories about the good old days, because you know, whenever you get to a scene, like the first thing people tell you is that you should have been there last year. And so I had a lot of that feeling of, I guess, sort of FOMO or, yeah, of having missed out.

And also curiosity about, like, with this stuff that we were right in the middle of, like, where did all this come from? And what was the deal? And the answer really was that it was these individuals in a place at a time. And a bunch of really weird, interesting people making specific decisions that, you know, that really shaped this moment we're in now. And I guess that's why I hope people take a look at it. So, again, I was so glad to see this book come because when I did my book, I had to excise a whole chapter about Gawker and about the early blogging period because it just didn't fit, the book was too

long, et cetera. And it didn't fit the narrative of, oh, this is how the internet happened. But the key thesis of that book was if you don't tell the kids coming up how A led to B led to C, eventually they don't know. The stuff that you and I or anyone does, if you don't preserve that institutional memory for the next cohort coming up, it doesn't get preserved, right? And so, like, I've been waiting for someone to do this book. And so I'm just so thrilled. I haven't even, I only scratched the surface of it. I'm going to read it this weekend. I cannot recommend enough traffic by Ben Smith.

It's largely about Gawker and BuzzFeed, but it's just this whole era that I'm glad someone finally wrote a book about. Well, thank you so much, and thanks for having me on.