The Compound and Friends - Media Expert Ben Smith Tells All

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

On this special episode of Live from The Compound, Ben Smith, journalist and co-founder of Semafor, joins Michael Batnick and Josh Brown to discuss Ben's new book, Traffic, his new media entity Semafor, and much more! Ben Smith is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Semafor - a global news company. Ben is a former media columnist for the NYT and former Editor-in-Chief of Buzzfeed News. Ben just released his book Traffic which focuses on digital media in the 21st century. Ben's book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678592/traffic-by-ben-smith/ Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: https://www.idontshop.com Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Josh Brown are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, all right. 5 p.m. East Coast. Our guest today is coming from the West Coast. Welcome, everybody, to a special edition of Live from the Compound. We are so excited to talk to Ben Smith today. Ben is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semaphore, a global news company. Ben is a former media columnist for the New York Times and editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. Ben just released his book, Traffic,

which focuses on digital media in the 21st century. Ben Smith, how's life? How's everything? It's good. It's good, Josh. Thanks for having me on. You didn't even mention that like you, I'm basically a blogger. Yeah. Well, a lot of us started as bloggers and now we talk into microphones, but it's almost the same thing, right? More or less. Yeah. Equal lack of editing. Do you remember, total aside, when was the last time I saw you? I think we went out to dinner with like 10 financial bloggers, something like that, during the BuzzFeed days. You guys were launching BuzzFeed business. You remember that?

That sounds right. Yep. Okay. Vaguely. All right. Ring the bell. I know. I know.

It's a long time ago. Okay. So first of all, the book is out, and I know you're doing a lot of media around the book. And I really wanted to just have you on and talk to our audience and our audience is kind of the intersection of financial services asset management trading investing and then of course financial media so it's like a wide range of people but everything is you know business related for the most part that we do on the channel and to some to some extent,

your book is a media story, but it's also a business model story. Could you talk a little bit about what drove you to write Traffic? Why now? Why is it so relevant to what we're living through these days? I mean, I guess, you know, I was, I sort of started out you know on the internet in the early 2000s as a local political reporter um and you know came to BuzzFeed in 2012 left in 2019 or 2020 I guess with a feeling like huh like this feels like a whole moment is coming to an end of the sort of sense that the internet was this rising new thing that was going to displace legacy media. And, you know, and you can sort of feel that winding down in a way, in a confusing way, actually. And I think from my perspective, it was very interesting to go like, what happened? Like, what did we all just live through? What happened? Where did it begin? I mean,

that was really the sort of impetus to write the book. My personal opinion, and, you know, I think your book confirms some of this, is that it was a confluence of 0% interest rates after the great financial crisis and the rise of the mega social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter and maybe to a lesser extent LinkedIn and some of the others. But I feel like you had this really great combination at that time of very cheap equity capital and a brand new way to distribute content. And all of these relatively young media companies came along and they seized upon a lot of the dynamics. They were able to get a lot of people to buy in and invest equity in businesses that didn't necessarily produce profits. And maybe profits weren't even on the horizon. And they were taking advantage of the social engineering that was built into these platforms. Do I kind of have the broad strokes of the story right?

On the business story, right, I think there were these basically entrepreneurs experimenting at what was a fairly small scale and building smallish businesses. Gawker, I mean, Gawker was a profitable small business from the start. BuzzFeed was not. BuzzFeed was sort of a laboratory that was losing other people's money. Right. But, and then you saw, but they were building on this growing digital space, right? And the space was growing with them.

And then when particularly Facebook exploded, they suddenly started growing really, really fast. And actually, you know, again, BuzzFeed was profitable in 2014. I remember I was there then and we were told that was like a mistake, that you shouldn't be profitable, that you should be focused on growth. Means you're under-investing. Yeah, you should be investing instead of paying taxes, basically. And, you know, because that. And I think the question that I sort of am, I don't know, a little hung up on now, because

I've been talking to a lot of people about the book, and it's something that I think isn't really resolved in the book, was like, were we and our investors totally delusional from the start that there could ever be a lucrative business here? Or was it just a bet that didn't break that way? And the bet, just to remember, because it's sort of hard to put your head back into this space, but the bet was that just as cable had come up in the 80s and the people who laid the cable wires, you know, they could have said, we're going to have market it, we're going to not pay anybody to produce content, we're going to take advertisements, and we're going to take user-generated content.

But instead, they thought, like, huh, we're going to be competing with other forms of media, so we're going to create an ecosystem where these ESPN, CNN, all those MTV make tons of money. And that comes ultimately out of the cable operator's margin. But it was worth it to them and it paid off. And the bet that we made was that Google, Facebook, Twitter would follow that, would sort of be forced competitively to follow that same trajectory. That they'd be competing with each other and with everything else to have higher and higher quality content. And the people who could do quality professional content that was totally also purpose built

for that kind of platform would build big businesses. When I say it now, it doesn't sound totally delusional and insane. Obviously, in retrospect, it was a disaster, did not work out that way, maybe was never going to work out that way. But just to sort of like, just so that people don't think, your listeners don't think we're total morons. That at least was what we were thinking. Maybe they'll still be morons. When you say purpose-built, so from a BuzzFeed standpoint, really catchy headlines, lists, which Disney princess are you? And I know you guys did serious reporting, especially politics and media and markets. And I had met a lot of the BuzzFeed business reporters over the years. But like just very, very catchy.

That's what you mean by purpose built? Yeah, I mean some of it was very catchy. But I mean specifically like you go into it thinking not what can I fill my website with or what can I put in my newspaper, but what's the kind of stuff people are going to share? And the answer to that question can be really different. Like we did a daily live hour on Twitter that was like, totally integrated with like, we was, you know, like the scandals we were talking about would be the scandals that were happening on Twitter. Like we were programming intrinsically for these platforms.

And yeah, and Facebook, if people wanted to share quizzes that were often connected to identity, actually, like, you know, like, in a way, it's the which Disney princess are you and then you share it because you're that disney princess josh you are in fact you know i don't know you're almost like giving giving people a souvenir they spend 30 seconds of their time on the content and then they have a souvenir that they want to share with other people they want to show their friends and that's how we were thinking and everything in a way like like both the content that seemed very smart and the content that seemed very dumb was in some sense kind of reverse engineered around what do people want to share because if that's the way that content is distributed michael i i forgot what disney princess you ended up being um but do you want to jump in here yeah i'm jasmine okay

ben as you look back as you look back on the era that we just lived through, and it does feel like the end of an era in several ways, would you look back and say, all right, the end was when Elon, arguably one of the worst purchases of that magnitude of all time, or would it be interest rates going from 0% to 5% and all of a sudden the willingness of venture capitalists to lose other people's money, people willing to provide that capital to venture capitalists to lose their money. And I know that wasn't the goal. But when we look back on this period of time, what do you think is going to be the end? You know, I think those were punctuation marks, but that it was sort of already over.

Like Twitter had huge – I think Twitter had big problems and was sort of culturally in decline before Elon came in. He's made some mistakes. But I think that once a social network goes out of fashion, these are social institutions. They're like nightclubs. That's not a fixable problem. It's not a technical problem. I heard you say that somewhere else. What do you mean by that?

Like a club is cool. You go to a social network because your friends are there. And you go to a club because your friends are there or a bar because your friends are there. You go to a social network because your friends are there. And you go to a club because your friends are there, or a bar because your friends are there. And if your friends aren't there anymore, the new ownership isn't going to put in a better sound system and everybody goes back.

It's just that was where you went when you were in your 30s, and now you're in your 40s, or whatever. And the younger kids don't want to go where you went before. They want to go somewhere new. And I just think that to a degree that we certainly, I didn't really anticipate, I think that we'll look back and say, oh, yeah, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, a lot of these platforms were places people went in the 2010s. Not that they will totally go away. Like Reddit, I think is a great

example of a social network that has held on to its place in the world, but not really its central, not a kind of central cultural status or influence. And then you, they could certainly, Twitter could, I think, certainly find some space like that. I wonder if Twitter was the disco ball and disco just is not cool anymore. And something that was really emblematic of what Twitter has become, maybe always was happened this week, last night, or the night before the New York Times published an article about Elizabeth Holmes, which I did not read. But I saw a lot of people getting quite upset with the image Liz Holmes wants you to forget about Elizabeth. The black turtlenecks are gone. So is the voice. As the convicted

Theranos founder awaits prison, she has adopted a new persona, devoted mother. And so, Ben, you know better than anyone that there are people who write the articles and there are people who write the headlines and the people that write the headlines might have different motivations. And so Twitter went f***ing nuts as it always does. And then Benedict Evans came out with a sober voice and said, am I the only person that thought that the New York Times Elizabeth Holmes piece is a masterpiece? It doesn't quite say that she's a lovely, sweet person. It says she was very good at playing the CEO character. And now she's very good at playing the lovely, sweet person character, with quotes around that. The journalist doesn't actually say, I like her. She says,

this convicted fraudster is extremely good at deliberately and consciously persuading me to like her. And so the point is that no, nobody read the piece. They just get fucking crazy because it's like the New York Times is siding with white collar criminals. And I do think that 10 years ago when that exact thing happened, because it happens every week or two weeks that somebody takes a screenshot and everybody reacts to the screenshot. And it's kind of a fun narrative that like the New York Times might respond or be like, oh, maybe we should have some concerns about our journalism. And that but this is just some like it's like when it's like a it's like a reflex action of like a dead body. You know, like this is just what Twitter does.

And I mean, my reading on reading on this piece was Benedict's. Like this is a like dryly savage portrait of a con artist that is letting her hang herself with her own words. Who were people mad at? The author of the article? Yeah, people get mad at the author of the article. They're mad at themselves. They're mad at themselves. Let's be honest.

I know. But I think this sort of thing nobody really cares about. But in a way that they used to really care, like lose sleep over. To just go back to your previous question, because I do think, like, in writing the book, much more clearly when I was writing it than I felt it at the time, of like this new internet media became toxic to advertisers, became sort of for a lot of, pretty like disturbing and unpleasant for lots of consumers, the sort of core of what we were selling at BuzzFeed, which is like there's this new cool thing called the Facebook News Feed,

and we're like intrinsic to it. We're giving you news, and we're giving you fun quizzes, and like it's all mixed up together. Like isn't that fun? In the Trump era, like it doesn't feel so fun. Because that was weaponized. all mixed up together, like, isn't that fun? In the Trump era, like, doesn't feel so fun. And because that was weaponized, that same, like, like, you could you could hijack it. If I'm not saying BuzzFeed did, but place that everybody was screaming at each other about toxic politics, and like, who wants to be there? I mean, it's funny, one of our, like one of our

real theses at the beginning of BuzzFeed's initial slogan was no haters, which didn't totally fit the journalism that we slightly backed away from. But really there was this thesis that maybe in the privacy of the Google search engine you will be looking for all sorts of dark and horrific stuff. But in the public space of social media, you're going to be your best self because you're going to want people to see that you're a person who cares about earthquakes. You would assume. Wrong, wrong. Yeah. Could that have been wronger, right? But honestly, it was a real thing. Who would go onto these public platforms and scream like a lunatic about politics? Who does that? Who would do that? That would get you thrown out of the dinner party. And yet it turns out that is, yeah, it turns out every woman does that. Ben days ben i think i think the the social network where people are them their best selves i think does exist it's the most boring unexpected one

but linkedin to me like if i had to bet which of these is still a thing in 10 years linkedin there are financial incentives to not be an asshole, like your whole future. And it seems that people are the most incented by just the way the platform is structured and the purpose of the platform. And I would bet LinkedIn over Facebook or LinkedIn even over Instagram. LinkedIn is obviously thriving.

And I do think that the thing about these networks is that once they start falling apart, I can't really think of an example of one that has pulled out of that spiral. Ben, do you think things would have turned out differently had Disney in an alternate universe bought Twitter, which was probably not going to happen, but at least they entertained it? I mean, I think that if you – I mean, I find it hard to even imagine this because I loved – I'm sure you guys did. Like, I am a total junkie. I love Twitter. I still go on there and like it, and I'm sad that it doesn't really work for me anymore. Guilty.

Right. Yeah, like I'm not – and the notion for me that this social network where, like, journalists and public figures can, like, exchange information could go on forever. Like, I like that. That's what I thought it was. But I think that if you could go back and tell Anthony Noto, whoever was running Twitter in like 2015, and show them what's happening now, they would have said, huh,

like maybe pivoting it into being some kind of media company is not the worst alternative, even though it would have been such a nightmare for the valuation. But ultimately, had they become a place where you got quality journalism and quality entertainment of certain kinds of sorts, and you paid for it, like maybe that would have been a functioning business, which is not a thing they have ever found. And now seems too late. I mean, it's not too late. They could become a sports game. They could be, I mean, I still think sports is super fun on Twitter. And you could see them becoming a great sports gambling business.

Like, God bless. But I don't know. Yeah, I don't know how that tailspin ends either. And to your point, I can't think of a site that was really popular, then went into decline, and then had some sort of a resurgence. I'm sure there is an example that I'll think of at some point, but I can't really think of one. And that thing seems to be imploding. I think what's interesting about it imploding is it's not because some competitor came along. And that's the history of social media to me is that something is hot and then there's the next thing.

There is no next thing. It feels like a NUI. What am I missing? Like Mastodon is not happening. Blue Sky is still in beta. Like what is the next thing? I mean, people like us, like nerds who like to read text and numbers

sometimes forget TikTok, but TikTok is massive. That's been, so that's taken from Twitter? Certainly taken time that people, you know, but I think also like, I don't know, I was just like watching Mrs. Davis on Peacock during time that I should have been on Twitter, right? Like every form of media is competing with everything else. I think people are just kind of over social media. I'm in like a text group that has sort of on signal of all things that has kind of replaced

Twitter for me a bit. I just think people, I just think the notion that a social network like Twitter and any social network, like I think that blue sky is like kind of slick technically and I've been playing around with that. But ultimately like all the same maniacs who were making Twitter annoying are now out there and making it annoying because it's that culture of social media that I think I'm sort of tired of

and want to do something different. Yeah, I think the quote tweet was the worst thing to ever happen to our society. Oh, just the dunking. Some people think it was something. I mean, you know, one of the things I read about in the book is, you know, the reblog, which it actually is like, I think there is an argument if you want to like talk about like where everything went wrong.

I didn't really make this argument in the book, but Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, one of his claims to fame is that he was like tinkering around and created this idea of reblogging, of having a blog that was able to sort of post somebody else's blog within the system. And this guy, Dave Karp, who he was working with or knew, basically he wound up at Tumblr with Dave Karp, who put it into, you know, where Tumblr was the first place to implement that, you know, now totally intuitive technical feature. And it then went to every other site. And I do think that, like, that is sort of where you get virality

and this kind of impulsive, massive, fast sharing. And the hit and runs, though, come from that. And I remember when it was... Yeah, and stuff traveling outside the context it was intended. Yeah, and stuff traveling outside... Yeah, RT. Right. And also, like, stuff traveling outside the context it was intended. Yeah, and stuff traveling outside. Yeah, RT. Right. And also like stuff traveling outside the context

where it was expected. And that, yeah, I think, I don't know. I think that is certainly like, if you're looking at kind of like technical features that made us all insane. That's certainly- I want to ask you about a phenomenon that's fascinating to me

where you have this new thing comes along. It's white hot everybody creates their profile everyone's everyone's talking about it clubhouse and then it just like comes and goes just as fast and two examples that come to mind clubhouse is obvious it was like a creature of the pandemic and maybe it got too hot too fast and it got polluted with a lot of terrible content. And then the other one is Vice, which you wrote about in your book. And is that the same kind of thing where just something is just too hot, and it can't possibly sustain that level of interest? Or is there something else going on there? No, I mean, it was pretty different, right? Like Clubhouse, as you say,

just was like everywhere for 10 minutes, and was really fun during the pandemic, but really was just, was a feature, right? And Twitter absorbed it as a feature. And maybe once a month you want to be on some live audio thing like that. I don't know, on the social platform you're already on, maybe. But not, yeah, but it didn't sort of sustain a community. And I agree with you, when we were allowed to go outdoors again, it sort of lost some of its appeal. I mean, Vice is something different. When we were allowed to go outdoors again, it sort of lost some of its appeal. I mean, Vice is something different. Vice is really interesting because Vice was like, is a great brand. Like, you know, like you and I, like we know what it stands for.

It really stands for something for a certain kind of like, at least for like men of our age, like a certain kind of like Gen X cool thing. And it never- Was it Gen X-y though? Or was it like millennially? I feel like Vice is like grungy news. It was Gen X II though or was it was it millennial II I feel like advice like grunge and I lose yeah my analog to for vice was like oh shit this is the new MTV and it had a shot exactly what it was and Tom Preston was the chairman of the company who created MTV and it was like but it totally but it

never the thing was it was it was the pure it's really. And it was like, it totally, but it never, the thing was, it was the pure, it's really, I mean, it was this pure brand. And they made not that much content, but it was really good. Some of those early documentaries were amazing and they were so in the zeitgeist. The ISIS stuff felt groundbreaking. But they never really had a business that was,

sort of like, their website never really got traffic in the way that others did. They never had a big digital business. They had an ad agency. And then the business they finally really did build was a production business. They produced a nightly news show for HBO. HBO, yeah. I mean, production company, like that's a tough business because you're a production company with one customer. And then your customer cancels the contract and you're out of business.

And that's basically what happened to them. I went there in Brooklyn, and I taped Desus and Mero before they were on Showtime. So I remember looking around and being like, this show seems so huge, and the production value here seems so minimalist. I was really surprised by that there's like in a conference room right now but that was like a great example like what like those are two funny men and they had a great deal for this really did have this great feel for the zeitgeist but they never but they you know they've gotten like a five billion dollar evaluation that required like it just it never made sense how where their revenue what

their business was which i think was so bad of various of these companies one of the threats to this conversation and certainly media just writ large over the last decade is it's competing for eyeballs is a difficult business whatever the business model is so you started semaphore i think wisely you decided not to take venture money uh Talk about like what opportunity did you see to create this new platform and a new way of distributing news with new styles and all that sort of stuff? What's the idea? at the Times for a couple of years, like throwing stones at everybody else's glass houses, is just, you know, how these moments of really dramatic change, there are opportunities. And I think, you know, that was true in the early 2000s when we were all so sick of just like being stuck with the same two newspapers and three television outlets. And suddenly there was this incredible profusion of like every newspaper in the world and every insane person in the world on their blog.

You could just read them. And now I think it's almost like consumers in the world and every insane person in the world on their blog. You could just read them. And now I think it's almost like consumers are in the opposite place. Like we're all just drowning and incoming and don't know who to trust. And so the service you can do, and by the way, this is why I think why people connect with shows like this, is this sense of like here's a person you can trust who's speaking in their own voice, who kind of knows the difference between a fact and their opinion, and who is maybe bringing some of their own news, but also synthesizing a lot of what's out there and giving you some guidance through the chaos of this sort of

late social media. And so like, that's really what we're trying to do. Like, we hired great reporters whose like, names people know who they, and the reporters in this very stylized way say, here's the say here are the facts, here's my opinion, here's room for disagreement from somebody who disagrees, and here's some other stuff to read on the same topics. You don't need to do this thing that, I feel like a lot of people do,

where you read an article, even in a publication you like, and then you Google the subject and find five more articles so you can like triangulate what really happened. And so we're trying to sort of build for this particular weird moment. Yeah, it is a weird moment because something is ending. The new thing hasn't yet started. Maybe you guys are part of the new thing.

Right. I totally get that. I find it interesting how quickly we can come to trust a new media venture just by virtue of liking the presentation. And like for me, Axios is a great example. Like one day it didn't exist and the next day it existed. And then the day after that, I'm like subscribed to it and I just like it. And so because I like the way they do things, I'm like an Axios reader. If they stop publishing it tomorrow, I would just be reading something else. Nothing would really change in my life, But like that's how quickly a new media venture can just become part of people's lives. I find that kind of thing fascinating.

You're probably banking on people in a place right now where they just want to try something new. Is that like a big part of the appeal that you think in the early days? Well, I mean I think it's certainly like it's a part of the opportunity, right? I mean, it doesn't get, you know, it is a moment when you, if you ask people, hey, do you like love the news you're getting and think it's great? Like, mostly no, they hate it. And that is certainly a moment when you can say, hey, try this. It has to be good, though. Like, it has to then really deliver and be thoughtful and clear and efficient and all the things that you need it to be. I mean, that's, you know, the opportunity only gets you so far. Do you have to cover a lot of, that's, you know, the opportunity only gets you so far.

Do you have to cover a lot of, I'm sorry, Michael, do you have to cover like a lot of ground in order to be a source? Or can you be like dialed in specifically on just a few topics and do them really well? Like what does a modern media company have to do? I mean, I think there's, it's such a splintered environment now. Like I don't think, I mean, we would certainly love to be, to grow into being all things to all people. And I think if you care about certain subjects, we're pretty close, you know, about tech, finance, politics, or maybe not tech, maybe AI, finance, politics, like we're pretty dug in. that we're not the only news organization someone is reading.

And I think that's actually like a big Achilles heel for places like the New York Times, that they sort of assume that their reader only reads the New York Times. And so they're going to give you 17 New York Times articles in their email, even if there's maybe some good stuff in the FT that day or whatever. And so like, yeah, I think, but I mean,

we're also, I mean, certainly something I learned at BuzzFeed is like, we're not going to, we're going to try not to bite off more than we can chew and not grow too fast. Okay. So you guys are doing a lot with just back to basics, using the inbox, email blasts. What about other forms of – Back to basics. What about other forms of communication, podcasts, videos, things like that?

Is that down the road or are you just never – Yeah, we're doing a lot of video. Joe Posner who created Explained at Vox, is setting up video for us. And events have been really big for us. It's like the most in-person media journalism. It's been really good for us. And obviously, we're on the web because the web does still exist. But I kind of agree with you when you say like,

we haven't figured out what's the next thing is still sort of nascent. I mean, I think there's this sort of interesting energy around what I think of as kind of Asian style aggregators, like smart news and news break, which are not things I necessarily consume, but you see the old Instagram guys started this thing called artifact that is trying to be like a,

I wanted to ask you about Artifact. Aggregator of different publishers. I don't know. It feels a long way off, honestly. But I do think I don't know. I do think that we're in the very early stage of something new. So I have two news sources. I left Twitter

three years ago this month. And I have two primary, other than my subscriptions directly to things, I use Google News, which is super old school, but it works great and they've improved the product. And there's no one's opinion. It's just literally, here are stories based on stories you've clicked on before. Great. It's an algorithm.

Here are your topics. And that's fine. I don't need all of the opinion and the fighting around this. I just want to know what's happened. That's one. And then I started using artifact and they're going to let you follow other people's posts of articles there, which sounds like it has the potential to transcend just a news gathering app, but it seems very early. And I worry that they have, I can sort of see little signs that they have this eternal Silicon Valley fantasy that they're going to ultimately rely on user-generated content

instead of these annoying media companies that want to charge you for their work. And to me, that's just obviously a path to irrelevance. I don't know if this is the first time that journalists have an alternative way to make money, obviously Substack and the like. Is there like a war for talent and how do you compensate people in a way that like – I don't know. It gives them some skin in the game and or makes them like not just a carousel because obviously talent is – How do you keep them if they can say, you know what? I have 1,000 fans that will pay me $10 a month.

That's what I'd rather do. A thousand true fans, the old internet dream. No, I think from my perspective, I think about that all the time. And for certain kinds of journalists, like Andrew Sullivan, say, if what you can do is write really thoughtful essays at a regular schedule that a huge following wants to hear from matt iglesias and you're not really probably doing that much original reporting but you're sort of you know but like you can go out on your own and really do incredibly well now in the subscription world there's a category of reporter which i'm in which is like we like to like break news and that maybe take means that like one week i'm writing about disney and one week I'm writing about some other random thing you don't care about,

even though you do care about Disney. And you're sort of following the news cycle. And you also require legal support and editors and a brand that sometimes you can hide behind when you get into fights with people. Yeah. And yet you also do want that direct connection with an audience that Andrew Sullivan might have. And I think for that kind of break, hard news, beat reporter, we're trying, that's really we're trying to create sort of the best of both worlds for someone like that.

I think, you know, Liz Hoffman, who's in, you know, covers finance for us is certainly an example of that where, you know, she's writing under her own name and her own voice, connects very directly to an audience, but also has, so that, you know, and, you know, and we do give equity to our writers. And so like has hopefully the upsides of being on your own, particularly I think that ability to like have that very direct connection to an audience, but at the same time, and to be like a human being who people can trust. But at the same time we have a great newsroom. And I think can trust. But at the same time, we have a great newsroom. And I think that's something that – the reason that you don't see that kind of reporter going out on their own much is because it's not really a solo sport in the end.

Yeah, you need some support from a company. You need somebody behind you, especially if you're breaking news and you're digging into places that other people don't want you to be. You're getting into really big fights with powerful people occasionally. And yeah, so I mean, the kind of reporters I think that if you're looking at who we're hiring, whether it's her, Reid Albergatti, who's covering Miss AI for us out there, Dave Weigel in Washington, like really great reporters who have big followings, but also are working in a way that doesn't quite fit the Substack model. you know, are working in a way that doesn't quite fit the sub-stack model.

What do you think an investor audience like ours can get out of your book, Traffic? What are like some of the takeaways or some of the areas that you explore that would be really interesting to people who allocate capital or take risk? I would hope anybody reading this would say, wow, that guy Ben Smith, I should invest in anything he does because his management of BuzzFeed was so brilliant. No. I mean, I actually think that people are going to, I see people taking this lesson that like digital is terrible and news is terrible and media is terrible because this ended badly. I mean, I think it's always easier to say that after the fact and that what I see are like the choices that were made by executives, both at the media and the tech companies,

chose a path that really did screw these companies, but it wasn't necessarily predetermined. But I do think that media in particular, it's just not a business that should be taking venture capital. Oh, that's interesting. I mean, they still will. It's not going to deliver 1,000x returns in four years. That kind of stuff, that kind of explosive growth, it doesn't make sense.

And I think certainly at Semaphore, we've raised money, but from people who understand the business, who are, we think, going to be patient. Justin and I have sort of shaken hands that we're in it for 10 years. And I think news, and again, news is really a subset of media. News is a weird business of its own. It can be a really good business. People want it. If you do it well, advertisers want to be associated with it.

People subscribe to it. There's ways to turn it into a really good business. associated with people subscribe to it. There's ways to turn it into a really good business. But it's not easy money. It's not a thousand X return overnight kind of business. And I think it was a mistake for people to think it could be. Are we in an advertising recession right now? I don't know. Like half the people I talk to think we are and half think we aren't. And I was just talking to the CMO at one of the biggest companies in the country who was like, yeah, I don't know.

Like we haven't cut our spending yet, but we're like having a meeting every day to decide whether we will. I mean I think everybody like you is looking at the economy and scratching their heads and trying to like figure out what the hell is going on. It's very confusing. Making decisions. But it definitely – I mean, it makes me super nervous. I wanted to end with the reckoning happening at Fox News and CNN. And obviously these aren't digital you know, digital media. They have digital media arms, but that's like big media.

It's kind of like a late social media phenomenon. Is that playing into that? Or is that kind of its own thing that's happening for other reasons? It's just me like, you know, saying zeitgeisty stuff because it feels that way, though I don't have evidence, but I'm curious what you think. I mean, it sure feels to me like these figures who blew up in an era when conflict drove engagement, drove views on Facebook, on cable news. Tucker, Don Lemon. Yeah, Tucker and Don, who are very different from each other, of course,

but are out of fashion in a way with consumers, but maybe even more with the big corporate media executives who are sort of narrowing the scope of what they're doing, nervous about advertisers, trying to sort of write their brands in some way. I mean, Fox is a, it's sort of an incredible, I mean, it's just sort of a different story. Like it's, I mean, it's an incredible management story, right? Like just an unbelievably badly run institution. Like, like we sort of like, that was one of the ways to read it. CNN, you know, trying to manage this brand in a, like a very, in a very, very complicated political situation. Like I feel like the Fox is basically self, self-inflicted. Well, Fox can't write another billion-dollar check. They could probably do that once in a decade.

They're going to write more. It feels like – I mean they got another – they're going to write more. Smartmatic? Smartmatic, presumably. I mean the price has now been set, right? All right. But it feels like conflict as a business model is sort of like maybe on the way out or maybe we haven't seen the worst.

I don't want to go too far. But I'm sure Tucker will find a great success sort of narrow casting to people who love him and think like he does. And he'll have a smaller audience but maybe make more money. It's 40 percent off its peak but it's still a huge business. Like it's not going away. But I think people are more – like most people are over it. Yeah, I wouldn't – over what? Over 5,000 units?

Just being – no, capitalizing on outrage. Yeah, right. It's right. It's not going away, but it doesn't feel like the thing that consumers are crying out for right now. That's in a bear market. John, let's put up Ben's book one more time on screen. Guys, this is an unbelievable business story. And a lot of money was raised.

A lot of money was lit on fire. A lot of interesting things have come out of that moment. And Ben was the guy in the center of some of the best stories, the best anecdotes. You could take that off, John. Am I phrasing this right? Is that really like the crux of the book is that you were in the room for a lot of this stuff and you really are telling the story in a way that most people have not heard it? I was in the room for some.

Yeah, for sure. I was in the room for some and the rest I really went and reported out. Right. Okay. All right. Everybody go ahead and grab a copy of Traffic. It's a great summer read. We want to thank our guest, Ben, for being on the show today. Guys, thank you so much for joining us on the live. We're checking out all your comments and questions. We appreciate that as well. And we'll see you soon. Thanks, Ben.

Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Michael. Good night.