Ben Smith on the Turmoil at Buzzfeed, Fox News and Everything In Between 01:04:42

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Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is someone who is finally free from the tyranny of the blue check. Thank you, Elon, for that. Not kidding. But this is on with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Naeem Araza. Well, congratulations, Kara, on being freed from that tyranny of being a lord and lady. It must have been hard for you. Yeah. I'm one of the people now. I'm one of the people. Yes.

It's made Twitter a very confusing place. It's like blue checklist universe. And we saw yesterday, immigration services, New York City government kind of fighting to claim that they are the ones that, you know, that have their own accounts. It's all confusing now. Yeah, and they're important. Emergency services should be absolutely verified. It's really important when there's disaster response. A lot of people have talked about this. It's just

stupid. The whole thing is stupid and it just creates lack of safety on a platform that really needs safety. And instead he made it into something ugly and tried to make money off of it. But whatever, it's his business. You know what, Kara, you could have been one of the ones that he floated, like Stephen King or LeBron James.

That was so pathetic because they didn't want to be. They declined. They didn't want $8 from one of the world's richest people, like a month. And he did it anyway. It's like buying your friends. Anyway, as Ice-T put it, I'm paraphrasing. This is a low point for society to be discussing blue checks. Yes. There's a lot of bigger things too. I mean, Elon specifically blowing up the Starship rocket, which it's a very complex and difficult thing. And it's going to happen a number of times before they get it right. Like

with Falcon 9. That's an important thing. The decline in Tesla stock because of competitors and other issues. Those are really actual business problems versus this. This is just a self-inflicted wound. It's true. These are not the important issues of the day, but there's a lot of important stuff happening in our own backyard of media. And that's what we're going to discuss today in our

episode. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced on Thursday that he would be shutting down its Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News operation. Fox News also settled its lawsuit with Dominion. Which of the two developments was more surprising to you? Oh, I wasn't surprised by Fox News settling in any way, nor was I surprised by getting rid of BuzzFeed. I mean, I bet on the

the situation Joan has been in. And as you know, they shuttered the Recode brand and it just is all in the Vox.com. And it's part of what happens in media. I am less sentimental than other people about this. Things change all the time. There's some amazing publications that Shuttered Sassy brings to mind, my favorite publication ever, with some amazing writers there for many years. You know what happened?

And in a situation where you have to make money, especially in this economic situation around advertising, you need to shut things down that aren't working or costing too much. You know, it had never been this profit-making business, but it had been a prize-winning business, maybe a bit of a vanity investment or a mission investment, however you want to put it, for Jonah Peretti. Yeah.

And obviously the public pressure. BuzzFeed had IPO'd VS back in 2021. And so all of a sudden you have the pressure of public markets who are like, we're not going to let that party continue. Yeah. It's part of being a business. And I think a lot of people in the media don't think as much about the business. And that's what Fox was doing. A hundred percent. They had to get out of this thing because it was going to be disastrous for their brand. A couple of questions on BuzzFeed News.

It's been such an important contributor to journalism. I mean, just this past month, they picked up a George Polk award for their deep dive into KKR, the private equity fund, reporting that led to KKR actually canceling their IPO. I know you're not sentimental about these things, but the

These are journalists, good journalists, who do jobs at a time where it's been a really dark winter for media. You know, here's a company that tried to be at the forefront of the digital revolution of media, and now it's not working out for them either. And it begs the question of how do you...

do news if you're not the New York Times or the Washington Post. Well, that's the difficulty. Though, you know, a lot of these reporters went to the New York Times. They went, all these other publications and including Recode, all the reporters went to these places and have been transforming them. And a lot of these companies,

took the learnings from what was BuzzFeed and Recode and many others were doing and did it. And then there's a bunch of small companies like the Information and Puck and some others that are doing some new things, Substack, and that's great. And some of those aren't going to work. And then it'll be the continued sort of evolution. But you can have a nice little business if you keep it in the right cost. BuzzFeed spent a lot, I used to think they spent a

same thing, Vice and BuzzFeed spent a lot of money. The money was flowing like champagne, that VC money. They spent a lot. Even when there was money flowing, I was like, they're spending too much money. I was at Vice once getting a tour and they had all these editing suites. And I was like, this is expensive. Like we don't spend money like this. And it just seemed like it wasn't going to, the economics were totally out of whack for some of them. And BuzzFeed definitely. Media doesn't make that much money. Like

The big secret, media doesn't make that, except if you have the New York Times. And they don't even make that much money, right? It doesn't match the value of the service I think that media is providing. It seems like there are just like a few paths for a media company. Let's break them down. One, you can have a billionaire owner, like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, or Time. Two, you can get bought by The New York Times or be The New York Times.

And three, you can stay niche and charge a lot for a subscription, like information or podcast. Are those the only ways? No, some things like podcasting, we do very well on advertising. You know, let me just point out the annual revenue at the New York Times is 2.3 billion. So it's not that big and it has $347 million for 2022 in operating profits. So again, it's so much more important than the business size. You know, that's not that much revenue. Although I'm

It's amazing because it's an 11% increase. All kudos to Meredith Levy. But you have to put it in context of other...

maybe not comparable businesses, but it's still small. And that's not just the news business. That's the crosswords business. That's the cooking business. That's the content business that the New York Times has managed to create and build. In general, it's doing great for a media company. It used to be, media companies used to like throw off money like crazy. And that era is long over. Well, part of that was that the Snapchats, the Facebooks, et cetera, came in and they were getting all that content for free, which helped get visibility, but hasn't necessarily led to subscription. It's kind of,

led to this belief that everything should be free also, which is a generational change in media. But anyways, here with us to discuss these very important topics, we could not have a better guest for this day. It's our former colleague, Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semaphore. He was until recently the media columnist for the New York Times. And in late 2020, he wrote one of the first and I think best columns about

what were then potential lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And then he's also the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, which he ran for almost a decade until 2020. He's just penned the book on BuzzFeed and digital media more broadly called Traffic, though he might want to update that book now. Yeah, he's going to have to. That's the problem with writing books. You don't get to update because they take so long to get out. When did you first meet Ben? Oh, gosh.

Probably BuzzFeed because we were all in the same class, right? If you think of classes, like right now, there's the information puck class. Urban Information was in the middle of that. But when he was doing BuzzFeed, I think I may have met him when he was a political reporter before that. He was really good. He was a good reporter and good writer. So you paid attention to people like that. But probably BuzzFeed around that time. They were so much bigger than anything we did. And just interesting and good journalism next to silly journalism. And I kind of thought it was cool.

We would tape with Ben only hours after the news broke that BuzzFeed News was going under. And he ran that newsroom. He hired some of the folks who had to be let go. And so I know not a sentimental person, Kara, but he was certainly coming in, um,

They have some really amazing reporters there. And I suspect all of them will get jobs because they're eventually. But they had some really, they had quite a newsroom. Several of my reporters went there. But really astonishing reporters. And if you have jobs, you should hire them because they really do understand digital and have really great skills. That's the classified section of On with Kara Swisher. We're going to charge for it. Take a quick break and we'll be back with the interview with Ben Smith.

Thank you.

On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.

Okay. Oh, did you hear that? Sorry, that was a gong because our sales team just closed a big deal in the background. Did you just make a sale for Semaphore? The other side of the house, but I do think things are going reasonably well at Semaphore. All right, good. Thanks for coming on the show. We have a lot to talk about, including your new book, Traffic.

and your news organization. But let's, we got to start with the big media news of recent days, the folding of BuzzFeed News and then the Dominion lawsuit. But let's start on BuzzFeed. Early Thursday morning, right before this taping, news broke that Jonah Peretti was shutting BuzzFeed News down as a larger cost-cutting effort that will reduce headcount by about 15%. He wrote in the memo, the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization. Obviously, this is your old shop. You were the founding editor-in-chief of

Are you surprised? I think you're probably not, but why don't you talk about it a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I guess I'd say I'm, you know, shocked but not surprised. This was, you know, in the cards for a long time. I mean, I think, you know, I was there from 2012 to 2020, and we, you know, Jonah Peretti, who founded it, sort of saw social media coming. I mean, he really saw around this corner. Yeah, it's the opening of your book. Yeah, it's strange because I spent, you know, a couple of years really like

spending a lot of time thinking about this period when I was writing this book. And Joan of, I think, maybe more successfully than anybody, really, like, channeled this huge new surge of audience and attention and traffic coming from social media onto BuzzFeed.

And, you know, we were in the year, you know, 2012, 2013, 2014. We had this theory and people seemed to like a website that mixed Disney princess quizzes and investigations and breaking news because that was kind of what your Facebook feed was like and people liked that too. Right.

And then politics really intervened. Like, Facebook went from it being delightful that this was this mix of things to it becoming toxic. Facebook and other platforms responded by trying to start to push news out of their feeds because it was... because people hated it. And I think BuzzFeed really lost its footing there and we never really recovered. Like, we looked for ways to...

escape this ecosystem that I'm sure we made lots of mistakes. It's really hard to start a media company, first of all, let's say that. That said, they are still subject to economics, at which I think reporters don't like that part of it. They're fine writing about other companies undergoing these kind of pressures. But, you know, BuzzFeed raised $700 million before its IPO. It had a $1.5 billion valuation at the IPO, and its market cap hovered significantly lower, $100 million to $250 million for most of last year.

There was downsizing, so it was sort of death by a thousand cuts, and the editors were pushing for more content with the downsized staff. But it was a prestige brand, and the first cuts in 2023 had not affected BuzzFeed News or the HuffPo. Can you talk about that and why?

Yeah, I mean, I think Jonah had been really attached to BuzzFeed News and loved it. And, you know, I don't think we did a particularly good job of building a business around it. And maybe this is actually, it's related to that and viewed it as something that was sort of a passion project, but ultimately,

you know, investors had been pushing him for years to cut it because it was unprofitable. And when your stock's under a dollar, it's pretty hard to resist those pressures, which is where things are and when it's hard to borrow money. Do you have any insight into why now did you say you have to give it up, Jonah? Or what was the inside? You know, I'm not on the inside of that anymore and I don't know. I mean, I do think to me, one of the most interesting and strange things is, you know, when I was going back and reporting

Huffington Post was this bold new digital entry that captured attention and dramatically upended media. And I think we then started to see it as this sort of legacy digital thing that was dying and it was sold to BuzzFeed, I think basically for less than a dollar. I think Verizon basically paid BuzzFeed to take it off its hands. And as the social web has receded and collapsed,

I think what they found at BuzzFeed is that like, huh, like Huffington Post front page traffic stuck around. It did. And I find myself in this weird moment where like when I want to know what's going on in the world, like Twitter doesn't really do that anymore. Twitter will tell you what Elon's thinking about, but it doesn't tell you what's happening in the world. And I find myself like, huh, like I'm going to the Drudge Report.

I'm going to Huffington Post. These old internet behaviors that predate social media are kind of back. Well, it's easier. It's a quick read or, you know, whatever you decide to read. And that's to the degree anybody's on the web at all. I mean, I think, you know, you are spending a lot of time in audio and at events. I'm spending all my time in newsletters and at events. I mean, these are alternatives to the web, basically, and other ways for people to get their news. So you said that, told the Times, that it's the end of a marriage between social media and news. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Yeah, I mean, I think BuzzFeed in some ways, among others, like led the way for publishers to say, wow, Facebook and Twitter in particular provide, in Facebook's case, massive distribution, in Twitter's case, sort of a central beating heart of news and an elite conversation to penetrate. And journalists...

for individual reasons to build our brands, you know, jumped in with both feet, publishers in varying degrees resisted or followed. But, you know, by say 2018, Facebook and Twitter are the most important parts of the news ecosystem. And then I think you've seen that collapse over the last few years. Facebook,

you know, is obviously losing users, losing audience in a substantial way. And also as part of its way of combating that is pushing anything like the resembles news or the resembles links out of the feed. Twitter losing its cultural relevance, probably just because social networks are like bars and clubs. They're cool when your friends are going there and then they're not. And so I think

Elon has probably speeded the move away from news, but I think it was probably inevitable. And then meanwhile, publishers and journalists are thinking a lot about just totally different places like email and like audio, where audiences who felt overwhelmed and manipulated by these algorithmic feeds...

are looking for something new. Let me ask you, in Peretti's memo, he talked about having overinvested in BuzzFeed News out of love for the work and mission, as you noted. It said it made him slow to accept the big platforms couldn't provide distribution and financial support required to support premium free journalism purpose built for social media. They stopped paying, right? But the New York Times reported in a meeting with the staff, he said, clearly there's a massive failure on my part. I'm deeply sorry for that. Have you spoken to him? Yeah, I mean, I spent hours and hours talking to him for the book. And he's, you know, he's sort of a,

congenital optimist and I think has been very excited about what's next, about particularly AI and the uses of AI in media. But I do think he

I don't know. I think he bet really heavily on Facebook and on Mark Zuckerberg. You know, BuzzFeed was among the companies that took checks from Facebook, but really built its business on an organic relationship with Facebook, you know, and on a bet on this whole social media ecosystem. And I think it was pretty hard for us to imagine, particularly in 2014, that this was just going to go away. The news part was supposed to not turn a profit. The larger companies subsidized the newsroom. You know, it depends. I mean, you always say you're not supposed to turn a profit when you're not turning a profit. I certainly, and early on,

You know, we were a venture-backed company, so nothing was supposed to turn a profit. If we were profitable, it was by accident. Yes, yeah. I mean, I, in retrospect, as soon as anybody started talking about news as something we were doing because it was important to the world, I should have said,

we got to cut costs. Like, we're inevitably screwed. Could you not charge more for advertising if it was as prestigious? Like, you broke a lot of news. You broke a lot of serious news. You broke a lot of news. But, you know, I mean, you know how media companies work. It's very hard to focus on selling the harder thing to sell. And I guess I've sort of, you know, I mean, the lessons I've learned are really about, like,

trying to build a news business where your partners on the business side are totally, totally focused on news and good at executing. So last year, Jonah told the newsroom recently that they had to turn a profit. It could be as little as a dollar, but they shouldn't expect to get subsidized by the larger company. Did they get enough time to do that or just...

Inevitable, your public company. Yeah, I just think they were, I mean, he'd been, you know, that was my mandate, which we failed at and I failed at, but, you know, not being particularly well qualified to do, you know, starting in 2018 or 2019. And yeah, I mean, I think they ran out, the company ran out of time. Yeah. How do you think he's handled this? One reporter on The Beat told us that their impression was no one was going to, going out of their way to cut him slack. Why is that?

Oh, you mean that his employees? I mean, I do think that there's a lot of public conflict around the union and that where inevitably it's a really adversarial relationship where management becomes a target. And I do think that

You know, I think that definitely alienated him personally from the news department and alienated a lot of journalists from him who are unhappy with how he handled it. Right. Well, you know, it's interesting because these layoffs, there's never any good way to do these things. There are better ways. Yeah. And when you cut costs, I mean, it's miserable. Yeah. Yeah. But one of the things I had told you, going public was the mistake and with a SPAC, boy. Did you think that was the case? I know you and I've talked about that a lot, but I always felt that one of the

assets of Vox's that didn't go public. Maybe it couldn't have, etc. I think in retrospect, Vox looks incredibly smart for not going public. And BuzzFeed went public through a SPAC and the process dragged until it was the absolute worst time possible to do it. And all the capital they thought they were going to raise with the SPAC went away. I mean, I think that when you pull back the camera here, like there are tons of tactical things that could have done differently of operating things, of kind of business decisions.

But this was a company that, you know, mastered social media, saw social media coming, lived in this whole world of social media that collapsed really, really fast around it. And I think that's a very hard thing to overcome. But in retrospect, do you think you should have cut more costs? You were sort of there in the salad days. You guys had money. You kept trying to hire all my reporters, I know, and I didn't have the money. Your editors would ask what their budget was, and I recall you would say, don't ask, or they might give us one. Yeah.

Was that a mistake then or just, well, that was the way it was then? Or would you do something different? You know, I mean, it's so easy to say knowing now what was going to happen to social media that we should have been obsessively focused with moving off of social media. And I think in, you know, at some point that did kind of dawn on us and we started building newsletters. And I think the company much more successfully took audiences from Facebook over to YouTube and looked at like, are there ways to take all this scale we've built on social media and move it elsewhere? But I don't think...

I don't think we really totally grasp the urgency or the speed with which that ecosystem would collapse. And I think people don't realize it was spend it, spend it, spend it. You wouldn't have not. I mean, I didn't have it, so I didn't spend it. But I remember thinking those assholes, they have all that money and it's non-economic.

We had this opportunity to build a newsroom, like totally rooted in this moment and hire great reporters and do great work. And I mean, that was, you know, I wasn't hired for my business savvy. I was hired to do that. And I think I'm very proud of what we did. Yeah, you did see cuts, though. There were cuts when VCMendi began dwindling post-2016. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Do you feel any responsibility to beat reporters you hired who are now unemployed? And let me put it in context. Recode, they just retired that and retired.

and folded it into Vox.com. I'm one of these people that we move along and it was an important part of the career, but do you feel responsibility or was it on them to realize they're a part of a new startup effort and their job was not guaranteed necessarily?

I mean, I don't think anyone thought their job was guaranteed or took anything for granted. I mean, I think everybody there was sort of eyes wide open about how perilous it was. But yeah, I feel tons of responsibility to the folks who are still there. And just, I don't know. I mean, I sort of think once you've edited somebody, you're always in some ways responsible for them. And that, you know, the core job of an editor in some ways is just to have their reporters back. And I definitely sort of feel that for people I don't work with anymore.

Do you imagine that reporting, I mean, I never thought media was stable because I came up in an era when it wasn't, when it was declining, when retailers were not doing these big ad buys anymore, classifieds were dying. So I was always in a sort of scarcity environment, but it really is now a much different environment for media. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think folks of sort of your and my generation, you know, kind of did see how unstable it was. I mean, I always felt that there were reporters a generation ahead of me who had done everything right and had gotten to successful places in their mid-40s and then had the rug ripped out from under them. And there's really nothing they could do. You know, if you were a mid-senior person at Time Inc. in the early 2000s, you were just totally screwed. Yeah.

And it wasn't 'cause you were an idiot or you'd made some misstep. I do think for people coming up in this environment, you've gotta look around and see what's happening. But at the same time, good reporters mostly are not particularly interested in or focused on the media business. They're interested and focused on their beats.

And they want to be basically left alone to pursue them. And I think that's sort of what good news institutions ought to do is not say like, well, you're really an entrepreneur who ought to be thinking about the P&L all day. I don't know if they shouldn't think about the P&L, but I think they need to understand business better. I just don't. You know, they either need to understand business better or be incredible at their jobs because that's, you know, and that's a good way to understand business better.

In your recent book, Traffic, you write, speaking of BuzzFeed and the layoffs, on both sides, there was a bit of bitterness that came from a deep confusion about what BuzzFeed News was for. Right now, thinking about it, what was it for and what is lost with it gone? You know, I think at its best, it was...

you know, this generationally new thing that was able to, partly because people thought the brand was so ridiculous that nobody, you weren't going to get people there who were totally wedded to the worst kinds of sort of new journalistic traditionalism, sort of pointless old rules.

And I think we got people who were really ambitious journalists who were interested in telling new stories and doing it new ways. And so we just, I think we were incredibly early to these huge stories about the rise of the far right. I think about the reporting on, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos and things like that. To a kind of international coverage that was about how the experiences of young people in different countries on the same platforms had really started to converge. There's a story by Nisha Dajah about a sexual assault in India.

It still sticks with me as like one of these things that only that newsroom could have told. It was also a weird mix, though. You know, everyone associates with listicles and GIFs. But you had an impressive newsroom when you were editor-in-chief. You know, you invest a lot of money in investigative. You broke big stories. You won awards, including Pulitzer. Is this not going to happen anymore, presumably, correct? Yeah.

I mean, not BuzzFeed. So what does that unwind look like, especially as BuzzFeed News is unionized? A lot of people losing their jobs, even at BuzzFeed.com and HuffPo may hire some. You know, I don't really know. You don't know. What do you think? What happens in a situation like that? I never had a unionized newsroom. I've been in them. I mean, I think unions are really good at protecting people on the downside. I mean, they're sort of built for, in this case, for a kind of downside scenario. And I think a lot of the reason people joined was they felt like it was just going to

I mean, a lot of the thing that they were focused on was protections in the case of layoffs and getting severance and things like that. Yeah. So your recent book, Traffic, as I noticed, it's about BuzzFeed. It's great, by the way. It's funny, pithy, just like you, really smart. But do you need to update it now? Or what are you going to do here? I mean, this is the most strange and maddening thing for an internet person about writing a book, which is that you can't... I just want to go... Like, yes, I would love to go in and fix it. I do think, though, I mean, the book is basically about...

the end of an era. And I did feel like it was the right moment to write it because it felt like that era was ending. There's this period, you know, maybe 2001 to like maybe 2020 that feels like a defined era of this new kind of media that influenced in everyone else and was absorbed everywhere, particularly by the New York Times, actually. Yes, they certainly did. They kept stealing all our good ideas, Ben. That is true. They did. And our people, that's true.

at the same time. But that's really over and it's a new one now. You know, right now, I just finished my book but I won't turn in the last three chapters and they're yelling at me. I'm like, I don't care. I'm not turning it in. You see, I don't have your level of assertiveness, Kara. They don't know what to do when you say no. It's like, well, then don't publish it. I don't know what to tell you. I,

In the book, you draw a direct line from Gawker's sex tapes and dick pics to BuzzFeed's listicles and cat videos. And the viral Is It Blue or Gold Dress Facebook post to right-wing authoritarian populists like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Duterte. I want you to explain this. I'd like you to redraw that line right now. Yeah, that's maybe not a straight line. Perhaps a zigzaggy BuzzFeed logo line. Right.

Yeah, I mean, I guess the thing that surprised me most in reporting out the book, which was like a lot about parts of media history that I had been a little next to and interested in, but not there. I wasn't invited to the Gawker parties. Like I was a young political reporter in New York. I kind of knew about them and wished I was invited. But going back to talking to everybody in that era, one of the things that really, really surprised me was...

was, you know, these are mostly people, I think Jonah certainly, who see, you know, a lot of the people around Gawker, who see themselves really as progressives. Huffington Post was created really specifically to elect a Democratic political candidate in 2008. And they boosted Barack Obama through the primary. And in some sense, it felt like the election of Barack Obama was the culmination of this new wave of progressive online media. And

yet you go back and it's like, huh, Andrew Breitbart was one of the co-founders of HuffPost. The founder of 4chan worked out of the BuzzFeed office. Steve Bannon is hanging around that story. You know, the founder of the Proud Boys was over at Vice and was pals with the women who founded Jezebel. And the sort of origins of the far right are just right, right next to that story. Like they're like down the white, they're like sitting at the same desk and learning without the sort of establishmentarian, like, well, we still have some rules, right?

kind of feelings that I, for instance, brought to it. And I think what I sort of realized was like, oh, actually the real culmination of this period is the election of Donald Trump, not the election of Barack Obama. I write about this in the book, but I went over to Trump Tower in the run-up to the 2016 election to see Steve Bannon.

And he had obviously studied BuzzFeed incredibly closely when he was creating Breitbart. And his one thing was he was like, I don't understand why you guys didn't just go all in for Bernie Sanders. I mean, that's where the traffic was, which was true, by the way, that that's where the traffic was. And it had folks in the BuzzFeed data side say, why aren't we going all in for Bernie Sanders? Like, well, we're journalists. We don't go all in.

And he just kind of shook his head at me, like, what are you doing? What's wrong with you? Yeah, he's the Elon Musk school of journalism. There's a line in the book that stuck with me. The thing about a commodity is that it needs to be limited to have real value. That means it's not a commodity, by the way. But give us some context for that and explain what you meant. It's an interesting point. Rarity is critically important, obviously. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, traffic was the commodity that people like Jonah, like Nick Denton, who founded Gawker,

like you and me, felt like we had sort of discovered. And I remember putting the first kind of tracker on my website and watching it come in. And, you know, basically the business model for all these companies was you could sell advertising because you had traffic. And then the problem was that

the value of each page view kept going down. And for a while, it's like, well, each page view used to be worth a dime and now it's worth a penny, but we're getting 20 times as many as we used to, so it's okay. And we can crank harder and harder and harder and still grow. Make it up in volume. And then at some point, the

gets so low that it doesn't matter what the denominator is or vice versa, whichever. But you couldn't make it up in volume because Facebook and Google provided effectively infinite scale. Right, exactly. Which is the reason I didn't go that way because I was like, I'm not going to win here.

ever economically. And so we went the other way with events and podcasts that had a much better return on substance, which was interesting. I want to talk quickly about Twitter. Elon, he's been going after news organizations for being government funded, although he's since corrected to publicly funded. He himself is government funded, by the way. I'll just point that out for the hundredth time. Do you

think he wants to be a news organization or is he doing damage to American media? I mean, both. I think he sees Twitter as a news organization and is, I'm not sure he would put it exactly this way, but yeah, he's trying to damage his competitors and drive them off his platform. And I think we'll certainly succeed at that. And is that a good thing?

i mean it's not a good thing if what you care about as i do is you know trusted careful verified journalism but i also think that a less relevant twitter that is a place where people you know have great conversations about ai and tech as they continue to um

that you know that much of what's on there isn't true, but that's sort of caveat emptor. I mean, like, for instance, I think Reddit is wonderful and an incredibly valuable part of the media ecosystem. Nobody says, well, Reddit is where you get trusted news, although sometimes there's incredible trustworthy stuff on Reddit. Or insightful things, yeah. Yeah, could Twitter become something like that? I think that's sort of where it's headed for somewhat different communities. And then also an incredible place to watch sports. So are some of his critiques justified? And which ones?

I don't know. What even are his critiques? I think critique is a really big word. Yeah, I know. I know. They're tantrums, really. You know, lords and ladies, elites. I think that's totally bizarre. Honestly, like, I think that there's this sort of weird reverse class resentment by billionaires of working people. Well, they are the victims, Ben. They are the victims. They're in pain. He's in pain. I do think the much narrower thing that reporters...

came to buy a set of ideologies about tech and wrote a bunch of nonsense stories. I mean, lots of journalism is wrong. I mean, you know, it's a flawed profession. It always has been. I do think the narrative that all society's ills were about these tech companies was overblown. I would agree. And entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are right to be pissed off about that. I think they then developed a kind of mirror image of

You know, they only saw the most irresponsible and worst stories because Twitter is a machine for elevating the dumbest stuff your enemies say. Yes, and they're very sensitive people, let's be clear. Yeah, so, you know, they're allowed to be. But I do think Twitter did this, in a way, they spent all their time on Twitter and developed their own totally Twitter-centric ideology of, like, what the media is and how it works that...

was actually just inaccurate. I mean, the notion that journalists were desperate for blue checks and would pay for them was just an inaccurate read. So inane. Yeah. And have their own pretty crazy ideology about how media works that was in some ways a kind of crazy mirror image of the dumbest things that journalists wrote about technology. I mean, I do think like

You know, you go back to that Cambridge Analytica story, and that was basically nonsense. It was indicative of real problems, and it was metaphorical for real problems. But the basic thrust of the story was that Cambridge Analytica had a meaningful impact on American elections, and that was not the case. That is correct. But it was indicative. It was indicative of bigger problems elsewhere. Sure, it was indicative of all these things. But somebody writes a story about you that's not true, and your defense can't be. It's indicative. Yeah.

No, but it could say there's mold here. We should look at this. Maybe there's something bigger. You know what I mean? Oh, sure. But if somebody says, we found people who died of mold in your living room, and you say that it's not an acceptable defense that that's not true and here's some mold. Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's fair. I think the error was Mark saying it has nothing to do with it. And he opened himself up on that issue. Yeah, I would say they have some justified grievances. Yeah, they do. But mostly when you hear pain from billionaires is harder to take, I think, especially when it's versus journalists.

What do you think the shift in Twitter is doing to journalists besides making us pull our hair out and, as you just said, visit the Drudge Report and HuffPo and do other things? I mean, I think it's actually pushing us to develop more direct connections with our audience, you know, and to find people who want to read our work and not go through other people's algorithms to do it. That feels healthy to me. And the pendulum always swings in this business and people get excited.

audiences get tired of one thing and interested in another thing. So I don't think it's, but I think that feels like a healthy shift right now. Let me do a quick lightning round. And based on what you wrote about in your book, what's happening in the news business at major outlets and what it means, you know, given what has happened and where it's going, let me put you back in your media critic days and where they are in the context of what you've been writing about here in traffic. First, the Washington Post. Bezos seems to be getting more involved, I think. The newsroom is very unhappy, I know. But

although many newsrooms are unhappy, but this is a particularly unhappy newsroom. But very quickly, Washington Post. I mean, I think the curse of having a billionaire owner is the lack of...

pressure, you know, on one hand to build a business, but really to connect with an audience and serve people. And I think they're currently strategically really adrift as a result. And what happens to them in that environment? I mean, they're not going to run out of money. They can drift for a long time. Drift, drift. You talked about the New York Times. They certainly have lots of controversies, whether it's the trans coverage, the thing around Tom Cotton, etc. Good spot?

Yeah, I mean, the Times was forced to panic and adjust. It's an incredibly strong position. What's their vulnerability? I mean, they're spending too much money. They got themselves to a place where subscriptions had been growing very healthily and the arrow pointed upward and

And, you know, if the economy goes into a recession, they build a huge organization. You know, basically a very healthy business, but they do have a lot, a lot of people. Yeah, I always think it's a small business. It's like smaller than you think. Yeah, and in a subscription business, that arrow just doesn't keep going up and to the right. It gets harder and harder. Challenged, very much so. CNN, Chris Lick, Don Lemon.

Can't figure out the morning? Yeah, I asked Chris about Don when Don was in the room the other day. He sat directly in my line of sight. It was an awkward moment. There's a lot to say about that. I do think one of the challenges is that it's been a very, very slow six months of news.

And the best thing that could possibly happen for CNN is the return of America's toxic, crazy politics, which does seem to be happening. NBCU, they seem to have a hit with Saki and Peacock is not doing that badly. You know, I got to say, NBCU, like when Cesar Conde came in, there was this sense of like, ah, here come the suits.

but like the suits are doing a pretty good low drama job. They did not make the mistakes everybody else made with SVOD and they went with an advertising supported streaming service. I think that like, if you look across the landscape of TV, that's the one place that is feels like a very stable, strategically focused place. It does indeed. And Peacock's pretty, it's not doing badly. Um,

Platforms like Substack who are increasingly investing in editorial services and product tweaks and free marketing from Elon, obviously. They are after what we did, right? They're the next thing. Yeah, I mean, I think they're really interesting. I think their ability to cross-promote newsletters is pretty cool and I'm a little jealous of it. I think the question of like if they built something more than an email service provider that's a competitor of something like Ghost is going to continue to be the big challenge for them. And can they...

can they basically build businesses that make a lot of money on those platforms and then not have them just immediately turn around and leave the platform? They've been doing an okay job at that so far, but I think that's a big long-term challenge. Can that be a business that reflects its valuation? I don't know. Fox News. We'll get to Dominion in a moment, but Will Held's role? No, I say no. I don't really think so. I mean, the notion that, well, 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch has learned his lesson now and is going to turn things around. I mean, come on.

He loves to pay people off. That's his go-to thing. Write a check, move on. Write a check. He's $500 million in. So why not another $800 million? What does he care? Yeah.

You're not good at 93. He might change at 93. Do you think? That's often, that's often the age at which people really change. Exactly. Profound personal transformation. Yeah. He's 92 just so you know, you know, but he might change at 93 and I know 94, he's suddenly going to go all liberal. It's going to be great. It's going to be fantastic. He's going to be, you know, dating someone progressive, et cetera. Anyway, uh, in a tough time for the media, uh,

which it certainly is on a tough day for media, which the closing of BuzzFeed News certainly is, what can we be optimistic about? Yeah, I mean, it's a tough day to feel particularly optimistic, although, but I mean, you know, I'm sitting here in Semaphore's newsroom with a really small team feeling really good about what we're doing. And I do think that, and this is a mixed blessing for the industry, but there is this new space for,

star reporters to really, really cut through on their own terms and write their own tickets. And that's, you know, what you're building on, what we're trying to build on. I think that's in some ways a big challenge for lots of the industry, but a big opportunity too. We'll be back in a minute. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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The other big news is Dominion, which Graydon Carter wrote about saying, which I thought was one of the best lines, Dominion versus Fox ended like a sexual liaison with Trump, with gasps, an abrupt ending, and a check being written. Which...

Pretty good. $787 million is a big amount. I understand why they did it completely on all sides. It's a good business decision for Dominion. Fox gets this off their thing. They have other things with Smartmatic and others. Is it accountability, though? I mean, it's not over, let's be clear. I mean, there's a great William Gaddis line. You get justice in the next world. In this world, you have the law.

I mean, you know, I think obviously it's, I mean, money is accountability, but it's not, this isn't some, the kind of reckoning, the final blow that, you know, I mean, I do think that that waits for the next world. Do you find this account? I think $787 million is a lot of money and it also buys a lot of losses. Yeah, it's a lot of money. Nobody wants to, nobody has any fun writing that check and there's probably another one coming to Smartmatic and it's an ongoing business headache. But you know what? Like this is a company that,

survives and thrives on this kind of nonsense. And so... Yeah, absolutely. I don't think it really affected the stock price much. There was a lot of, Sean, media coverage leading up to the trial, a good amount of disappointment when it settled. I thought the reactions were overblown. Did you? Yeah, I think the notion that the Dominion and its private equity owners were our champions fighting for justice and

they betrayed us is ludicrous. I think they just wanted, um, they wanted some good Sean Hannity on the stand and Murdoch on the stand, which would have been disastrous. Yeah, although, I mean, that said, Dominion really did a service to the world. I mean, the internal workings of Fox News are, like, genuinely shocking and appalling to anybody who works in news. That is not what my newsroom ever worked like. It's not what your newsroom ever worked like. I mean...

It is as bad as you would have imagined in terms of their, you know, disguising a willingness to deceive their audience in the language of respecting their audience. I mean, really pretty shocking. The thing is, they're doing just fine. They're doing better than ever. At the end of the day, do you think they will continue to do this? Yeah, I mean, I think they learned the narrowest imaginable lesson, like don't defame voting machine companies. If you're going to lie on air, make sure you don't specify who you're lying about and make sure it's not a commercial entity that can sue us.

Keep it to public figures. Do you imagine during the election they're going to change it all? Also, Newsmax and OWN are under siege by these companies. Probably will put them out of business. They don't have the money that Fox... Yeah, I mean, Newsmax, much less relevant thing, but I mean, the only challenge for Newsmax is it is a cat with a mouse in its hand. Does it want to, like, squeeze drops of... Would it like to take, you know, the mouse's blood in monthly installments or would it like to...

drive the mess into bankruptcy. This is a terrible metaphor. But that's, I mean, Dominion's big problem with Newsmax is

they could put him out of business tomorrow, but actually they would like to bleed as much money out of them as they can, which requires them continuing to be in business. Fox, we're back to the basic dilemma, which is that they're captives of Donald Trump, that they, you know, there's incredible emails from Rupert Murdoch saying, we will make Donald Trump a non-person. He was being interviewed last week on there with Tucker Carlson. You know, just sort of behaving sort of worshipfully to him. And, and,

I think, you know, the thing is that like the Republican Party, like they're captive to Trump. He speaks for their base and I think they don't feel like they have a lot of room to maneuver, so they'll do whatever he wants. So losing credibility doesn't matter because they don't care. I think they have credibility with their audience, yeah. Yeah, as long as they stick to the narrative the audience likes. Which is in a way what those emails say. Yeah, you know, my mom, of course, watches Fox News and she was like, did he say different things than he says on the air?

I'm like, yeah, quite a bit. And when I showed it to her, she goes, oh, that's bad. And I was like, yeah, but then moved on rather quickly. I think Trump and the audience ruled that particular thing and will do well if they continue to do that. They have a very strong little audience going there. It's not the biggest in the world, but it's strong. It's really strong. And it speaks to the fragmentation of media that they have, you know,

three or four million people who really love them and in a country of 300 million but that is that's great business and enough to really capture a big chunk of politics absolutely this would have been a very juicy story for you as a media columnist the new york times you still cover it for semaphore i want to get into semaphore as we end and um it's hardly the same real estate sorry to say that but it's not um do you miss that time's job in big media moments like this

No. I mean, the fun thing about The Times, as you know, is just that you can sort of call Bob Iger and he kind of feels like he has to call you back. He still calls me back. I don't know if he doesn't. I don't need access to any of his stuff. If you're Kara Swisher, everybody calls you back, too. No, don't stop it. You know what? Honestly, he returns my emails, too. I don't know. Maybe he's a bad example. He's a very, you know, he's a friend of journalists. But there's a level of The Times just gets you into the room. And then there's a big audience who really cares about...

Although, if you write something stupid and boring there, nobody reads it anyway. And if you write something interesting somewhere else, it'll find its audience. And I guess I'm... I agree. You know, I want to write for people who want to read it. The thing I miss most about The Times, actually, is the depth and quality of editing. Like, I have great editors here at Semaphore who I make edit my copy, but...

But, you know, there was a great, I can't remember what the, backfield editor named Phyllis Messenger, who every Saturday would go over my column after Carolyn Ryan, who's just a fabulous editor, had spent a lot of time editing it. And there was a depth and commitment to edit to that kind of editing, which I'd love to, you know, build in any institution I'm in, but was really pretty blown away by there.

Talk about Semaphore. How is the business going? As you describe very eloquently in your book, it's hard to get traffic these days. Like this traffic is not the thing, correct? Or I think there's an argument and I think maybe something that I was learning while I was at BuzzFeed that the business of news in particular is not really about you're not going to compete for scale with entertainment.

And so you have to, you know, get an audience who people really want to reach of, in our case, you know, people who are very, very influential and central to the beats they're on, who you can gather in person, who you can reach very directly with newsletters. And you can build an advertising business, you can build other businesses around that. And I think the thing, the nice thing about that kind of journalism is that

is that every-- you know, if you're talking to and breaking news about the central figures in really important areas, whether it's politics, finance, there's a huge audience that's interested in that and who will come along for that. So a smaller audience you're talking about. Yeah, but the biggest stories you break have a huge audience. But day to day, you're talking to a smaller audience, yeah? I mean, the thing about the Facebook era was that you could sort of imaginably reach every single person in the whole world and see, you know, like the dress.

was, you know, this global instant cultural phenomenon. And I think the internet isn't built that way anymore. That was a great moment in your career, Ben, the dress. I really think if I remember anything about you, it's the dress. But now, I don't think anything about the dress. I'm not an elite about listicles anyway, and dresses. Are you getting pressure from investors to get revenue in?

I mean, we just launched the company. So I think we feel, I hope, I mean, I feel, and I hope Justin, my partner, who's really responsible around it, feels just immense pressure from all sides to get revenue in. I mean, I think one of the things I learned from BuzzFeed, and really not just BuzzFeed, but just that whole venture-backed era in media, is that I'd rather build more slowly and carefully with a business that is really paying the bills. I want to do a little lightning round of the kind of pitches you made. We were joking recently because on this episode of Succession, they were talking, what was it? Economist meets...

i can't even remember meets um the new yorker meets the economist or we already met the economy yeah it sounds like you're i definitely felt like it was a i would say incredibly flattering parody i've sent before you heard some say the best way to raise money in business is to go to rich people and tell them you're starting a news organization that has centrist views on the news is that what you did was would you say that was the strongest pitch for what you're doing um i mean i think the strongest pitch to investors

was in particular that my partner had been really, really successful. I mean, first of all, like it's a very hard business and Justin is a great operator. I do think that's really underrated. I think like execution focus, those things in our business are incredibly underrated. And actually that I think what we told investors and I don't think we said anything different to investors and everybody else was really about the audience and how sick people are of what they're getting and how it feels like it's this moment when there's an opportunity to give them something more transparent.

more global and more like focused on helping them get through the sort of chaos of broken late social media. So more global than other words? I think it sounded very silly when I said it, but I think if you look, we're up and running in a really

you know, significant way that we're proud of across several African countries and building around that as we build in the U.S. And I think that's a really good model that we'll take elsewhere. Talk about your pitch to your readers. Why should someone who already pays for the Times and the Post and the Journal pay for some more? And how has that changed? Well, first of all, we're not asking them to pay.

So the easiest part of the pitch is that it's free. It's free. And as you economize in these difficult times, hope you'll keep that in mind, but that you're hearing directly unfiltered from great journalists who really know what they're talking about on beats that they are truly expert in. You've got to read it because they are breaking huge stories. And then they're also telling you what they think about them. And they're helping navigate all the zillion things everybody else is writing and saying about everything at all times. And what's your pitch to reporters? You didn't...

learning, you learned a lot of very good reporters, but the big marquee, I assume you went out to big marquee names. If your reporter's already has a following, what's the appeal for Semaphore as opposed to the Times, Substack? Yeah, I mean, I feel like we peeled pretty great people off of pretty marquee names off big places, whether it's Dave Weigel or Liz Hoffman. And I mean, I think like Liz, who's a superstar finance reporter, is a great example of this, which is that here's somebody who is, you know, she's a real true star at the Wall Street Journal, who if you talk to somebody in finance,

not only knew her work, but knew what she thought and knew her perspective. But you did not get that in the Wall Street Journal. What you got was the news with no sense of what Liz Hoffman thought. But Liz Hoffman knows a lot about this stuff. And I think the pitch to journalists and to readers is we're going to take her out of this kind of wooden...

opaque news article. To be sure. I call it the to be sure place. Yeah, bring her into it where journalists smuggle their views in through quotes and through adjectives and like just say and give her a space where she's breaking a huge story and then she's telling you what she thinks about it but she's confident enough actually to know the difference between

between facts and her analysis and to include room for disagreement as well. So your idea is unleashing her. Yeah, that's right. Unleashing her knowledge. That's totally right. When you think about doing that, what is your biggest pitch when they're like, I don't know, I'm super comfortable here at the New York Times slash Wall Street Journal slash whatever. The sub-sec reporters are different. They're more entrepreneurial. I mean, I think some people, I mean, I don't, you know, I think some people really love those institutions and will never leave. And, and, and,

I mean, I think different people have really different ideas of where they want to go with their careers. But I do think there's this funny moment where if you say words like influencer or brand to a journalist, they like throw up in their mouths. Really? Creator. Like it's so like it's such a gross idea that that's what journalists are. And yet at the same time.

I think a lot of journalists, partly thanks to Twitter, like feel the romance and the tug of like, wow, there's an audience that's actually interested in what I have to say, knows who I am and my voice, not just me as a cog in a giant Wall Street Journal or New York Times machine. It's absolutely true. And...

I mean, that's really ultimately what's, I think, like so fun about it. And I think they want that. I think they want that. I don't think everybody does. I think there's certain kinds of reporters. Like if you're an investigative reporter who just wants to spend two years on one topic, blow it open, disappear for two more years and come back with something totally different, you're not really trying to build an audience around your own voice or a source space. But for beat reporters in particular, it's just a delight to work this way. Let me ask you a final question. When you think about traffic and what you experience, it does feel, reading the book, like, oh,

Not old, but like, oh, that era, right? So what's the next era, if you had to bet, beyond Semiform, what you're doing? What does media look like?

Is it this media monopoly of the New York Times and a lot of small people, interesting people, whether it's Punchbowl, Puck, whatever information, smaller people who are doing just fine? I think the big story in some ways about news, I mean, media is a huge business, but I think about news, which is a smaller business, is going to be about the tensions between institutions and talent.

And the challenge, which I certainly think about constantly, about how do you square the two? How do you get the best of both worlds and have an institution with all the great things and the newsroom and the lawyers and the editing and the support that a great newsroom brings that also unleashes and opens up journalistic talent rather than sort of trying to undermine it? And how do you square that circle? I think that's the big management challenge for all of us, but also opportunity. Is it squarable? Yeah, I think so, actually. I think that great journalists really do want...

the camaraderie, the support, the teamwork of a great newsroom. And by the way, you know, a strong newsroom and editor that you can occasionally hide behind when it gets really hot out there sometimes and you don't just want to be out there on your own. But they also really do want a direct personal connection with their audience. And I think successful newsrooms are going to give people both.

I think they will do it dragging, screaming and dragging. Oh, and in some cases with enormous misery. And, you know, it's not, I don't think it's trivial for these institutions. It's both that management hates it because they lose leverage, but also there's this wonderful egalitarian culture historically in newsrooms represented in some cases by unions and the notion that

That value is migrating increasingly to a few stars is really in tension with that culture. And I don't envy the people trying to navigate it because I think it's a really hard challenge. Yeah, it's why you asked me about my salary so much in the Semaphore interview, which I thought was curious. Wait, did I?

Yeah, you're like, do you think you should get that? And I was like, I think I should. You do think you should. I think I was trying to provoke this particular rant and I succeeded. Thank you. I didn't rant. No, I did not rant. I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm paid just fine. I think you're a journalist who knows her value. Yes, I know my value. Quoting the great Mika Brzezinski, I know my value. Anyway, Ben, thank you so much. Thanks, Cara. It's great talking to you.

So his theory is that successful newsrooms are going to give journalists both great editorial support and a direct connection to their talent, the ability to be stars. Yeah. I think you're right, Kara. It would happen with some of them dragging and screaming. They would not want to do that. Yeah, they don't. Way back 20 years, whenever we started All Things D, it was very, it was, they were angry at us for wanting some of the profits. And they were angry at us for wanting some of the profits.

And they were resentful. Like, how dare you? You know, speaking of lords and ladies, how dare you, you know, stop tilling our fields, essentially? Like, what, you want some money for all your work? And so it was very awkward. Didn't they also underestimate the value of what you were doing? They did. Because events was so non-core to the print business. No one had ever done it. And they hadn't really done very well in that business at all because it was terrible content. It was terrible. They produced a terrible product. And so I think

there are certain reporters and we used to argue with them. We make a lot of revenue compared to the reporter sitting next to me. And then the newsroom, the ethos of the newsroom, they didn't think that was, you know, they sort of accept that, like that they're not getting the value of their contribution. And it's hard to figure out what the value of

contribution is. I mean, investigative reporters are a cost item, but they're so necessary to an organization. I think it's more the new stuff people make that has a revenue. Yeah, video and audio, the stuff I do. Like if you're a video journalist, an audio journalist, a multimedia journalist, what do you do? They know how much it costs and they know how much they make. Well, of course. Well, I know, thankfully, I have an MBA. I know how much it costs and know how much it makes. But I also think that the challenge is that on the business side, they are willing to pay. Product managers get paid at

managers get paid because they're competing with Google and Facebook. But in the journalism business, they're competing with, you know, Reuters and Washington Post. So like they pay you according to the market, quote unquote, and the market kind of screws you. Yeah.

It's very difficult to understand what the value of someone is. In some cases, it's very clear, right? I'm not going to name individual reporters, but there's some that's like, that's part of the important part of the brand. So should they get more? And that starts really hard when you get in a unionized environment like the New York Times and other media organizations. But typically over history, the news organization has always benefited and the reporters have been happy. And some are happy to

take that. I just, I think you should get paid what you're worth. I think so. And people get angry when I say that, but I will. I always find conversations with Ben interesting because I feel he's like simultaneously earnest and cynical. He is. And he does have a great love of institutions. Like I am less

in love with, whether it's the Washington Post or the New York Times, I have huge respect for them. But I'm like, well, okay. And I think they do amazing things for society, et cetera, et cetera. But I do think they're businesses. I see them like, come on, they're businesses. And I think he has a great romance with them in a way.

which I appreciate. I mean, he's a political reporter, a media critic, like he came from that world. And yet I was pretty surprised when he left to do Semaphore. I wasn't because his entrepreneurial tendencies are higher. It's not, he doesn't do it for money. He just wants to make what he wants to make. But it's also a very tough time because of digital advertising and consumers being able to, and what is a media organization? TikTok media is

Twitter media. Yeah. And cutting through the noise, right? And I think about this a lot as a producer. Like, how do you cut through the noise? How is what you're doing fresh or different? Because Ben's talking about going to like HuffPo or Drudge Report. I think I'm a different generation where, sure, I know those outlets. I go to those sites, but not regularly. And things like Puck, Semaphore, some of their newsletters have definitely been added to my media diet. You know, newsletters like Popular Information, The Dispatch, obviously, The New York Times, Washington Post. But

It's hard to cut through to say, okay, I'm going to add this to my media diet because there's only so many hours a day. You do, but here's the thing. This is an elite discussion of media. Most people get stuff from Facebook. That's what's really happened. And by the way, most people weren't reading newspapers anyway. Like, I mean, the local newspapers have died off. The local news organizations don't exist anymore, which is problematic for our democracy. Very problematic. So, you know, it's just most people don't have a media diet. They turn on Fox News or whatever.

MSNBC and that's their thing. Or flip on to USA Today. Yeah.

It is an elite discussion of media. And I think it's a little like Axios, but that's where it is, right? Axios was like catering to yuppies. Advertisers want that audience. And they got sold for half a billion bucks to Cox. They did. You can be very, you can be light and elite and make it big in this business. That was a great idea. So, you know, I love all this experimentation. And it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And that's what I like about it. It's like we're not like, it's not the worst thing in the world for it to not work. So...

Yeah. You were saying most people get their news from Facebook. It was interesting to hear Ben pushing back on that. Social media companies are like, we don't want to touch this nuclear thing of news. It has not behooved us to be part of this. Not to make news, not to make news, but create it. Yeah. I think what Ben was on this, it's like,

No longer force-fed by your friend's feed, but maybe more opportunities for self-guided discovery in what you consume. And that creates opportunities for newsletters, events, like a renaissance for some things that had dwindled to the ease of the digital link that could get you a cent. But links from other people, I think, are important. Like Reddit, I think, is a support.

Surprising little place where people get a lot of news. I love Reddit. My favorite Reddit, my favorite subreddit is Data is Beautiful, where they show these charts and they tell you like, it's like you actually have visualizations of data. And, you know, it's no, it's like you could go to the New York Times and see a lot of great infographics, but I find amazing data there. You have to go check it yourself. You have to go see, is it true? Citizen journalism can be good when it's good. Sometimes it's like citizen surgery. So.

And AI will change everything, by the way. And that was one of the things we didn't get to enough in this. Post-Aid had been at BuzzFeed, but BuzzFeed's strategy now is really a lot around AI and its sales and its content generation, its list of goals. They are looking at artificial intelligence as kind of the future, which is...

Probably good to not mix that with news, I would say. But well, it'll summarize. It'll summarize. Give me the summarize. And I think it'll be like Apple will have it and everyone will have it in there. Where's the best places to eat? These are things newspapers used to do. So that's a whole other new wrinkle now.

Well, I look forward to reading Ben's next book in 10 years. I mean, the best parts of this book, Traffic, are like when he's talking about the internet as this liberal phenomenon that has in the back shadows. Andrew Breitbart with Huffington Post, 4chan near BuzzFeed News, the Proud Boys link to Jezebel. The technology is, as they like to say, sometimes, quote, neutral, which means it's being used by more we can see. And I think that's something we'll see in AI as well. Oh, 100%. We had an interview with All Things Tea with Ralph Reed, who's a right-wing journalist.

Influencer, I guess. I don't know what else to call it. And he talked about how the right was using all the internet tools because they had been shut out of mainstream media. And this is where they found power. And it was tailor-made for this group of people. And they used it well, badly, but well.

you know, for their purposes. So we'll see where it goes with AI. We'll see. I'm going to ask you the same question we asked Ben, which is in the time that's hard for media with the shuttering of BuzzFeed News, kind of, you know, I know you're not sentimental, but the day that's hard for media at a time that's challenging to do news, what do you think there is to be optimistic about?

There'll be something new. I'm not, it's sentimental means I look forward to the next thing that's happening. And again, like I said, these are businesses. And so they have to, they have to live as businesses. And that's important at whether we think so, we have a romantic version of it or not. I'm optimistic that something cool will happen. Like I didn't expect all the, I didn't,

Substack was not unlike what we did at Recode and Puck is not unlike that. And we'll see what happens. I think it's kind of, this AI stuff, I think is, if I was a young media entrepreneur, I'd be right up in AI's grill. I don't have the energy anymore. But that's what I would do. If you do, Kara. No, I don't. I don't. I can't. I just...

Let's start an AI podcast. No, I just don't want to. We'll call it possible. But I think someone should. Possible. Possible. Someone should. Yeah. If I were in building a media business right now, I would look at kids and how they consume news and information on Roblox and try to build something kind of like Metaverse on Roblox. You should do it. See? See? Yeah. See? We're already thinking up ideas. This is how life works, you know? Anyways, let's go brainstorm and read us the credits so we can get to making the money. No, it's not happening. Okay.

Today's show was produced by Naeem Arraza, Blakeney Schick, Christian Castro Rossell, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get an invite to Rupert Murdoch's Coming Out as a Liberal Party. If not, you only get to go to his 93rd birthday.

party. 93 years young, Rupert. Happy birthday. He's going to pop out of the cake. No, thank you. Go wherever you listen to podcasts. Search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.