Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Geo Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 1: Tracy, there's been a lot of media news and it's
Speaker 1: a cliche and I'm sure it's been repeated over and
Speaker 1: over again in headlines, but we're at like the end
Speaker 1: of an era, for like the era of journalism that
Speaker 1: we both came up in.
Speaker 2: I feel like before we start this episode, we should
Speaker 2: just get the disclaimer out right away, which is this
Speaker 2: is probably going to be our most navel gazing episode ever.
Speaker 1: Yes, and I think we're even planning on releasing this
Speaker 1: it's like a Friday bonus episode or the week just
Speaker 1: to acknowledge that. It's like, Okay, if you don't want
Speaker 1: to know anything about the media business or Joe and
Speaker 1: Tracy are all these things that are sort of like
Speaker 1: endemic to their lives over the last decade, feel free
Speaker 1: to skip this one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is media talking about the media. But you
Speaker 2: are right. There have been some things that happened happening lately. Specifically,
Speaker 2: we've seen BuzzFeed News announcing that it will be shutting down.
Speaker 2: I think there was a report recently about Vice Media
Speaker 2: potentially filing for bankruptcy. It feels like the end of
Speaker 2: an era for a lot of these digital focused media startups.
Speaker 1: No, I mean, it's definitely true. And you know, as
Speaker 1: listeners do know, we both started our careers sort of
Speaker 1: in digital basically roughly the same time, basically right at
Speaker 1: the worst of the Great Financial Crisis, And out of
Speaker 1: this period came all of these new experiments and you know,
Speaker 1: upstart media companies that were supposed to dislodge the incumbent.
Speaker 1: You know, the blog at FT.
Speaker 2: Every Financial Times, Alphaville, yep.
Speaker 1: I was an insider and insiders still chugging. They recently
Speaker 1: they did announce laoffs. But of all of the companies,
Speaker 1: maybe we'll talk about this, of all of the companies,
Speaker 1: I kind of feel like they're like the winner that
Speaker 1: nobody talks about in the I.
Speaker 2: Also call it insider and not its original name. Have
Speaker 2: you just erace that from your mind?
Speaker 1: Do you know what the original name was?
Speaker 2: Was it not cluster stock? It was, yeah, Oka cluster stock.
Speaker 1: Because everyone's like our business insider but with names even
Speaker 1: before then, and even before then was still a Connelly insider. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it's a pretty pivotal time, and you know, I guess
Speaker 1: the question for was this all is phenomenon or was
Speaker 1: this something else? Or like what was going on there?
Speaker 2: Well, I think there is an overlap with some of
Speaker 2: the bigger you know, I might be reaching here, but
Speaker 2: I think there is an overlap with some of the
Speaker 2: bigger themes we've been talking about recently, which is I
Speaker 2: guess the sort of attrition of tech or the tech
Speaker 2: strains that we've seen. And the thing that digital media
Speaker 2: has in common with a lot of the tech industry
Speaker 2: has to be venture capital financing. It has to be
Speaker 2: there was a story about what was going to happen
Speaker 2: in the digital media market. You know, people talked about
Speaker 2: these big numbers, huge audiences that could now be reached
Speaker 2: through online pop. So it feels like there is some
Speaker 2: overlap there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And of course, you know, and I was a
Speaker 1: business insider, like there was a really intense pressure month
Speaker 1: after month to hit new traffic goals. And part of
Speaker 1: that was like clearly like ad sales right there, like
Speaker 1: sort of on some level of function of traffic. But
Speaker 1: I think the other thing is they're a function of
Speaker 1: telling a story to your investors, yes for your next round.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have lots of lines going up.
Speaker 1: Lots of lines, and so regardless of whether you're actually
Speaker 1: profitable or not at any given moment, if the lines
Speaker 1: are up, you can live because you can get that
Speaker 1: next round of funding into.
Speaker 2: The classic tech growth exactly.
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to talk all about this because we're
Speaker 1: going to be speaking with Ben Smith. He is the
Speaker 1: editor in chief and co founder of Semaphore, previously as
Speaker 1: a media columnist at The New York Times, and previous
Speaker 1: to that, he was the editor in chief at the
Speaker 1: aforementioned BuzzFeed News, which changed the world. And he's the
Speaker 1: author of the new book Traffic Genius, Rivalry and The
Speaker 1: Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. So, Ben, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for coming on.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me. And I should
Speaker 3: say like, as a genuine fan and listener of the show,
Speaker 3: I can't imagine that anybody does not want to know
Speaker 3: all the details of your lives. I certainly do.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for saying that on air. I
Speaker 1: have a question, which is why did BuzzFeed News exist?
Speaker 1: And the reason I asked specifically is that in my mind,
Speaker 1: as a competitor to it, when I was an insider
Speaker 1: for several years, my perception was that BuzzFeed itself was
Speaker 1: this huge traffic monster, cultural juggernaut. Everyone knows about the quizzes,
Speaker 1: et cetera, and that BuzzFeed news was there to raise
Speaker 1: the prestige of the brand maybe for advertisers. Is that correct?
Speaker 1: Like why did it exist?
Speaker 3: So that's partially correct, but I think you have to
Speaker 3: put your head back to twenty eleven, twenty twelve when
Speaker 3: we started it, when the kind of thesis that we
Speaker 3: were working on was that in part that the Facebook
Speaker 3: news feed was this central pillar of society and people
Speaker 3: loved it. People loved the idea that quizzes, that meme,
Speaker 3: that baby pictures from your friends were all mixed up together.
Speaker 3: And at BuzzFeed, among other things, they'd noticed that on
Speaker 3: big news days their traffic went down, and so both
Speaker 3: you know, and so both kind of in a functional sense,
Speaker 3: that was part of this mix that again that people
Speaker 3: liked that this stuff was all mixed together, and so
Speaker 3: it was part of the mix that I think Jonah
Speaker 3: and the Peretti, the founder thought people wanted. But also
Speaker 3: BuzzFeed was you say it was a cultural juggernaut, but
Speaker 3: actually it was struggling for relevance. It was part it
Speaker 3: was halfway to feel this being seen by advertisers and
Speaker 3: by the platforms and by everybody else as a media company,
Speaker 3: halfway to being seen as being like nine Gag or
Speaker 3: like break dot com, or like a generation of you know, cheeseburger,
Speaker 3: a generation of an earlier generation of essentially meme sites
Speaker 3: that got wiped out in that era because the platforms
Speaker 3: consider them spam.
Speaker 2: Well, I was going to ask how much did the
Speaker 2: content mix become a problem for BuzzFeed overall because it
Speaker 2: was trying to do something kind of unusual in the
Speaker 2: sense that it was trying to do very important, sometimes
Speaker 2: investigative journalism, you know, hard news, while at the same
Speaker 2: time publishing memes and you know, like ten of the
Speaker 2: best random products you can buy off of Amazon kind
Speaker 2: of lists.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know. In this moment of which, again, this
Speaker 3: very kind of optimistic and fresh moment of social media
Speaker 3: in twenty twelve, it seemed plausible that people liked the mix,
Speaker 3: the consumers liked the mix actually, and that the same
Speaker 3: people who liked memes wanted to get hard news and
Speaker 3: wanted to get them in the same place, which was
Speaker 3: to say, Facebook slash BuzzFeed. I think as you suggest
Speaker 3: in the question that really starts to change, like news
Speaker 3: got less fun as the decade war on, not from
Speaker 3: some technical perspective, but because in fact, like there was
Speaker 3: this huge rise of right wing populism, of left wing populism,
Speaker 3: of super confrontational public politics playing out through people screaming
Speaker 3: at each other on social media, and suddenly this idea
Speaker 3: that the Facebook feed is this delightful mix of all
Speaker 3: these different things kind of curdled. And I think that
Speaker 3: was a huge problem for us that we never totally
Speaker 3: found our way out of right.
Speaker 2: So you had this like weird mix of maybe the
Speaker 2: ultra right talking about fascism and then like ten clap
Speaker 2: back tweets that you've never seen before, and they kind
Speaker 2: of sit badly alongside each other.
Speaker 3: Well, no more. You have a list of like, you know,
Speaker 3: things you only knew if you grew up Persian in
Speaker 3: New Jersey and a bunch of cute cats and a
Speaker 3: story about Donald Trump, and the reactions to that story
Speaker 3: about Donald Trump are totally polarized. So I see, okay,
Speaker 3: and yeah, and maybe you know and maybe the there's
Speaker 3: always a huge brand problem in question that like BuzzFeed news,
Speaker 3: it's like calling something like I don't know, Disney News
Speaker 3: or something like, it's a weird brand, but there was
Speaker 3: a window in which we leaned into it and people
Speaker 3: liked it, and then I think the broader social forces
Speaker 3: changed and turned against that. None of this speaks to
Speaker 3: the business model or anything else, but that was that
Speaker 3: was a real you could feel as Trump rose, you
Speaker 3: could kind of feel the weather change and feel that
Speaker 3: brand get worse.
Speaker 1: Well, man, there's a lot there. I hadn't really thought
Speaker 1: about that element though, that Like, basically, people just got
Speaker 1: angrier with each other, you know, at the end of
Speaker 1: the twenty tens than they were at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the twenty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that's the story of Facebook and
Speaker 3: BuzzFeed was the end of Twitter and BuzzFeed was a
Speaker 3: big bat on news being distributed by social media. You know.
Speaker 1: Just on this brand question though, that we can sort
Speaker 1: of pivot. You know. When I was an insider, I
Speaker 1: always sort of felt this sort of like, you know,
Speaker 1: my boss then Henry Blodgett again winner of this whole
Speaker 1: era in my opinion, and completely brilliant media executive. But
Speaker 1: I also sort of felt like this, like, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess the question is like to some extent, if
Speaker 1: you're like going up against the New York Times or
Speaker 1: the Washington Post or Bloomberg News, et cetera. Does the
Speaker 1: existence of the sort of like meme side of the
Speaker 1: operation create some sort of like hard care app in
Speaker 1: terms of really how far you can go with like prestige.
Speaker 1: I mean, because I got the sense that insider that
Speaker 1: on some level that you could like get win Coolitzers
Speaker 1: and do great work, et cetera, but on some level
Speaker 1: you kind of have to pick one or the other.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that there
Speaker 3: was a path for BuzzFeed where at its best, maybe
Speaker 3: I'm somebody who I actually like think prestige is overrated
Speaker 3: and sometimes kind of productive, but there's you know, there
Speaker 3: was journalism you could do that was that particularly focused
Speaker 3: on stuff that the majority young women who were sharing
Speaker 3: memes cared about a lot, which could be like sexual
Speaker 3: assault at massage. Envy for instance, was something we wrote about.
Speaker 3: I think at our best we were like a lot
Speaker 3: of the coverage, you know, was in sync with the
Speaker 3: people who were reading the site and was really hard
Speaker 3: hitting journalism that also overlapped with the interests of regular
Speaker 3: people reading buzzfed.
Speaker 2: Talk to us about how we I mean, the book
Speaker 2: is called Traffic, so I assume you have a lot
Speaker 2: of opinions on the importance of traffic and how it works.
Speaker 2: But talk to us, maybe specifically about how that fed,
Speaker 2: you know, the lines going up on the chart, how
Speaker 2: that fed into the business model and shaped the offering.
Speaker 2: How were people thinking about traffic as a monetizable commodity back.
Speaker 3: Then, Yeah, and I asked, And you know, I spent
Speaker 3: a lot of time in the book, and a lot
Speaker 3: of the reporting of the book, for me, particularly was
Speaker 3: on the stuff that happened before I got there, which
Speaker 3: is to say, kind of the discovery of traffic in
Speaker 3: the mid offts by the folks at you your team
Speaker 3: at Insider a little bit later, but early on, by
Speaker 3: Jonah Pieretti who was then at Huffington Post and Nick
Speaker 3: Detton at Gocker. And It's interesting to use the word commodity,
Speaker 3: because they really did think it was a commodity. It
Speaker 3: was something where they could, you know, for every individual
Speaker 3: who clicked on their sites, they could get something like
Speaker 3: a nine dollars CPM, which is a pretty good rate
Speaker 3: then and sadly now, and.
Speaker 1: They had CPM is per thousand costs for nine dollars
Speaker 1: for a thousand clicks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, And they had I think every reason to
Speaker 3: think that. Wow, Like, at this very rudimentary stage of
Speaker 3: this business, we're getting nine dollars for a really crappy product.
Speaker 3: We're going to make that product way better and we're
Speaker 3: going to scale it a lot more. And if this
Speaker 3: is a classic commodity, we're going to make an enormous
Speaker 3: amount of money. And so they're folks on trafficking the
Speaker 3: different theories about it. Denton, who started Gawker, had this
Speaker 3: very both very ideological guys actually had this theory that
Speaker 3: traffic is really to be found in kind of like
Speaker 3: ripping the mask off of society's hypocrisy, of your own hypocrisy.
Speaker 3: If your audience wants pornography, give them pornography. If they
Speaker 3: want sort of malicious stuffs that give them that it
Speaker 3: was actual important a flash spot. But also if they
Speaker 3: wanted sort of stuff that appealed to their worst instincts,
Speaker 3: give them that, don't make them pretend to be better.
Speaker 3: And then also of rip the mask of traditional journalism
Speaker 3: and print the stuff, the sort of mean, sometimes gossipy
Speaker 3: stuff or sometimes true hard truths the journalists say to
Speaker 3: each other at a bar but don't print. So that's
Speaker 3: one theory. Jonah's theory was totally different. He saw this
Speaker 3: kind of just the bubbling of this social media world
Speaker 3: and the theory that we had a buzz Steed, founder
Speaker 3: of puffing the post and then a BuzzFeed. And what
Speaker 3: he saw in this social media world, which also was
Speaker 3: true for a time, was that the stuff that people
Speaker 3: would share tended to be very positive, Like, you weren't
Speaker 3: going to go out and I mean, God forbid share insane,
Speaker 3: screamy politics because that would make you look like a
Speaker 3: crazy person. No one would do that. What you would
Speaker 3: share on Facebook was, you know, fundraisers for earthquake victims
Speaker 3: or lists of cute cats. And so he sort of
Speaker 3: what he built was around an idea at first that
Speaker 3: people were going to be distributing media themselves hand to
Speaker 3: hand and doing it in a way that reflected their
Speaker 3: best selves. So they're very different tactical ideological approaches to
Speaker 3: the Internet.
Speaker 2: This is actually something that I wanted to ask you about,
Speaker 2: which is it feels like the way people thought about
Speaker 2: traffic is it's always good eyeballs are always good, but
Speaker 2: it sort of ignores. It feels to me today like
Speaker 2: one way of generating a lot of traffic is through
Speaker 2: the hate read you get. You know, you have something
Speaker 2: saying something provocative, you're still going to get a lot
Speaker 2: of eyeballs on it. But you can't tell whether people
Speaker 2: are reading that because they think it's a valuable piece
Speaker 2: of journalism, or they're reading it because people like to
Speaker 2: read those sort of hate ready, you know, like dog
Speaker 2: whistle type pieces. How like is that something that you
Speaker 2: ever noticed.
Speaker 3: Oh, yes, there's something I ever noticed that people hate it? Yes,
Speaker 3: for sure. And I would say that if you're you know,
Speaker 3: if you are thinking of traffic as a commodity, well
Speaker 3: you're really selling is the space the white space next
Speaker 3: to that article, and so you don't care if people
Speaker 3: love it or hate it, the sort of purest logic
Speaker 3: of traffic, which turned out, by the way, to be
Speaker 3: not how it worked, and I think not how good
Speaker 3: editors ever quite saw it.
Speaker 2: The way I should have phrased the question is like
Speaker 2: did that eventually impact the business model?
Speaker 3: You know, I don't think that It's hard to think
Speaker 3: of a site that really lived on hate read's. I
Speaker 3: mean I'm sure I'm forgetting one. There was something sort
Speaker 3: of similar.
Speaker 2: The marriage announcement section of the New York Times.
Speaker 3: There is that. I mean. There was also the site
Speaker 3: called exojane that.
Speaker 1: Oh, our producer just in the message thought catalog that's
Speaker 1: a good.
Speaker 3: Yes. There was a kind of writing and I actually
Speaker 3: that was basically about having went mostly young women write
Speaker 3: in a totally un self conscious way about their personal
Speaker 3: experiences in a way that was torqued by often by
Speaker 3: kind of sophisticated, cynical editors to make them look like
Speaker 3: horrible people so people would attack them on the Internet.
Speaker 3: I mean, that to me is one of the really
Speaker 3: worst forms of Internet journalism and did like lots of
Speaker 3: damage to these writers in the name of traffic. And
Speaker 3: more broadly, there was it was a kind of I
Speaker 3: think and this came out of Gocker, really came out
Speaker 3: of Jezebel, which you know, I was not a reader
Speaker 3: at the time in two thousand and seven, but was
Speaker 3: this incredibly high impact piece of Internet history that for
Speaker 3: a time I think, if you it's actually kind of
Speaker 3: amazing to look at. You know, they launched inn O
Speaker 3: seven with this. The first thing they do is offer
Speaker 3: a bounty for anybody who can find an unretouched photograph
Speaker 3: from a women's magazine and they get it. They had
Speaker 3: ten thousand dollars and they pay it out and they
Speaker 3: get an unretouched photo of Faith Hill which before her
Speaker 3: freckles and smile lines have been removed, and really like
Speaker 3: launched this incredibly effective assault on this on everything that
Speaker 3: was wrong with women's magazines, the way they distorted the
Speaker 3: images of people's bodies. There were no black models. And
Speaker 3: they also published this very like frank revelatory writing about
Speaker 3: sex and about women's lives. And they also developed this
Speaker 3: unbelievably intense and pathological relationship with their commentators that sort
Speaker 3: of drove them totally not so and that who in
Speaker 3: the commenters felt they owned them and attacked them. And
Speaker 3: some of the writing was the kind of writing we're
Speaker 3: talking about, where you people sort of expose their own
Speaker 3: lives and then face this intense and very personal criticism.
Speaker 3: And it got enormous amounts of traffic, and Nick Detton,
Speaker 3: who didn't really love the content, kept it going because
Speaker 3: it got so much traffic. But it was both as
Speaker 3: a sort of early glimpse of both that the power
Speaker 3: of that kind of social media age, and then also
Speaker 3: it had damage or the emotions that could provoke and
Speaker 3: how damaging it could be for the writers.
Speaker 1: I want to jump ahead just like a few years.
Speaker 1: You know. It's funny because the day I literally the
Speaker 1: day before the news came out that BuzzFeed News was
Speaker 1: shutting down, I was thinking about this sort of now
Speaker 1: or famous. I guess it was a letter to the
Speaker 1: editor of the All where someone is like, I hate
Speaker 1: my life because I don't work at BuzzFeed. I was
Speaker 1: literally just sharing this article with someone the day before
Speaker 1: the news And the psychological hold that I think, like
Speaker 1: in the BuzzFeed heyday had over everyone else in the
Speaker 1: media was like extraordinary. The pressure to keep up the perception,
Speaker 1: and I think it, you know, I think our reports
Speaker 1: went all the way up to like, you know, board
Speaker 1: level at the New York Times like feeling like what
Speaker 1: are we going to do about this juggernaut. It's so innovative.
Speaker 1: They keep coming up with new story types and traffic
Speaker 1: and influence and all the young people prefer to get
Speaker 1: the news there. But what I'm curious about actually is like,
Speaker 1: what's the date that peaked?
Speaker 3: Twenty fifteen?
Speaker 1: So it was basically like that all it was basically
Speaker 1: like and why twenty like what happened?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: What was the turning point in twenty.
Speaker 3: Five I mean to me, you know, BuzzFeed was this
Speaker 3: bat and some of all these companies were a beat
Speaker 3: on that this new form of distribution was durable and
Speaker 3: that the economics would work themselves out. And I think
Speaker 3: everyone now totally rightly can say this was always idiotic.
Speaker 3: Maybe it was, but the basic metaphor analogy everybody's using
Speaker 3: was cable. You know, there were these new form of
Speaker 3: distribution been laid out. The people owning the cable lines
Speaker 3: knew that they needed quality content to populate it, and
Speaker 3: they reached a like economic arrangement where ESPN, CNN, MTV become,
Speaker 3: you know, become these great businesses. And that's what I
Speaker 3: think BuzzFeed and others imagined they would become. And I
Speaker 3: think twenty fifteen was the was really where it started
Speaker 3: to become a little clear a that that these platforms
Speaker 3: themselves are pretty fragile and sort of susceptibled all these
Speaker 3: social pressures and be that's a lot of that. They
Speaker 3: weren't going to move away from their total reliance and
Speaker 3: user generated content to create a business for publishers.
Speaker 2: So, just on this note, my impression was always that,
Speaker 2: in addition to the distribution issues that you just mentioned,
Speaker 2: which we should dig into a little bit further, but
Speaker 2: one of one of the big problems here was that
Speaker 2: the traditional media companies also just got better at doing
Speaker 2: what a lot of the digital media companies were doing.
Speaker 2: And you know, where I worked Alphaville, it wasn't necessarily
Speaker 2: a traffic juggernaut, but it was kind of pioneering of
Speaker 2: a certain type of journalism, certain experiments with you know,
Speaker 2: audience engagement and events and things like that. And what
Speaker 2: always tended to happen within the Financial Times was that
Speaker 2: we would do something new and exciting and innovative, and
Speaker 2: then that would just get replicated by the ft itself,
Speaker 2: and so it becomes hard to sort of maintain the
Speaker 2: momentum of having new types of exciting journalism at a
Speaker 2: constant rate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a sign of a pretty healthy organization basically.
Speaker 3: But there was this arrogance that really came out of
Speaker 3: the oughts where we were looking at the New York Times,
Speaker 3: at the CBS News and it was just it just
Speaker 3: seems so clear that they were doomed that they could
Speaker 3: never figure out digital media, that their leadership just was
Speaker 3: terrified of it and had no idea what was going on.
Speaker 3: And I think this arrogance lasted a long long past
Speaker 3: its expiry date. And we just published on Semaphore an
Speaker 3: excerpt from my book of When Jonah Peretti Goes is
Speaker 3: invited into the New York Times in twenty fifteen to
Speaker 3: tell them how to do their jobs. And it's a
Speaker 3: board he's speaking to a board meeting and the interviewer
Speaker 3: asks him what he would do if he was named
Speaker 3: CEO of the New York Times, and he says, well,
Speaker 3: first I would ask you for a raise, and then
Speaker 3: second I would go into my office, shut my door
Speaker 3: and cry yeah.
Speaker 1: And that's a lot of yeah.
Speaker 3: But what Actually, by then, the Times had started to
Speaker 3: figure it out, and they didn't follow fast. And in fact,
Speaker 3: a number of traditional media companies I'm thinking of the
Speaker 3: Washington Post had really screwed themselves by trying to follow fast,
Speaker 3: like they had copied this thing and that thing in
Speaker 3: blogs and never really built anything. The Times followed slowly
Speaker 3: and carefully, but very very deliberately and very effectively. And
Speaker 3: I think suddenly we looked up and yeah, they had
Speaker 3: copied a lot of our tactics. They had taken a
Speaker 3: lot of our best people and had closed that gap
Speaker 3: and then had could deploy their huge advantages around brand,
Speaker 3: around resources.
Speaker 1: You know, you mentioned the doomed cable analogy and some
Speaker 1: of like that peak and one sort of phrase that
Speaker 1: I think lives rent free, so to speak in the
Speaker 1: head of many journalists to digital journalists is quote the
Speaker 1: pivot to video and all of these the pivot to video,
Speaker 1: We're going to do video.
Speaker 2: And my impression we just launched a video product.
Speaker 3: Water, are we being filmed? I'm still soaking.
Speaker 1: We did odd lots? Is in fact doing a pivot
Speaker 1: to video? No, it's kind of. But my impression is,
Speaker 1: like what happened. Facebook came to a bunch of publishers
Speaker 1: and said, we will you'll go viral more if you
Speaker 1: do video.
Speaker 2: Well, there's a lot driving this.
Speaker 1: There's hire CPMs and you're going to do really well
Speaker 1: and so build all these expensive video studios and you're
Speaker 1: going to make a lot of money. Is that basically
Speaker 1: what happened? Then it didn't materialize in the end.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I find it a little hard to I mean
Speaker 3: to be mad at Facebook for this. They just kind
Speaker 3: of randomly gave a bunch of publishers money and in
Speaker 3: some did redeploy their existing writers who weren't good on
Speaker 3: video to make videos. I mean, I you know, there was,
Speaker 3: there has been in society a pivot to video. There's
Speaker 3: this widely used product called TikTok, which is reliant on
Speaker 3: short video. So I mean, I think then that news
Speaker 3: was going to be delivered in video by people who
Speaker 3: were terrible at making videos was probably not the case,
Speaker 3: but and it was a sign. I think it came
Speaker 3: as a lot of these digital publishers, you know, we're
Speaker 3: scrambling for revenue try to figure out how their businesses
Speaker 3: were supposed to work, and so a pivot was a
Speaker 3: pretty scary thing.
Speaker 2: Can we talk more about the distribution channels here, because
Speaker 2: I think that's the subtext of a lot of what
Speaker 2: we're talking about, which is you had this explosion of
Speaker 2: digital media, but then at the same time you had
Speaker 2: a handful of distribution platforms, so things like Google, Facebook,
Speaker 2: Apple that were growing more and more powerful and sort
Speaker 2: of more concentrated in their own monopoly power. When it
Speaker 2: came to distributing the news. So how much of that
Speaker 2: was a negative force on the digital media business.
Speaker 3: Well, it was the digital media business. I mean, it
Speaker 3: was a hugely positive force, right, much of the digital
Speaker 3: media business, and certainly really BuzzFeed above all was just
Speaker 3: all your chips on the table, bet on Facebook and
Speaker 3: subsidiarily and Pinderest and others, and that they were going
Speaker 3: to be your distribution. And that again, like jonah Pretty's
Speaker 3: basic theory, which I think you can argue now about
Speaker 3: whether it's true or not, was that Facebook and these
Speaker 3: other platforms would find that they had a need for
Speaker 3: quality content to retain their users to compete against places
Speaker 3: like Netflix, and that they would eventually start paying for
Speaker 3: higher and higher quality content as other platforms head through history.
Speaker 3: And that just did not happen, and that that went
Speaker 3: totally wrong.
Speaker 1: Let's here's a twenty twenty three question. How old is
Speaker 1: some of four now about it?
Speaker 3: That's six months six months?
Speaker 1: Where does traffic come from today or where does audience
Speaker 1: if you want to redefine that come from in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, because I you know, it doesn't feel like
Speaker 1: many things like go viral at any level anymore.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's such a totally different world. I mean, newsletters
Speaker 3: are really important to us and probably the sort of
Speaker 3: core of our distribution. The web exists and it's a
Speaker 3: very familiar space to me for someone who's been kind
Speaker 3: of looking at traffic for twenty years, and that the
Speaker 3: Drudge Report is a great is a really important Many
Speaker 3: people continue to go there. There's a set of kind
Speaker 3: of I think it was Asian style aggregators, some Asian,
Speaker 3: some specifically out of Asia, smart news, news break, little
Speaker 3: send traffic, flipboard indoors. But in a weird way, it's
Speaker 3: this Internet from fifteen years ago, before social media existing,
Speaker 3: that has returned. And then you know, we do a
Speaker 3: lot of events which people really like, which is you know,
Speaker 3: the most intimate direct form of audience.
Speaker 2: So is that the future of traffic and audience? Is
Speaker 2: it the sort of smaller scale develop it organically or
Speaker 2: are there still the big channels? I know you mentioned
Speaker 2: Judge Report, but is anyone still trying to target you know,
Speaker 2: Facebook exclusively?
Speaker 3: Now you know, Facebook is just not on our radar
Speaker 3: as a distribution channel at all. I mean, it's a
Speaker 3: really it's I mean that was probably the biggest surprise
Speaker 3: to me in starting a new thing, and I'm not
Speaker 3: sure there's one future. I mean, I think what we're
Speaker 3: really looking at is a much more splintered landscape in which,
Speaker 3: among other things like the web itself and traffic is
Speaker 3: one of the splinters.
Speaker 1: Is there, like ever going to be another publication that
Speaker 1: tries to be a you know, like the thing about
Speaker 1: Insider and the thing about BuzzFeed and the thing about Gawker.
Speaker 1: Through all of the various like Gawker subverticals is that
Speaker 1: they were essentially attempts to replicate or go after the
Speaker 1: New York Times and to create these all in one
Speaker 1: news packages. Huffington Post as well, obviously like destinations that
Speaker 1: had everything like would anyone try that again to sort
Speaker 1: of like create an all purpose news brand?
Speaker 3: What kind of an idiot would do something like that? Well, actually,
Speaker 3: I mean sports, Like you know, it's some.
Speaker 1: You know we're say would sew for launched sports?
Speaker 3: I would say nobody would would try it. Would imagine
Speaker 3: that you can do it in a kind of explosive,
Speaker 3: flip the lights on and reach a billion people in
Speaker 3: three years kind of a way. I mean, I think
Speaker 3: I do think that it's again a weird changing moment
Speaker 3: where what people want is some people are if the
Speaker 3: challenges are different. If like, you know, when we were
Speaker 3: starting all this stuff, it was so cool to be
Speaker 3: able to read read publications from all over and hear
Speaker 3: voices from all over. Now people are drowning in that
Speaker 3: and are looking for help navigating it. And if you
Speaker 3: can do that, well, that's real value. But it does
Speaker 3: feel like a kind of interregnum where there's some next thing.
Speaker 3: We haven't totally seen it yet.
Speaker 2: We haven't really talked about the funding side, which I
Speaker 2: think is important, But we saw a lot of venture
Speaker 2: capital money flood into the space in the sort of
Speaker 2: twenty tens. What was the story back then and then
Speaker 2: fast forward to today? Are there any vcs out there
Speaker 2: who are very excited about the future of digital media?
Speaker 2: I assume there are some because Somemaphore got some VC funding,
Speaker 2: I believe, But like, what is the story now?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we didn't actually get any sorry funding, and I think,
Speaker 3: you know, that was certainly a lesson. I feel like
Speaker 3: I learned from that era the expectation of fast, massive returns.
Speaker 3: And we talked about digital media, but we're really talking
Speaker 3: about the news business, the journalism business. That's a really
Speaker 3: unrealistic expectation and not something that we wanted to promise
Speaker 3: that we would in four years have you know, multiplier
Speaker 3: valuation by a thousand or whatever vcs expect. You know,
Speaker 3: these people aren't well I don't know, I don't They're
Speaker 3: not widely seen as idiots, and they were making these
Speaker 3: big bets on all the publishers we've mentioned. Yeah, because
Speaker 3: they imagined that there was a world in which they
Speaker 3: were companies, you know, in which Vice would be Disney
Speaker 3: or which BuzzFeed would be NBC Universal, and these would
Speaker 3: go to massive, massive scale. It's you know, it's interesting
Speaker 3: to think back to how could they have thought such
Speaker 3: a thing. And I think that cable analogy tells some
Speaker 3: of that story. But I don't really see any vcs
Speaker 3: anywhere near the media business right now.
Speaker 1: Can I just quid detour? Because we've been talking about
Speaker 1: Insider and what was Vice? Because I actually, like people
Speaker 1: talked about Vice a lot, but like I never like
Speaker 1: knew someone who like went to Vice dot com.
Speaker 3: Like what was Vice? I know, it's you know, I
Speaker 3: wrote this whole book about traffic, and Advice isn't really
Speaker 3: in it because they didn't get any traffic. They were Ah.
Speaker 3: They were the purest best brand of the digital media era,
Speaker 3: as Shane Smith was the best advertising salesman anyone has
Speaker 3: probably of our generation, and best equity salesman of our generation.
Speaker 3: And they did have this brand that really stood for something.
Speaker 3: They made some incredible documentary mini documentaries that really caught
Speaker 3: people's attention and defined a style of telling stories. They
Speaker 3: did not ever really build digital audience, and what they
Speaker 3: were able to do for a time was to convert
Speaker 3: that brand into a television production company that made a
Speaker 3: pretty good news show for HBO. But the television production business,
Speaker 3: I mean you think the digital media business is tough,
Speaker 3: I mean that's a really tough business as well, because
Speaker 3: you can get your show canceled, which is ultimately what happened.
Speaker 2: Sorry to keep jumping back in time, but I think
Speaker 2: it sort of informs the current state of the market.
Speaker 2: There was a moment when Shona Peretti was talking about
Speaker 2: like maybe the media could get together to give them
Speaker 2: some more bargaining power over the platforms the distribution channels.
Speaker 2: Was that ever a viable solution to some of the
Speaker 2: issues we've been talking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Jonah in particular had an idea that you could
Speaker 3: basically if you rolled up enough scale on digital media
Speaker 3: that you could gain leverage against Facebook in particular. I mean,
Speaker 3: you see why that makes sense. I mean it's a
Speaker 3: very classic way of thinking about a market. But I
Speaker 3: think there's this underlying problem that what these guys were
Speaker 3: selling was, you know, that it was not a commodity,
Speaker 3: that scale was infinite, that Facebook, whether or not they
Speaker 3: had access to, you know, high quality journalism, at least
Speaker 3: to the thought that they could reach every single person
Speaker 3: on the planet forever with their better mass trap and
Speaker 3: didn't really need you. Again, I think as you look
Speaker 3: at social media and you watch it unravel, it's not
Speaker 3: crazy to think about, huh, like, maybe these maybe maybe
Speaker 3: these social platforms should have taken more seriously the idea
Speaker 3: that they should have been pivoting towards subscription services with
Speaker 3: high quality content, since that seems like those are the
Speaker 3: companies that are now winning. But that was it, But
Speaker 3: it also seems inspect that was never going to happen,
Speaker 3: and it was crazy to imagine it would.
Speaker 1: So speaking of bargaining power, you know, I was an
Speaker 1: insider for six years and they were very good for
Speaker 1: my career, etc. As I wouldn't trade that for anything
Speaker 1: except that they were extremely psychologically and physically demanding. I basically,
Speaker 1: I work seven days a week. I would get up
Speaker 1: early on weekends to post. I would probably work twelve
Speaker 1: hours a day on the weekdays. I would wake up
Speaker 1: sometimes so stressed out I would like punch a pillow
Speaker 1: a few times. And the reason I bring up bargaining
Speaker 1: power is that I think a lot of people don't
Speaker 1: like that. And a number of newsrooms have unionized, and
Speaker 1: I'm sort of curious, Like I left Insider prior to
Speaker 1: that newsroom having unionized. But but BuzzFeed News did unionize
Speaker 1: while you were the editor in chief there, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. How did that change that? Was there like
Speaker 1: a noticeable different in the way like this sort of
Speaker 1: like post post post post that I like grew up in,
Speaker 1: Like did that change or was there like a did
Speaker 1: it shift anything when the news rem union ized? You know?
Speaker 3: I mean maybe we had already moved a little past
Speaker 3: the era that you were talking about where you were
Speaker 3: in a personal foot race with Twitter. Yeah, and you
Speaker 3: were always second, which is pretty amazing, Like no one
Speaker 3: else could manage it. You were the fleetest of foot
Speaker 3: It was crazy, but it did seem stressful still. Second, Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I was, yeah, I mean I was, you know,
Speaker 3: in that race too at various times. No, I don't
Speaker 3: think people I don't think people union ask because they
Speaker 3: wanted to work less hard. I think it was a
Speaker 3: sense of wanting control over your life and your work
Speaker 3: in this very stressful, chaotic moment in America, not just
Speaker 3: in you know, in the news business in particular, and
Speaker 3: wanting protection against the downside at a pretty gloomy seeming moment. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but you know, the New York Times, Wall Street journal
Speaker 3: I had unions forever. I think it's you know, it's
Speaker 3: an industry that has a history of pretty strong unions.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think there's this other challenge right now,
Speaker 3: which is that news rooms, good newsrooms are really egalitarian
Speaker 3: and feel it, and unions are part of that culture.
Speaker 3: And at the same time, this ecosystem rewards individual journalists
Speaker 3: who get there there whatever. You know, they hate, we
Speaker 3: all hate the words like influencer and brand, but in
Speaker 3: fact that is it's an ecosystem that rewards that. And
Speaker 3: figuring out how you blend those cultures I think is
Speaker 3: a big kind of newsroom challenge.
Speaker 2: Since we mentioned Twitter. It has been interesting watching the
Speaker 2: slow implosion of Twitter at this time, but both Joe
Speaker 2: and I our careers have certainly benefited from that platform.
Speaker 2: What would be the impact of Twitter, you know, suddenly
Speaker 2: going away or either becoming irrelevant on the media industry.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think we're halfway through that process and
Speaker 3: you're seeing it. I think it means that as a consumer,
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm currently and I don't know if you
Speaker 3: feel this or if your listeners feel this, but I
Speaker 3: wake up in the morning and I want to My
Speaker 3: main use case for Twitter had been what is how
Speaker 3: happening there?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: And it doesn't do that anymore for me, just like,
Speaker 3: what are the four news stories I need to be watching?
Speaker 3: I need to go to the front page of the
Speaker 3: New York Times or the Drudge Report or seventeen other
Speaker 3: places and actually a lot of it some forore, like,
Speaker 3: that's definitely like a job we feel can be done.
Speaker 3: What we're trying to do every morning with Flagship is like,
Speaker 3: here's what is happening in the world, because that is
Speaker 3: a service Twitter used to provide. They have what Netwi
Speaker 3: Twitter that provides is this riveting story about itself, which
Speaker 3: I find very interesting as a long time Twitter user,
Speaker 3: but I watch it.
Speaker 2: That's most of the value now is to see what
Speaker 2: people are saying about Twitter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it doesn't do that particular thing and it
Speaker 3: doesn't you know, and it's yeah, and it's just so so.
Speaker 3: But I think as a newswire, as a sort of user,
Speaker 3: it's become less useful. As a journalist, it was a
Speaker 3: good place for people to build their brands to some
Speaker 3: degree still is I think in certain spaces. I think
Speaker 3: in economics AI there are really interesting like threads of
Speaker 3: conversation that are still there and you could imagine. I mean,
Speaker 3: I think Reddit is a really interesting example, like there's
Speaker 3: a social network that didn't go away, actually probably the
Speaker 3: best place on the internet, but it's also not centrally
Speaker 3: relevant to news in culture, and I think there's a
Speaker 3: path for Twitter that is that.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you mentioned AI. Actually it's funny, Tracy it.
Speaker 1: I recorded an episode earlier in the day and we
Speaker 1: decided that well, from now on, I guess there's always
Speaker 1: going to be an AI question, probably in every interview
Speaker 1: at least, it's.
Speaker 2: Usually going to be how is AI going to make
Speaker 2: this worse?
Speaker 1: But actually, like, as someone who makes my living with
Speaker 1: words in one way or another. A. I'm pretty blown
Speaker 1: away by what AI can do, and in my mind,
Speaker 1: I have a fair amount of anxiety that at some
Speaker 1: point in a few years someone could say, you know,
Speaker 1: I'd really like to hear Ben Smith on the Odd
Speaker 1: Lots podcast, and rather than waiting for us to like
Speaker 1: book Ben's Smith and then get it out a week
Speaker 1: later or whatever, they just say, what would it be like?
Speaker 1: And then they run it through a voice generation thing
Speaker 1: and they have like a pretty good version of the
Speaker 1: Odd Lots podcast where Joe and Tracy interview Ben. I'm
Speaker 1: on ironically anxious that this is like a real possibility,
Speaker 1: but in like the next few years, Like, doesn't it
Speaker 1: worry you at all?
Speaker 3: It worries me. I don't think I've quite figured out
Speaker 3: the scenario that's really gonna freak me out, because I
Speaker 3: don't I'm not sure it's that. I mean, I think
Speaker 3: I don't. I think there's already enormous amounts of sort
Speaker 3: of you know, copy pasta random grated content on the Internet,
Speaker 3: and the fact that you could get someone to read
Speaker 3: it aloud in my voice. I'm not sure that's four.
Speaker 3: Like I'm not sure we're I mean, I think there
Speaker 3: was this sort of Google centric view of the Internet
Speaker 3: where if you just sprayed garbage content everywhere, you would
Speaker 3: ocasually make a few pennies.
Speaker 1: My concern is that it's not going to be garbage,
Speaker 1: That it actually will scan the corpus of all Ben
Speaker 1: Smith content and be pretty good and sort of figuring
Speaker 1: out what you were going to answer, That it'll scan
Speaker 1: Joe and Tracy episodes and kind of and be good
Speaker 1: at figuring out the questions we would ask. And I actually,
Speaker 1: I actually.
Speaker 2: Don't worry about that. What I worry about is because
Speaker 2: it will come up with something predictable. What humans will
Speaker 2: have to do, what human journalists will have to do
Speaker 2: is come even more extreme and were unpredictable.
Speaker 3: A really interesting I mean, I don't think your audience
Speaker 3: wants that, Like I think you underestimate your audience, Like
Speaker 3: I think if you if you flagged in advance of
Speaker 3: this episode was entirely AI generated from from re scrambling
Speaker 3: the corpus of things we've said before, they wouldn't listen. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't know, but I also and I also I
Speaker 3: guess I sort of come from like the sort of
Speaker 3: scoop world of journalism, Like I care a lot about reporting,
Speaker 3: and it isn't And that's a kind of journalism where
Speaker 3: not only is it's sort of a little harder to
Speaker 3: see AI disrupting it, but also over you know, over
Speaker 3: the last twenty thirty years of editors getting worn away
Speaker 3: in newsrooms, there's been this thing that I've noticed where
Speaker 3: there's a kind of journalist who was not a particularly
Speaker 3: good writer. And in the old days of tabloids, like
Speaker 3: you know, you were a runner and you had a
Speaker 3: rewrite guy. And as these metro newspapers ran out of money,
Speaker 3: the first people to go were these kind of rewrite
Speaker 3: mid level editors. And it really disfavored people who did
Speaker 3: not have fancy educations and or were not good writers,
Speaker 3: but were really great reporters. And I don't know, if
Speaker 3: you have somebody who can really report and can't write
Speaker 3: and wants to use some writing tools, like that's fine
Speaker 3: with me.
Speaker 1: I remember hearing a story Tracy from I Forget, who
Speaker 1: is someone at the New York Post talk about how
Speaker 1: you know, they'd have the guy go out and it's
Speaker 1: like a doctor was found dead in a hotel room
Speaker 1: with his girlfriend and then the rewrite gown being okay
Speaker 1: doc with Gail Pale, like could translate it into New
Speaker 1: York Post.
Speaker 3: Speak like and that's and that is and that's like
Speaker 3: literally what what what chat GVT is best at? Right now?
Speaker 2: There was someone at the FT who was exactly like that.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to say who, but I imagine.
Speaker 3: You would make it more boring.
Speaker 2: No, there was someone who is very, very good at
Speaker 2: reporting and getting the story, but had to have all
Speaker 2: of their copy rewritten.
Speaker 3: Oh, they're legendary, fabulous magazine writers whose names we all
Speaker 3: know and admire, whose editors write every word, and like,
Speaker 3: what's wrong with that?
Speaker 1: Like, I think that's a different jobs.
Speaker 3: It's a great form of news production. It's sort of
Speaker 3: too bad that it's all been flattened out. And if
Speaker 3: some of these tools help people write, it's not the
Speaker 3: most important part of the job.
Speaker 2: So one of the things I wanted to ask you
Speaker 2: was I was reading. First of all, I really want
Speaker 2: to read your book. I haven't done it yet, but
Speaker 2: I'm looking forward to it. I was reading instead one
Speaker 2: of the reviews of the book.
Speaker 3: I think it was the one to read the reviews,
Speaker 3: like in that movie Metropolitan, just read the critics.
Speaker 2: I think it was probably John Gapper or someone like that,
Speaker 2: but they had a line in there saying that they
Speaker 2: felt that in the book there was no moral conclusion
Speaker 2: about this whole episode of digital media. So I guess
Speaker 2: I'd love to hear from you, you know, here's your
Speaker 2: chance at a clear moral conclusion, like what is the
Speaker 2: big takeaway of the past ten or fifteen years in
Speaker 2: digital journalism?
Speaker 3: It's the old apocryphal John lie thing, So too soon
Speaker 3: to tell, But I think I don't know about a
Speaker 3: moral conclusion, but would say the thing that surprised me
Speaker 3: most in the reporting was that that world that we
Speaker 3: that I was reporting on, that we were all in
Speaker 3: in the kind of early Internet I think was assumed
Speaker 3: thought itself to be politically progressive, like without really thinking
Speaker 3: about it, these were the Internet was where young people
Speaker 3: got together to elect Barack Obama. And you know Barack
Speaker 3: Obama pays a visit to Facebook. Obviously Facebook. You know,
Speaker 3: it goes with that saying book is a democratic place
Speaker 3: where that is friendly to Barack Obama. And I think
Speaker 3: the people, some of the people at Huffington Post totally
Speaker 3: explicitly their job was to elect Barack Obama, and I
Speaker 3: think it was a surprise to me and the reporting
Speaker 3: to see that the sort of people who created the
Speaker 3: populist right. You know, the guy Chris Pool who founded
Speaker 3: four Chan worked out of BuzzFeed's offices. I don't think
Speaker 3: he was a conservative, but he built that. Andrew Breichbart
Speaker 3: was a co founder of Huffington Post. Steve Bannon comes
Speaker 3: through and learns from Huffington Post and so on and
Speaker 3: so on. And then, like I think, if the people
Speaker 3: who thought that the election of Barack Obama was kind
Speaker 3: of the apage of this whole moment, yeah, turn around
Speaker 3: and suddenly, actually the election of Donald Trump is the
Speaker 3: apogee of the moment, and the people who thought they
Speaker 3: were the main characters actually were the supporting characters. And
Speaker 3: the main characters were these conservatives who'd been we thought
Speaker 3: had been hanging around the edges, but actually were the
Speaker 3: central thrust.
Speaker 1: One thing that you know, since we're talking politics, you know,
Speaker 1: we have the various cable networks on TV, like in
Speaker 1: the newsroom, and they're all on mute, so I don't
Speaker 1: really listen to them. But one thing I definitely noticed
Speaker 1: is that like CNN and like maybe some of the others,
Speaker 1: they've never been able to quit Trump. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: like Biden has been the president for like over two
Speaker 1: years now, and I'm pretty sure at least I see
Speaker 1: as much Trump pretty much constantly. I don't know, I'm
Speaker 1: just sort of curious, Like the last thing like this
Speaker 1: very like strange love hate. I kind of think the
Speaker 1: media mostly loves Trump, even if like the words are
Speaker 1: kind of anti Trump. Like I'm just like, what like
Speaker 1: the Trump era and beyond has like done to the media.
Speaker 3: I mean, the rise of this you know, reality show
Speaker 3: star turned would be authoritarian is obviously the biggest story,
Speaker 3: you know, in this period of American history. So I
Speaker 3: don't think it's crazy that the media covers it or
Speaker 3: that its viewers are very interested in it. And but
Speaker 3: I but obviously also, you know, TV has its own
Speaker 3: form of traffic, which is ratings. Yeah, And there's a
Speaker 3: sense in which Trump in twenty sixteen was like sort
Speaker 3: of providing free syndic content to CNN that was just
Speaker 3: putting it on and people were watching it. I mean
Speaker 3: Newsmax was competitive with other channels the other day because
Speaker 3: it just put a Trump speech on unfiltered, and CNN
Speaker 3: is going back to the well and on town hall
Speaker 3: with Donald Trump. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think
Speaker 3: it's you know, I think sometimes the media overestimates our
Speaker 3: own role and our own power. And you know, Trump,
Speaker 3: in fact, basically was banned from cable Rupert Murdoch said
Speaker 3: that he was going to make him a non person.
Speaker 3: He was banned from the social networks, and he remained
Speaker 3: very popular because a lot of Republicans really love him
Speaker 3: and like what he's selling. And maybe we overestimated the
Speaker 3: role of the media in that, like they weren't confused
Speaker 3: about who he was, they hadn't been tricked. They just
Speaker 3: really like him. And so it's not particularly healthy for
Speaker 3: a country. Like when a country's consuming as much news
Speaker 3: as this country was in the period twenty sixteen twenty twenty,
Speaker 3: that's like not a great sign. It was probably a
Speaker 3: more normal country that consumes less news, and we're headed
Speaker 3: probably to another national panic attack and consume a lot
Speaker 3: of news.
Speaker 2: I do remember before Trump won the presidency. I think
Speaker 2: I was in Abu Dhabi at the time and I
Speaker 2: wasn't watching cable news, and I remember coming back to
Speaker 2: the US for a visit and seeing CNN and it
Speaker 2: was just Trump like wall to wall coverage of Trump,
Speaker 2: and up until that point, I thought like, oh, this
Speaker 2: is crazy, but then you see him on TV all
Speaker 2: the time and you're like, oh wait a second. But
Speaker 2: just on that note, I mean, so I think the
Speaker 2: thing that traffic and cable news all kind of has
Speaker 2: in common. And going back to the question I asked
Speaker 2: earlier about the hate read, is a way to get
Speaker 2: people's attention is obviously to provoke outrage or to play
Speaker 2: to previously held opinions. Once that can has been opened
Speaker 2: or once that box has been opened, can we ever
Speaker 2: go back to that sort of like classic maybe nineteen fifties,
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties era of you know, unbiased media coverage, bipartisan coverage,
Speaker 2: heels to all types of people, or is that just gone?
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that specific thing you're talking about
Speaker 3: isn't so much classic as a sort of temporary product
Speaker 3: of post war metropolitan newspaper businesses that were that you know,
Speaker 3: we're selling, you know, we're these monopoly advertising businesses that
Speaker 3: wanted to sell to everybody. But I also think, you know,
Speaker 3: the sort of suddenly the lights turned on when the
Speaker 3: data from digital media came in, and suddenly these people
Speaker 3: who've been not only flying without instruments but kind of sleepwalking.
Speaker 3: You know, they've been doing the same thing for years
Speaker 3: and years and in a pretty in a declining industry,
Speaker 3: and suddenly they could you know, they were flying with
Speaker 3: instruments and we could all suddenly see and you know,
Speaker 3: exquisite detail everyone who was reading everything and it and
Speaker 3: in many ways probably you know, over overtrqued toward that lesson.
Speaker 1: All right, I have one last question. It's very self
Speaker 1: serving for me and Tracy, but I feel like, to
Speaker 1: some extent, and tell me of you disagree to some extent,
Speaker 1: I feel like when you look at all of the
Speaker 1: big changes that have undergone the news business, in a way,
Speaker 1: business news is a bit of an exception and that
Speaker 1: it's been more stable. And I remember an insider when
Speaker 1: you like, I'm a huge admirer and was at the
Speaker 1: whole time of like BuzzFeed News, but I remember I
Speaker 1: was like paranoid when you guys launched a business section
Speaker 1: because I was like, oh, now you're gonna come and
Speaker 1: it didn't really click in my opinion, like it didn't
Speaker 1: really work. And generally speaking, it does not feel like
Speaker 1: the level of disruption and sort of like tumult that
Speaker 1: many parts of the industry has faced has hit business
Speaker 1: news quite the same way. And the Wallshet Journal is
Speaker 1: still powerhouse and Bloomberg is still a powerhouse, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Is there Do you feel that that's the case? Like
Speaker 1: what it was it about business news, even at BuzzFeed
Speaker 1: that made it unlike say some of these other categories.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it was more competitive, and it was
Speaker 3: better resourced, and you had healthier institutions. And that's because
Speaker 3: business is where the money is. I mean, I think
Speaker 3: that's actually why it's a better business than general christ news,
Speaker 3: you know, just for the literal reason that people are
Speaker 3: making money on what you and what you produce, and
Speaker 3: so they can and trading on it and subscribing. I mean,
Speaker 3: this institution is probably the best example of that.
Speaker 1: I'm not kidding about the psychological effects on me in
Speaker 1: those years. I mean I've like gotten over it, and
Speaker 1: it's not one of these things like oh I needed
Speaker 1: years of therapy, but like those were really extremely stressful years.
Speaker 1: And I remember before BuzzFeed launched its business section just
Speaker 1: being like insanely stressed. I was like, my life is
Speaker 1: stressful enough. And now like the news entity that's the
Speaker 1: juggernaut of all things is coming after business news and
Speaker 1: now we're done.
Speaker 3: But well, I'm glad we didn't. We didn't push Thank
Speaker 3: you that one.
Speaker 1: Thank you for not Thank you for Ben, Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for coming on Odd Lost. This was a
Speaker 1: lot of fun.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker 2: Thanks Ben. That was great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was great, Tracy, that was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: I hope the listeners found it fun because for me, actually,
Speaker 1: like I could talk about this for hours, Like there
Speaker 1: are not many topics that we discussed on the show
Speaker 1: in which I feel like I have expertise, like that's
Speaker 1: why I'm the interviewer, but like on the digital media
Speaker 1: business of the last fifteen years, which were both in
Speaker 1: I kind of consider us both experts.
Speaker 2: Joe, you know which one of us got more traffic
Speaker 2: last year?
Speaker 1: Uh? It was you? It wasn't it?
Speaker 2: It was me? Was it?
Speaker 1: It was like one of those housing store what was it?
Speaker 1: You had so many? I had a bunch.
Speaker 2: I was just behind Matt Levine in the in the
Speaker 2: traffic ranks. But I actually that's something we didn't talk about,
Speaker 2: is the data visibility, because this was one of the
Speaker 2: like defining things of digital journalism, which was you could
Speaker 2: see how many people were reading your article in real time,
Speaker 2: and that really helped you focus on the type of
Speaker 2: content you were producer.
Speaker 1: There's a lot there. I mean, so an insider, it
Speaker 1: was on the walls, like it was on on the
Speaker 1: like a scoreboard. It was on the scoreboard for everyone's.
Speaker 2: Just that's crazy.
Speaker 1: It was I'm telling you, I don't want to totally
Speaker 1: over exaggerated and say scarred for years, but the stress
Speaker 1: that caused people to like see everyone's traffic on the
Speaker 1: walls and all the time, it did two things that
Speaker 1: drove people crazy, and it turned people into absolute juggernauts.
Speaker 1: And you could take someone out of school from like
Speaker 1: Columbia Jay School or UNC or Duke or Northwestern, and
Speaker 1: in a few months they were a traffic moster.
Speaker 2: But see, this is also why I asked that question
Speaker 2: about hate reads, because you can produce a headline that
Speaker 2: will get a bunch of people to click on it,
Speaker 2: but not necessarily in a good way. And I feel
Speaker 2: like a lot of digital journalism was about provoking that
Speaker 2: response and not necessarily building up a dedicated audience.
Speaker 1: Henry Blodgett, what it's like to actually eat a cheeseburger.
Speaker 1: What it's actually you know, like those were like hate
Speaker 1: reads and Veterans is so good.
Speaker 2: But like, but you know, there's no differentiating between someone
Speaker 2: reading something because it's fair and balanced and accurate and
Speaker 2: insightful versus someone reading something because it's provocative or stupid
Speaker 2: or extreme in one way or another.
Speaker 1: Your point is something I'm very concerned about about AI,
Speaker 1: which is if there's this perception that's sort of like
Speaker 1: AI is going to be really good at the sort
Speaker 1: of commodity normal, and all these people in media think like, oh,
Speaker 1: I got to really like I have to AI proof
Speaker 1: my career.
Speaker 2: You have to turbo charge the hot takes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm like, this is what social media did, and I
Speaker 1: think this is one I don't know. I think it's
Speaker 1: going to be even more extreme.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I think too. All Right, on that
Speaker 2: happy note, shall we leave it there.
Speaker 1: Let's leave it there, all right.
Speaker 2: This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at
Speaker 2: Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 1: And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at the Stalwart. You can follow our guest Ben Smith.
Speaker 1: He's at semaphore Ben and check out his new book Traffic.
Speaker 1: Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman and dash
Speaker 1: Ol Bennett at dashbot. And for more odd Lots content,
Speaker 1: go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd lots, where we
Speaker 1: post the transcripts. We have a blog, a newsletter that
Speaker 1: comes out every Friday, and we have a discord Discord
Speaker 1: dot gg slash odd lots. Listeners are in there twenty
Speaker 1: four to seven talk about all this stuff. It's really fun.
Speaker 1: It might even be the future of media we can do.
Speaker 1: It's really great. I love it. It's a great place
Speaker 1: to hang out.
Speaker 2: Leave Twitter and joining us, join us on discord
Speaker 1: On ironically that go check it out and thanks for listening.