WEBVTT - Ben Smith on the End of an Era for Digital Media 0:00:10.119 --> 0:00:14.280 Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. 0:00:14.360 --> 0:00:16.680 I'm Geo Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. 0:00:17.239 --> 0:00:19.919 Tracy, there's been a lot of media news and it's 0:00:19.920 --> 0:00:22.880 a cliche and I'm sure it's been repeated over and 0:00:22.920 --> 0:00:25.040 over again in headlines, but we're at like the end 0:00:25.079 --> 0:00:27.440 of an era, for like the era of journalism that 0:00:27.480 --> 0:00:28.600 we both came up in. 0:00:28.960 --> 0:00:31.440 I feel like before we start this episode, we should 0:00:31.520 --> 0:00:34.720 just get the disclaimer out right away, which is this 0:00:34.760 --> 0:00:38.920 is probably going to be our most navel gazing episode ever. 0:00:39.360 --> 0:00:41.839 Yes, and I think we're even planning on releasing this 0:00:41.960 --> 0:00:44.920 it's like a Friday bonus episode or the week just 0:00:44.960 --> 0:00:47.479 to acknowledge that. It's like, Okay, if you don't want 0:00:47.479 --> 0:00:50.680 to know anything about the media business or Joe and 0:00:50.720 --> 0:00:52.879 Tracy are all these things that are sort of like 0:00:53.200 --> 0:00:55.960 endemic to their lives over the last decade, feel free 0:00:56.040 --> 0:00:57.320 to skip this one. 0:00:57.440 --> 0:00:59.920 Yeah, this is media talking about the media. But you 0:01:00.120 --> 0:01:04.759 are right. There have been some things that happened happening lately. Specifically, 0:01:04.800 --> 0:01:08.160 we've seen BuzzFeed News announcing that it will be shutting down. 0:01:08.440 --> 0:01:12.080 I think there was a report recently about Vice Media 0:01:12.120 --> 0:01:16.080 potentially filing for bankruptcy. It feels like the end of 0:01:16.120 --> 0:01:20.800 an era for a lot of these digital focused media startups. 0:01:21.360 --> 0:01:23.960 No, I mean, it's definitely true. And you know, as 0:01:24.200 --> 0:01:28.120 listeners do know, we both started our careers sort of 0:01:28.240 --> 0:01:32.680 in digital basically roughly the same time, basically right at 0:01:32.720 --> 0:01:35.319 the worst of the Great Financial Crisis, And out of 0:01:35.360 --> 0:01:39.520 this period came all of these new experiments and you know, 0:01:39.720 --> 0:01:43.280 upstart media companies that were supposed to dislodge the incumbent. 0:01:43.920 --> 0:01:46.440 You know, the blog at FT. 0:01:45.920 --> 0:01:48.040 Every Financial Times, Alphaville, yep. 0:01:48.000 --> 0:01:51.720 I was an insider and insiders still chugging. They recently 0:01:51.960 --> 0:01:54.480 they did announce laoffs. But of all of the companies, 0:01:54.560 --> 0:01:56.400 maybe we'll talk about this, of all of the companies, 0:01:56.440 --> 0:01:58.440 I kind of feel like they're like the winner that 0:01:58.480 --> 0:02:00.160 nobody talks about in the I. 0:02:00.120 --> 0:02:03.480 Also call it insider and not its original name. Have 0:02:03.560 --> 0:02:05.320 you just erace that from your mind? 0:02:05.440 --> 0:02:07.160 Do you know what the original name was? 0:02:07.160 --> 0:02:10.519 Was it not cluster stock? It was, yeah, Oka cluster stock. 0:02:10.560 --> 0:02:13.000 Because everyone's like our business insider but with names even 0:02:13.080 --> 0:02:16.280 before then, and even before then was still a Connelly insider. Anyway, 0:02:17.000 --> 0:02:19.600 it's a pretty pivotal time, and you know, I guess 0:02:19.600 --> 0:02:23.200 the question for was this all is phenomenon or was 0:02:23.240 --> 0:02:25.519 this something else? Or like what was going on there? 0:02:25.720 --> 0:02:27.720 Well, I think there is an overlap with some of 0:02:27.720 --> 0:02:29.720 the bigger you know, I might be reaching here, but 0:02:29.760 --> 0:02:31.079 I think there is an overlap with some of the 0:02:31.120 --> 0:02:34.320 bigger themes we've been talking about recently, which is I 0:02:34.320 --> 0:02:38.200 guess the sort of attrition of tech or the tech 0:02:38.280 --> 0:02:41.400 strains that we've seen. And the thing that digital media 0:02:41.440 --> 0:02:43.960 has in common with a lot of the tech industry 0:02:44.120 --> 0:02:47.400 has to be venture capital financing. It has to be 0:02:47.639 --> 0:02:50.880 there was a story about what was going to happen 0:02:51.120 --> 0:02:54.320 in the digital media market. You know, people talked about 0:02:54.320 --> 0:02:58.560 these big numbers, huge audiences that could now be reached 0:02:58.720 --> 0:03:01.720 through online pop. So it feels like there is some 0:03:01.840 --> 0:03:02.640 overlap there. 0:03:02.919 --> 0:03:04.520 Yeah, And of course, you know, and I was a 0:03:04.560 --> 0:03:08.560 business insider, like there was a really intense pressure month 0:03:08.600 --> 0:03:12.360 after month to hit new traffic goals. And part of 0:03:12.400 --> 0:03:14.760 that was like clearly like ad sales right there, like 0:03:14.800 --> 0:03:17.560 sort of on some level of function of traffic. But 0:03:17.680 --> 0:03:20.560 I think the other thing is they're a function of 0:03:20.720 --> 0:03:23.640 telling a story to your investors, yes for your next round. 0:03:23.760 --> 0:03:25.440 Yeah, you have lots of lines going up. 0:03:25.440 --> 0:03:27.799 Lots of lines, and so regardless of whether you're actually 0:03:27.800 --> 0:03:30.080 profitable or not at any given moment, if the lines 0:03:30.120 --> 0:03:32.080 are up, you can live because you can get that 0:03:32.160 --> 0:03:33.320 next round of funding into. 0:03:33.160 --> 0:03:35.160 The classic tech growth exactly. 0:03:35.800 --> 0:03:38.240 Well, we're going to talk all about this because we're 0:03:38.280 --> 0:03:40.360 going to be speaking with Ben Smith. He is the 0:03:40.480 --> 0:03:44.040 editor in chief and co founder of Semaphore, previously as 0:03:44.040 --> 0:03:47.120 a media columnist at The New York Times, and previous 0:03:47.160 --> 0:03:49.440 to that, he was the editor in chief at the 0:03:49.480 --> 0:03:52.520 aforementioned BuzzFeed News, which changed the world. And he's the 0:03:52.560 --> 0:03:56.800 author of the new book Traffic Genius, Rivalry and The 0:03:56.840 --> 0:03:59.120 Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. So, Ben, thank you 0:03:59.160 --> 0:04:00.160 so much for coming on. 0:04:00.760 --> 0:04:02.560 Thank you so much for having me. And I should 0:04:02.560 --> 0:04:05.200 say like, as a genuine fan and listener of the show, 0:04:05.480 --> 0:04:07.360 I can't imagine that anybody does not want to know 0:04:07.400 --> 0:04:09.360 all the details of your lives. I certainly do. 0:04:10.400 --> 0:04:13.080 Thank you so much for saying that on air. I 0:04:13.120 --> 0:04:16.800 have a question, which is why did BuzzFeed News exist? 0:04:16.960 --> 0:04:20.040 And the reason I asked specifically is that in my mind, 0:04:20.560 --> 0:04:23.680 as a competitor to it, when I was an insider 0:04:23.720 --> 0:04:28.479 for several years, my perception was that BuzzFeed itself was 0:04:28.520 --> 0:04:32.359 this huge traffic monster, cultural juggernaut. Everyone knows about the quizzes, 0:04:32.360 --> 0:04:37.200 et cetera, and that BuzzFeed news was there to raise 0:04:37.240 --> 0:04:40.560 the prestige of the brand maybe for advertisers. Is that correct? 0:04:40.600 --> 0:04:41.600 Like why did it exist? 0:04:42.160 --> 0:04:44.240 So that's partially correct, but I think you have to 0:04:44.240 --> 0:04:46.840 put your head back to twenty eleven, twenty twelve when 0:04:46.880 --> 0:04:49.960 we started it, when the kind of thesis that we 0:04:49.960 --> 0:04:52.680 were working on was that in part that the Facebook 0:04:52.680 --> 0:04:55.760 news feed was this central pillar of society and people 0:04:55.800 --> 0:04:59.880 loved it. People loved the idea that quizzes, that meme, 0:05:00.320 --> 0:05:03.400 that baby pictures from your friends were all mixed up together. 0:05:03.920 --> 0:05:06.320 And at BuzzFeed, among other things, they'd noticed that on 0:05:06.480 --> 0:05:10.039 big news days their traffic went down, and so both 0:05:10.200 --> 0:05:12.760 you know, and so both kind of in a functional sense, 0:05:12.800 --> 0:05:15.120 that was part of this mix that again that people 0:05:15.240 --> 0:05:17.160 liked that this stuff was all mixed together, and so 0:05:17.520 --> 0:05:19.360 it was part of the mix that I think Jonah 0:05:19.360 --> 0:05:23.200 and the Peretti, the founder thought people wanted. But also 0:05:23.320 --> 0:05:25.880 BuzzFeed was you say it was a cultural juggernaut, but 0:05:25.960 --> 0:05:28.960 actually it was struggling for relevance. It was part it 0:05:29.000 --> 0:05:32.240 was halfway to feel this being seen by advertisers and 0:05:32.279 --> 0:05:34.920 by the platforms and by everybody else as a media company, 0:05:35.279 --> 0:05:38.200 halfway to being seen as being like nine Gag or 0:05:38.240 --> 0:05:42.720 like break dot com, or like a generation of you know, cheeseburger, 0:05:42.760 --> 0:05:45.760 a generation of an earlier generation of essentially meme sites 0:05:45.800 --> 0:05:48.480 that got wiped out in that era because the platforms 0:05:48.800 --> 0:05:49.919 consider them spam. 0:05:49.960 --> 0:05:52.320 Well, I was going to ask how much did the 0:05:52.560 --> 0:05:57.280 content mix become a problem for BuzzFeed overall because it 0:05:57.360 --> 0:06:00.200 was trying to do something kind of unusual in the 0:06:00.240 --> 0:06:03.600 sense that it was trying to do very important, sometimes 0:06:03.640 --> 0:06:08.159 investigative journalism, you know, hard news, while at the same 0:06:08.240 --> 0:06:13.000 time publishing memes and you know, like ten of the 0:06:13.000 --> 0:06:16.040 best random products you can buy off of Amazon kind 0:06:16.080 --> 0:06:16.760 of lists. 0:06:17.160 --> 0:06:19.360 Yeah, you know. In this moment of which, again, this 0:06:19.520 --> 0:06:22.839 very kind of optimistic and fresh moment of social media 0:06:23.000 --> 0:06:27.160 in twenty twelve, it seemed plausible that people liked the mix, 0:06:27.240 --> 0:06:29.840 the consumers liked the mix actually, and that the same 0:06:29.880 --> 0:06:32.200 people who liked memes wanted to get hard news and 0:06:32.200 --> 0:06:33.919 wanted to get them in the same place, which was 0:06:33.960 --> 0:06:37.760 to say, Facebook slash BuzzFeed. I think as you suggest 0:06:37.800 --> 0:06:40.799 in the question that really starts to change, like news 0:06:40.839 --> 0:06:43.440 got less fun as the decade war on, not from 0:06:43.440 --> 0:06:46.200 some technical perspective, but because in fact, like there was 0:06:46.240 --> 0:06:49.560 this huge rise of right wing populism, of left wing populism, 0:06:49.600 --> 0:06:53.599 of super confrontational public politics playing out through people screaming 0:06:53.600 --> 0:06:56.120 at each other on social media, and suddenly this idea 0:06:56.160 --> 0:06:58.920 that the Facebook feed is this delightful mix of all 0:06:58.960 --> 0:07:01.479 these different things kind of curdled. And I think that 0:07:01.560 --> 0:07:03.760 was a huge problem for us that we never totally 0:07:03.760 --> 0:07:05.120 found our way out of right. 0:07:05.240 --> 0:07:08.640 So you had this like weird mix of maybe the 0:07:08.760 --> 0:07:12.880 ultra right talking about fascism and then like ten clap 0:07:12.960 --> 0:07:15.720 back tweets that you've never seen before, and they kind 0:07:15.760 --> 0:07:17.720 of sit badly alongside each other. 0:07:17.800 --> 0:07:20.360 Well, no more. You have a list of like, you know, 0:07:20.520 --> 0:07:22.560 things you only knew if you grew up Persian in 0:07:22.640 --> 0:07:25.800 New Jersey and a bunch of cute cats and a 0:07:25.800 --> 0:07:28.400 story about Donald Trump, and the reactions to that story 0:07:28.400 --> 0:07:31.559 about Donald Trump are totally polarized. So I see, okay, 0:07:31.800 --> 0:07:34.320 and yeah, and maybe you know and maybe the there's 0:07:34.360 --> 0:07:37.360 always a huge brand problem in question that like BuzzFeed news, 0:07:37.400 --> 0:07:39.520 it's like calling something like I don't know, Disney News 0:07:39.600 --> 0:07:42.120 or something like, it's a weird brand, but there was 0:07:42.160 --> 0:07:44.800 a window in which we leaned into it and people 0:07:44.920 --> 0:07:48.520 liked it, and then I think the broader social forces 0:07:48.600 --> 0:07:50.560 changed and turned against that. None of this speaks to 0:07:50.600 --> 0:07:53.320 the business model or anything else, but that was that 0:07:53.400 --> 0:07:55.640 was a real you could feel as Trump rose, you 0:07:55.640 --> 0:07:57.800 could kind of feel the weather change and feel that 0:07:57.920 --> 0:07:59.559 brand get worse. 0:08:00.240 --> 0:08:03.360 Well, man, there's a lot there. I hadn't really thought 0:08:03.360 --> 0:08:08.040 about that element though, that Like, basically, people just got 0:08:08.080 --> 0:08:11.360 angrier with each other, you know, at the end of 0:08:11.400 --> 0:08:13.200 the twenty tens than they were at the beginning of 0:08:13.200 --> 0:08:13.480 the twenty. 0:08:13.560 --> 0:08:15.480 Yeah, and I think that's the story of Facebook and 0:08:15.520 --> 0:08:18.240 BuzzFeed was the end of Twitter and BuzzFeed was a 0:08:18.280 --> 0:08:22.040 big bat on news being distributed by social media. You know. 0:08:22.240 --> 0:08:25.560 Just on this brand question though, that we can sort 0:08:25.600 --> 0:08:27.880 of pivot. You know. When I was an insider, I 0:08:27.920 --> 0:08:30.320 always sort of felt this sort of like, you know, 0:08:30.480 --> 0:08:35.200 my boss then Henry Blodgett again winner of this whole 0:08:35.240 --> 0:08:39.400 era in my opinion, and completely brilliant media executive. But 0:08:39.480 --> 0:08:42.920 I also sort of felt like this, like, well, I mean, 0:08:42.920 --> 0:08:46.760 I guess the question is like to some extent, if 0:08:46.800 --> 0:08:49.000 you're like going up against the New York Times or 0:08:49.000 --> 0:08:52.440 the Washington Post or Bloomberg News, et cetera. Does the 0:08:52.559 --> 0:08:56.040 existence of the sort of like meme side of the 0:08:56.120 --> 0:09:00.480 operation create some sort of like hard care app in 0:09:00.559 --> 0:09:03.400 terms of really how far you can go with like prestige. 0:09:03.880 --> 0:09:06.000 I mean, because I got the sense that insider that 0:09:06.080 --> 0:09:09.800 on some level that you could like get win Coolitzers 0:09:09.840 --> 0:09:12.240 and do great work, et cetera, but on some level 0:09:12.880 --> 0:09:14.520 you kind of have to pick one or the other. 0:09:15.720 --> 0:09:17.319 Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that there 0:09:17.400 --> 0:09:19.560 was a path for BuzzFeed where at its best, maybe 0:09:19.600 --> 0:09:22.400 I'm somebody who I actually like think prestige is overrated 0:09:22.760 --> 0:09:25.160 and sometimes kind of productive, but there's you know, there 0:09:25.200 --> 0:09:27.920 was journalism you could do that was that particularly focused 0:09:27.960 --> 0:09:32.040 on stuff that the majority young women who were sharing 0:09:32.120 --> 0:09:34.600 memes cared about a lot, which could be like sexual 0:09:34.679 --> 0:09:37.640 assault at massage. Envy for instance, was something we wrote about. 0:09:37.640 --> 0:09:39.920 I think at our best we were like a lot 0:09:39.960 --> 0:09:43.320 of the coverage, you know, was in sync with the 0:09:43.360 --> 0:09:45.600 people who were reading the site and was really hard 0:09:45.640 --> 0:09:50.520 hitting journalism that also overlapped with the interests of regular 0:09:50.520 --> 0:09:51.520 people reading buzzfed. 0:10:08.760 --> 0:10:10.880 Talk to us about how we I mean, the book 0:10:10.960 --> 0:10:13.280 is called Traffic, so I assume you have a lot 0:10:13.280 --> 0:10:16.400 of opinions on the importance of traffic and how it works. 0:10:16.720 --> 0:10:20.440 But talk to us, maybe specifically about how that fed, 0:10:20.520 --> 0:10:22.960 you know, the lines going up on the chart, how 0:10:23.160 --> 0:10:27.400 that fed into the business model and shaped the offering. 0:10:27.559 --> 0:10:32.959 How were people thinking about traffic as a monetizable commodity back. 0:10:32.800 --> 0:10:35.000 Then, Yeah, and I asked, And you know, I spent 0:10:35.040 --> 0:10:36.880 a lot of time in the book, and a lot 0:10:36.880 --> 0:10:39.719 of the reporting of the book, for me, particularly was 0:10:39.760 --> 0:10:41.760 on the stuff that happened before I got there, which 0:10:41.760 --> 0:10:44.480 is to say, kind of the discovery of traffic in 0:10:44.520 --> 0:10:47.959 the mid offts by the folks at you your team 0:10:48.000 --> 0:10:50.320 at Insider a little bit later, but early on, by 0:10:50.400 --> 0:10:52.880 Jonah Pieretti who was then at Huffington Post and Nick 0:10:52.960 --> 0:10:56.040 Detton at Gocker. And It's interesting to use the word commodity, 0:10:56.080 --> 0:10:58.240 because they really did think it was a commodity. It 0:10:58.320 --> 0:11:01.320 was something where they could, you know, for every individual 0:11:01.400 --> 0:11:03.720 who clicked on their sites, they could get something like 0:11:03.760 --> 0:11:06.640 a nine dollars CPM, which is a pretty good rate 0:11:06.760 --> 0:11:08.560 then and sadly now, and. 0:11:08.600 --> 0:11:12.480 They had CPM is per thousand costs for nine dollars 0:11:12.520 --> 0:11:13.640 for a thousand clicks. 0:11:13.400 --> 0:11:15.920 Yeah, okay, And they had I think every reason to 0:11:16.040 --> 0:11:19.760 think that. Wow, Like, at this very rudimentary stage of 0:11:19.760 --> 0:11:22.560 this business, we're getting nine dollars for a really crappy product. 0:11:22.559 --> 0:11:24.280 We're going to make that product way better and we're 0:11:24.320 --> 0:11:26.400 going to scale it a lot more. And if this 0:11:26.520 --> 0:11:28.880 is a classic commodity, we're going to make an enormous 0:11:28.920 --> 0:11:31.079 amount of money. And so they're folks on trafficking the 0:11:31.120 --> 0:11:34.000 different theories about it. Denton, who started Gawker, had this 0:11:34.280 --> 0:11:37.600 very both very ideological guys actually had this theory that 0:11:37.679 --> 0:11:39.440 traffic is really to be found in kind of like 0:11:39.559 --> 0:11:43.840 ripping the mask off of society's hypocrisy, of your own hypocrisy. 0:11:44.280 --> 0:11:47.120 If your audience wants pornography, give them pornography. If they 0:11:47.160 --> 0:11:49.839 want sort of malicious stuffs that give them that it 0:11:49.960 --> 0:11:54.040 was actual important a flash spot. But also if they 0:11:54.040 --> 0:11:56.720 wanted sort of stuff that appealed to their worst instincts, 0:11:56.720 --> 0:11:58.760 give them that, don't make them pretend to be better. 0:11:59.080 --> 0:12:02.319 And then also of rip the mask of traditional journalism 0:12:02.320 --> 0:12:05.840 and print the stuff, the sort of mean, sometimes gossipy 0:12:05.880 --> 0:12:08.719 stuff or sometimes true hard truths the journalists say to 0:12:08.800 --> 0:12:11.040 each other at a bar but don't print. So that's 0:12:11.120 --> 0:12:14.640 one theory. Jonah's theory was totally different. He saw this 0:12:14.760 --> 0:12:17.640 kind of just the bubbling of this social media world 0:12:18.080 --> 0:12:21.480 and the theory that we had a buzz Steed, founder 0:12:21.520 --> 0:12:23.720 of puffing the post and then a BuzzFeed. And what 0:12:23.800 --> 0:12:26.000 he saw in this social media world, which also was 0:12:26.040 --> 0:12:28.080 true for a time, was that the stuff that people 0:12:28.120 --> 0:12:31.200 would share tended to be very positive, Like, you weren't 0:12:31.200 --> 0:12:33.920 going to go out and I mean, God forbid share insane, 0:12:33.960 --> 0:12:36.040 screamy politics because that would make you look like a 0:12:36.040 --> 0:12:38.720 crazy person. No one would do that. What you would 0:12:38.720 --> 0:12:43.200 share on Facebook was, you know, fundraisers for earthquake victims 0:12:43.360 --> 0:12:46.680 or lists of cute cats. And so he sort of 0:12:46.720 --> 0:12:50.400 what he built was around an idea at first that 0:12:50.440 --> 0:12:53.720 people were going to be distributing media themselves hand to 0:12:53.760 --> 0:12:56.040 hand and doing it in a way that reflected their 0:12:56.080 --> 0:13:01.280 best selves. So they're very different tactical ideological approaches to 0:13:01.320 --> 0:13:01.840 the Internet. 0:13:02.040 --> 0:13:04.360 This is actually something that I wanted to ask you about, 0:13:04.400 --> 0:13:07.400 which is it feels like the way people thought about 0:13:07.480 --> 0:13:11.200 traffic is it's always good eyeballs are always good, but 0:13:11.280 --> 0:13:13.600 it sort of ignores. It feels to me today like 0:13:13.679 --> 0:13:16.120 one way of generating a lot of traffic is through 0:13:16.600 --> 0:13:19.480 the hate read you get. You know, you have something 0:13:19.640 --> 0:13:22.679 saying something provocative, you're still going to get a lot 0:13:22.679 --> 0:13:25.280 of eyeballs on it. But you can't tell whether people 0:13:25.320 --> 0:13:27.640 are reading that because they think it's a valuable piece 0:13:27.679 --> 0:13:30.600 of journalism, or they're reading it because people like to 0:13:30.720 --> 0:13:33.880 read those sort of hate ready, you know, like dog 0:13:33.920 --> 0:13:37.599 whistle type pieces. How like is that something that you 0:13:37.679 --> 0:13:38.800 ever noticed. 0:13:39.040 --> 0:13:41.760 Oh, yes, there's something I ever noticed that people hate it? Yes, 0:13:42.679 --> 0:13:44.800 for sure. And I would say that if you're you know, 0:13:45.040 --> 0:13:47.640 if you are thinking of traffic as a commodity, well 0:13:47.640 --> 0:13:50.120 you're really selling is the space the white space next 0:13:50.120 --> 0:13:52.960 to that article, and so you don't care if people 0:13:53.000 --> 0:13:55.200 love it or hate it, the sort of purest logic 0:13:55.240 --> 0:13:57.600 of traffic, which turned out, by the way, to be 0:13:58.000 --> 0:14:00.559 not how it worked, and I think not how good 0:14:00.679 --> 0:14:01.840 editors ever quite saw it. 0:14:02.120 --> 0:14:04.200 The way I should have phrased the question is like 0:14:04.440 --> 0:14:07.800 did that eventually impact the business model? 0:14:08.920 --> 0:14:11.600 You know, I don't think that It's hard to think 0:14:11.600 --> 0:14:14.080 of a site that really lived on hate read's. I 0:14:14.080 --> 0:14:16.640 mean I'm sure I'm forgetting one. There was something sort 0:14:16.640 --> 0:14:17.760 of similar. 0:14:18.240 --> 0:14:20.720 The marriage announcement section of the New York Times. 0:14:21.000 --> 0:14:22.680 There is that. I mean. There was also the site 0:14:22.680 --> 0:14:24.600 called exojane that. 0:14:24.560 --> 0:14:27.560 Oh, our producer just in the message thought catalog that's 0:14:27.600 --> 0:14:27.840 a good. 0:14:27.920 --> 0:14:30.160 Yes. There was a kind of writing and I actually 0:14:31.000 --> 0:14:36.080 that was basically about having went mostly young women write 0:14:36.080 --> 0:14:38.880 in a totally un self conscious way about their personal 0:14:38.960 --> 0:14:42.800 experiences in a way that was torqued by often by 0:14:42.880 --> 0:14:45.520 kind of sophisticated, cynical editors to make them look like 0:14:45.560 --> 0:14:48.440 horrible people so people would attack them on the Internet. 0:14:48.520 --> 0:14:49.800 I mean, that to me is one of the really 0:14:49.840 --> 0:14:52.560 worst forms of Internet journalism and did like lots of 0:14:52.640 --> 0:14:55.720 damage to these writers in the name of traffic. And 0:14:55.920 --> 0:14:58.000 more broadly, there was it was a kind of I 0:14:58.040 --> 0:15:00.480 think and this came out of Gocker, really came out 0:15:00.480 --> 0:15:02.840 of Jezebel, which you know, I was not a reader 0:15:02.880 --> 0:15:04.360 at the time in two thousand and seven, but was 0:15:04.400 --> 0:15:09.280 this incredibly high impact piece of Internet history that for 0:15:09.320 --> 0:15:11.640 a time I think, if you it's actually kind of 0:15:11.680 --> 0:15:13.120 amazing to look at. You know, they launched inn O 0:15:13.240 --> 0:15:15.320 seven with this. The first thing they do is offer 0:15:15.360 --> 0:15:18.720 a bounty for anybody who can find an unretouched photograph 0:15:18.800 --> 0:15:21.800 from a women's magazine and they get it. They had 0:15:21.800 --> 0:15:23.440 ten thousand dollars and they pay it out and they 0:15:23.440 --> 0:15:26.120 get an unretouched photo of Faith Hill which before her 0:15:26.160 --> 0:15:29.080 freckles and smile lines have been removed, and really like 0:15:29.160 --> 0:15:32.400 launched this incredibly effective assault on this on everything that 0:15:32.480 --> 0:15:35.640 was wrong with women's magazines, the way they distorted the 0:15:35.640 --> 0:15:38.720 images of people's bodies. There were no black models. And 0:15:38.760 --> 0:15:42.320 they also published this very like frank revelatory writing about 0:15:42.320 --> 0:15:46.800 sex and about women's lives. And they also developed this 0:15:47.080 --> 0:15:51.440 unbelievably intense and pathological relationship with their commentators that sort 0:15:51.480 --> 0:15:53.360 of drove them totally not so and that who in 0:15:53.400 --> 0:15:56.400 the commenters felt they owned them and attacked them. And 0:15:56.680 --> 0:15:58.280 some of the writing was the kind of writing we're 0:15:58.280 --> 0:16:00.680 talking about, where you people sort of expose their own 0:16:00.720 --> 0:16:04.480 lives and then face this intense and very personal criticism. 0:16:05.000 --> 0:16:07.440 And it got enormous amounts of traffic, and Nick Detton, 0:16:07.480 --> 0:16:09.840 who didn't really love the content, kept it going because 0:16:09.840 --> 0:16:12.520 it got so much traffic. But it was both as 0:16:12.520 --> 0:16:14.400 a sort of early glimpse of both that the power 0:16:14.560 --> 0:16:16.880 of that kind of social media age, and then also 0:16:17.560 --> 0:16:20.280 it had damage or the emotions that could provoke and 0:16:20.280 --> 0:16:22.000 how damaging it could be for the writers. 0:16:23.240 --> 0:16:26.760 I want to jump ahead just like a few years. 0:16:27.000 --> 0:16:29.960 You know. It's funny because the day I literally the 0:16:30.080 --> 0:16:32.800 day before the news came out that BuzzFeed News was 0:16:32.840 --> 0:16:36.760 shutting down, I was thinking about this sort of now 0:16:36.920 --> 0:16:38.920 or famous. I guess it was a letter to the 0:16:39.000 --> 0:16:41.680 editor of the All where someone is like, I hate 0:16:41.720 --> 0:16:44.120 my life because I don't work at BuzzFeed. I was 0:16:44.160 --> 0:16:46.440 literally just sharing this article with someone the day before 0:16:46.520 --> 0:16:50.560 the news And the psychological hold that I think, like 0:16:50.600 --> 0:16:54.320 in the BuzzFeed heyday had over everyone else in the 0:16:54.360 --> 0:16:58.320 media was like extraordinary. The pressure to keep up the perception, 0:16:58.720 --> 0:17:00.480 and I think it, you know, I think our reports 0:17:00.520 --> 0:17:02.080 went all the way up to like, you know, board 0:17:02.160 --> 0:17:05.000 level at the New York Times like feeling like what 0:17:05.040 --> 0:17:07.840 are we going to do about this juggernaut. It's so innovative. 0:17:07.880 --> 0:17:10.520 They keep coming up with new story types and traffic 0:17:10.560 --> 0:17:13.160 and influence and all the young people prefer to get 0:17:13.240 --> 0:17:16.600 the news there. But what I'm curious about actually is like, 0:17:17.600 --> 0:17:18.919 what's the date that peaked? 0:17:19.480 --> 0:17:20.240 Twenty fifteen? 0:17:20.800 --> 0:17:23.440 So it was basically like that all it was basically 0:17:23.520 --> 0:17:25.320 like and why twenty like what happened? 0:17:25.320 --> 0:17:25.399 Like? 0:17:25.440 --> 0:17:27.200 What was the turning point in twenty. 0:17:27.000 --> 0:17:29.159 Five I mean to me, you know, BuzzFeed was this 0:17:29.480 --> 0:17:32.440 bat and some of all these companies were a beat 0:17:33.080 --> 0:17:37.560 on that this new form of distribution was durable and 0:17:37.560 --> 0:17:40.200 that the economics would work themselves out. And I think 0:17:40.240 --> 0:17:44.040 everyone now totally rightly can say this was always idiotic. 0:17:44.560 --> 0:17:47.720 Maybe it was, but the basic metaphor analogy everybody's using 0:17:47.720 --> 0:17:50.040 was cable. You know, there were these new form of 0:17:50.040 --> 0:17:52.880 distribution been laid out. The people owning the cable lines 0:17:52.920 --> 0:17:55.679 knew that they needed quality content to populate it, and 0:17:55.720 --> 0:18:01.000 they reached a like economic arrangement where ESPN, CNN, MTV become, 0:18:01.480 --> 0:18:03.760 you know, become these great businesses. And that's what I 0:18:03.760 --> 0:18:07.040 think BuzzFeed and others imagined they would become. And I 0:18:07.040 --> 0:18:10.320 think twenty fifteen was the was really where it started 0:18:10.359 --> 0:18:13.520 to become a little clear a that that these platforms 0:18:13.520 --> 0:18:16.440 themselves are pretty fragile and sort of susceptibled all these 0:18:16.480 --> 0:18:21.400 social pressures and be that's a lot of that. They 0:18:21.480 --> 0:18:25.119 weren't going to move away from their total reliance and 0:18:25.240 --> 0:18:28.320 user generated content to create a business for publishers. 0:18:28.680 --> 0:18:31.679 So, just on this note, my impression was always that, 0:18:32.200 --> 0:18:35.320 in addition to the distribution issues that you just mentioned, 0:18:35.320 --> 0:18:37.600 which we should dig into a little bit further, but 0:18:37.720 --> 0:18:40.280 one of one of the big problems here was that 0:18:40.680 --> 0:18:44.840 the traditional media companies also just got better at doing 0:18:45.000 --> 0:18:47.639 what a lot of the digital media companies were doing. 0:18:48.080 --> 0:18:51.320 And you know, where I worked Alphaville, it wasn't necessarily 0:18:51.359 --> 0:18:54.480 a traffic juggernaut, but it was kind of pioneering of 0:18:54.520 --> 0:18:58.479 a certain type of journalism, certain experiments with you know, 0:18:58.640 --> 0:19:02.520 audience engagement and events and things like that. And what 0:19:02.640 --> 0:19:06.080 always tended to happen within the Financial Times was that 0:19:06.119 --> 0:19:09.479 we would do something new and exciting and innovative, and 0:19:09.520 --> 0:19:14.359 then that would just get replicated by the ft itself, 0:19:14.400 --> 0:19:17.479 and so it becomes hard to sort of maintain the 0:19:17.520 --> 0:19:21.719 momentum of having new types of exciting journalism at a 0:19:21.760 --> 0:19:22.520 constant rate. 0:19:22.920 --> 0:19:25.600 Yeah, that's a sign of a pretty healthy organization basically. 0:19:25.920 --> 0:19:28.560 But there was this arrogance that really came out of 0:19:28.600 --> 0:19:30.639 the oughts where we were looking at the New York Times, 0:19:30.640 --> 0:19:32.960 at the CBS News and it was just it just 0:19:32.960 --> 0:19:35.240 seems so clear that they were doomed that they could 0:19:35.280 --> 0:19:38.280 never figure out digital media, that their leadership just was 0:19:38.359 --> 0:19:40.080 terrified of it and had no idea what was going on. 0:19:40.160 --> 0:19:43.040 And I think this arrogance lasted a long long past 0:19:43.080 --> 0:19:45.719 its expiry date. And we just published on Semaphore an 0:19:45.720 --> 0:19:48.879 excerpt from my book of When Jonah Peretti Goes is 0:19:49.000 --> 0:19:51.119 invited into the New York Times in twenty fifteen to 0:19:51.119 --> 0:19:53.280 tell them how to do their jobs. And it's a 0:19:53.600 --> 0:19:55.920 board he's speaking to a board meeting and the interviewer 0:19:55.960 --> 0:19:58.040 asks him what he would do if he was named 0:19:58.080 --> 0:20:00.560 CEO of the New York Times, and he says, well, 0:20:00.600 --> 0:20:03.240 first I would ask you for a raise, and then 0:20:03.320 --> 0:20:05.440 second I would go into my office, shut my door 0:20:05.440 --> 0:20:06.880 and cry yeah. 0:20:07.080 --> 0:20:08.760 And that's a lot of yeah. 0:20:08.840 --> 0:20:12.679 But what Actually, by then, the Times had started to 0:20:12.720 --> 0:20:15.040 figure it out, and they didn't follow fast. And in fact, 0:20:15.080 --> 0:20:17.239 a number of traditional media companies I'm thinking of the 0:20:17.280 --> 0:20:20.920 Washington Post had really screwed themselves by trying to follow fast, 0:20:21.000 --> 0:20:22.760 like they had copied this thing and that thing in 0:20:22.800 --> 0:20:26.480 blogs and never really built anything. The Times followed slowly 0:20:26.520 --> 0:20:30.040 and carefully, but very very deliberately and very effectively. And 0:20:30.040 --> 0:20:33.480 I think suddenly we looked up and yeah, they had 0:20:33.520 --> 0:20:35.639 copied a lot of our tactics. They had taken a 0:20:35.640 --> 0:20:38.679 lot of our best people and had closed that gap 0:20:38.760 --> 0:20:41.840 and then had could deploy their huge advantages around brand, 0:20:41.880 --> 0:20:42.640 around resources. 0:20:43.480 --> 0:20:48.320 You know, you mentioned the doomed cable analogy and some 0:20:48.400 --> 0:20:52.199 of like that peak and one sort of phrase that 0:20:52.320 --> 0:20:54.359 I think lives rent free, so to speak in the 0:20:54.359 --> 0:20:57.560 head of many journalists to digital journalists is quote the 0:20:57.560 --> 0:21:00.680 pivot to video and all of these the pivot to video, 0:21:00.680 --> 0:21:01.520 We're going to do video. 0:21:01.640 --> 0:21:05.200 And my impression we just launched a video product. 0:21:05.720 --> 0:21:08.960 Water, are we being filmed? I'm still soaking. 0:21:08.280 --> 0:21:13.359 We did odd lots? Is in fact doing a pivot 0:21:13.359 --> 0:21:16.159 to video? No, it's kind of. But my impression is, 0:21:16.200 --> 0:21:18.960 like what happened. Facebook came to a bunch of publishers 0:21:19.000 --> 0:21:22.440 and said, we will you'll go viral more if you 0:21:22.600 --> 0:21:23.040 do video. 0:21:23.600 --> 0:21:25.359 Well, there's a lot driving this. 0:21:25.520 --> 0:21:29.040 There's hire CPMs and you're going to do really well 0:21:29.200 --> 0:21:33.560 and so build all these expensive video studios and you're 0:21:33.600 --> 0:21:34.960 going to make a lot of money. Is that basically 0:21:35.000 --> 0:21:36.840 what happened? Then it didn't materialize in the end. 0:21:37.160 --> 0:21:39.320 Yeah, I find it a little hard to I mean 0:21:39.480 --> 0:21:41.520 to be mad at Facebook for this. They just kind 0:21:41.520 --> 0:21:44.760 of randomly gave a bunch of publishers money and in 0:21:44.880 --> 0:21:48.800 some did redeploy their existing writers who weren't good on 0:21:48.920 --> 0:21:51.679 video to make videos. I mean, I you know, there was, 0:21:51.760 --> 0:21:54.920 there has been in society a pivot to video. There's 0:21:54.960 --> 0:21:58.080 this widely used product called TikTok, which is reliant on 0:21:58.119 --> 0:22:00.800 short video. So I mean, I think then that news 0:22:00.920 --> 0:22:02.919 was going to be delivered in video by people who 0:22:03.000 --> 0:22:06.440 were terrible at making videos was probably not the case, 0:22:06.560 --> 0:22:08.600 but and it was a sign. I think it came 0:22:08.800 --> 0:22:11.360 as a lot of these digital publishers, you know, we're 0:22:11.400 --> 0:22:13.359 scrambling for revenue try to figure out how their businesses 0:22:13.359 --> 0:22:15.679 were supposed to work, and so a pivot was a 0:22:15.680 --> 0:22:16.560 pretty scary thing. 0:22:17.080 --> 0:22:20.480 Can we talk more about the distribution channels here, because 0:22:20.520 --> 0:22:22.520 I think that's the subtext of a lot of what 0:22:22.640 --> 0:22:25.119 we're talking about, which is you had this explosion of 0:22:25.160 --> 0:22:28.240 digital media, but then at the same time you had 0:22:28.680 --> 0:22:32.800 a handful of distribution platforms, so things like Google, Facebook, 0:22:32.840 --> 0:22:36.560 Apple that were growing more and more powerful and sort 0:22:36.600 --> 0:22:40.560 of more concentrated in their own monopoly power. When it 0:22:40.600 --> 0:22:43.320 came to distributing the news. So how much of that 0:22:44.000 --> 0:22:46.920 was a negative force on the digital media business. 0:22:47.080 --> 0:22:49.280 Well, it was the digital media business. I mean, it 0:22:49.320 --> 0:22:51.720 was a hugely positive force, right, much of the digital 0:22:51.720 --> 0:22:55.639 media business, and certainly really BuzzFeed above all was just 0:22:55.920 --> 0:22:59.000 all your chips on the table, bet on Facebook and 0:22:59.040 --> 0:23:02.439 subsidiarily and Pinderest and others, and that they were going 0:23:02.480 --> 0:23:06.000 to be your distribution. And that again, like jonah Pretty's 0:23:06.040 --> 0:23:08.320 basic theory, which I think you can argue now about 0:23:08.280 --> 0:23:11.199 whether it's true or not, was that Facebook and these 0:23:11.240 --> 0:23:13.159 other platforms would find that they had a need for 0:23:13.280 --> 0:23:16.560 quality content to retain their users to compete against places 0:23:16.560 --> 0:23:20.280 like Netflix, and that they would eventually start paying for 0:23:20.400 --> 0:23:23.840 higher and higher quality content as other platforms head through history. 0:23:24.200 --> 0:23:26.720 And that just did not happen, and that that went 0:23:26.760 --> 0:23:27.359 totally wrong. 0:23:28.160 --> 0:23:31.280 Let's here's a twenty twenty three question. How old is 0:23:31.320 --> 0:23:32.280 some of four now about it? 0:23:32.359 --> 0:23:33.719 That's six months six months? 0:23:34.160 --> 0:23:37.960 Where does traffic come from today or where does audience 0:23:38.000 --> 0:23:40.560 if you want to redefine that come from in twenty 0:23:40.600 --> 0:23:42.919 twenty three, because I you know, it doesn't feel like 0:23:43.080 --> 0:23:45.280 many things like go viral at any level anymore. 0:23:45.359 --> 0:23:47.680 Yeah, it's such a totally different world. I mean, newsletters 0:23:47.680 --> 0:23:49.760 are really important to us and probably the sort of 0:23:49.800 --> 0:23:53.080 core of our distribution. The web exists and it's a 0:23:53.200 --> 0:23:55.679 very familiar space to me for someone who's been kind 0:23:55.680 --> 0:23:57.840 of looking at traffic for twenty years, and that the 0:23:57.920 --> 0:24:01.200 Drudge Report is a great is a really important Many 0:24:01.240 --> 0:24:04.200 people continue to go there. There's a set of kind 0:24:04.200 --> 0:24:06.720 of I think it was Asian style aggregators, some Asian, 0:24:06.880 --> 0:24:09.760 some specifically out of Asia, smart news, news break, little 0:24:09.760 --> 0:24:13.040 send traffic, flipboard indoors. But in a weird way, it's 0:24:13.040 --> 0:24:16.920 this Internet from fifteen years ago, before social media existing, 0:24:17.280 --> 0:24:19.159 that has returned. And then you know, we do a 0:24:19.160 --> 0:24:21.359 lot of events which people really like, which is you know, 0:24:21.400 --> 0:24:23.480 the most intimate direct form of audience. 0:24:23.880 --> 0:24:27.359 So is that the future of traffic and audience? Is 0:24:27.400 --> 0:24:30.840 it the sort of smaller scale develop it organically or 0:24:30.880 --> 0:24:33.160 are there still the big channels? I know you mentioned 0:24:33.240 --> 0:24:37.240 Judge Report, but is anyone still trying to target you know, 0:24:37.560 --> 0:24:39.160 Facebook exclusively? 0:24:39.320 --> 0:24:41.960 Now you know, Facebook is just not on our radar 0:24:42.119 --> 0:24:44.440 as a distribution channel at all. I mean, it's a 0:24:44.480 --> 0:24:46.200 really it's I mean that was probably the biggest surprise 0:24:46.280 --> 0:24:48.040 to me in starting a new thing, and I'm not 0:24:48.080 --> 0:24:50.560 sure there's one future. I mean, I think what we're 0:24:50.560 --> 0:24:53.120 really looking at is a much more splintered landscape in which, 0:24:53.440 --> 0:24:56.119 among other things like the web itself and traffic is 0:24:56.160 --> 0:24:57.080 one of the splinters. 0:24:58.400 --> 0:25:02.600 Is there, like ever going to be another publication that 0:25:02.720 --> 0:25:05.080 tries to be a you know, like the thing about 0:25:05.760 --> 0:25:09.400 Insider and the thing about BuzzFeed and the thing about Gawker. 0:25:09.680 --> 0:25:12.439 Through all of the various like Gawker subverticals is that 0:25:12.480 --> 0:25:16.000 they were essentially attempts to replicate or go after the 0:25:16.040 --> 0:25:18.200 New York Times and to create these all in one 0:25:18.320 --> 0:25:23.199 news packages. Huffington Post as well, obviously like destinations that 0:25:23.359 --> 0:25:26.160 had everything like would anyone try that again to sort 0:25:26.200 --> 0:25:28.800 of like create an all purpose news brand? 0:25:28.920 --> 0:25:31.840 What kind of an idiot would do something like that? Well, actually, 0:25:31.880 --> 0:25:34.560 I mean sports, Like you know, it's some. 0:25:34.800 --> 0:25:37.560 You know we're say would sew for launched sports? 0:25:37.600 --> 0:25:40.600 I would say nobody would would try it. Would imagine 0:25:40.600 --> 0:25:42.400 that you can do it in a kind of explosive, 0:25:42.760 --> 0:25:45.720 flip the lights on and reach a billion people in 0:25:45.760 --> 0:25:47.760 three years kind of a way. I mean, I think 0:25:48.440 --> 0:25:51.280 I do think that it's again a weird changing moment 0:25:51.359 --> 0:25:54.040 where what people want is some people are if the 0:25:54.119 --> 0:25:55.840 challenges are different. If like, you know, when we were 0:25:55.840 --> 0:25:58.040 starting all this stuff, it was so cool to be 0:25:58.040 --> 0:26:00.920 able to read read publications from all over and hear 0:26:01.000 --> 0:26:03.639 voices from all over. Now people are drowning in that 0:26:03.760 --> 0:26:06.600 and are looking for help navigating it. And if you 0:26:06.640 --> 0:26:08.600 can do that, well, that's real value. But it does 0:26:08.640 --> 0:26:11.360 feel like a kind of interregnum where there's some next thing. 0:26:11.480 --> 0:26:28.520 We haven't totally seen it yet. 0:26:29.560 --> 0:26:32.600 We haven't really talked about the funding side, which I 0:26:32.640 --> 0:26:35.000 think is important, But we saw a lot of venture 0:26:35.040 --> 0:26:38.000 capital money flood into the space in the sort of 0:26:38.000 --> 0:26:41.840 twenty tens. What was the story back then and then 0:26:41.960 --> 0:26:44.520 fast forward to today? Are there any vcs out there 0:26:44.600 --> 0:26:48.080 who are very excited about the future of digital media? 0:26:48.160 --> 0:26:51.920 I assume there are some because Somemaphore got some VC funding, 0:26:51.960 --> 0:26:54.520 I believe, But like, what is the story now? 0:26:55.080 --> 0:26:57.600 Yeah, we didn't actually get any sorry funding, and I think, 0:26:57.800 --> 0:26:59.359 you know, that was certainly a lesson. I feel like 0:26:59.400 --> 0:27:04.200 I learned from that era the expectation of fast, massive returns. 0:27:04.200 --> 0:27:05.840 And we talked about digital media, but we're really talking 0:27:05.840 --> 0:27:08.600 about the news business, the journalism business. That's a really 0:27:08.680 --> 0:27:11.959 unrealistic expectation and not something that we wanted to promise 0:27:12.000 --> 0:27:15.160 that we would in four years have you know, multiplier 0:27:15.280 --> 0:27:18.359 valuation by a thousand or whatever vcs expect. You know, 0:27:18.400 --> 0:27:20.640 these people aren't well I don't know, I don't They're 0:27:20.680 --> 0:27:23.000 not widely seen as idiots, and they were making these 0:27:23.000 --> 0:27:26.280 big bets on all the publishers we've mentioned. Yeah, because 0:27:26.320 --> 0:27:28.640 they imagined that there was a world in which they 0:27:28.680 --> 0:27:31.360 were companies, you know, in which Vice would be Disney 0:27:31.440 --> 0:27:34.080 or which BuzzFeed would be NBC Universal, and these would 0:27:34.119 --> 0:27:37.200 go to massive, massive scale. It's you know, it's interesting 0:27:37.240 --> 0:27:39.080 to think back to how could they have thought such 0:27:39.080 --> 0:27:41.040 a thing. And I think that cable analogy tells some 0:27:41.119 --> 0:27:43.960 of that story. But I don't really see any vcs 0:27:44.520 --> 0:27:46.200 anywhere near the media business right now. 0:27:46.280 --> 0:27:49.040 Can I just quid detour? Because we've been talking about 0:27:49.080 --> 0:27:53.919 Insider and what was Vice? Because I actually, like people 0:27:54.040 --> 0:27:56.199 talked about Vice a lot, but like I never like 0:27:56.320 --> 0:27:59.200 knew someone who like went to Vice dot com. 0:27:59.119 --> 0:28:01.399 Like what was Vice? I know, it's you know, I 0:28:01.400 --> 0:28:03.879 wrote this whole book about traffic, and Advice isn't really 0:28:03.880 --> 0:28:06.320 in it because they didn't get any traffic. They were Ah. 0:28:06.600 --> 0:28:10.000 They were the purest best brand of the digital media era, 0:28:10.000 --> 0:28:13.320 as Shane Smith was the best advertising salesman anyone has 0:28:13.400 --> 0:28:17.520 probably of our generation, and best equity salesman of our generation. 0:28:17.920 --> 0:28:20.040 And they did have this brand that really stood for something. 0:28:20.040 --> 0:28:24.520 They made some incredible documentary mini documentaries that really caught 0:28:24.520 --> 0:28:27.719 people's attention and defined a style of telling stories. They 0:28:27.760 --> 0:28:30.400 did not ever really build digital audience, and what they 0:28:30.600 --> 0:28:33.920 were able to do for a time was to convert 0:28:33.960 --> 0:28:36.840 that brand into a television production company that made a 0:28:36.880 --> 0:28:40.280 pretty good news show for HBO. But the television production business, 0:28:40.320 --> 0:28:42.440 I mean you think the digital media business is tough, 0:28:42.920 --> 0:28:45.200 I mean that's a really tough business as well, because 0:28:45.200 --> 0:28:47.560 you can get your show canceled, which is ultimately what happened. 0:28:48.160 --> 0:28:50.760 Sorry to keep jumping back in time, but I think 0:28:50.800 --> 0:28:53.600 it sort of informs the current state of the market. 0:28:53.680 --> 0:28:57.040 There was a moment when Shona Peretti was talking about 0:28:57.480 --> 0:29:01.480 like maybe the media could get together to give them 0:29:01.560 --> 0:29:06.600 some more bargaining power over the platforms the distribution channels. 0:29:07.280 --> 0:29:10.240 Was that ever a viable solution to some of the 0:29:10.240 --> 0:29:11.560 issues we've been talking about. 0:29:12.000 --> 0:29:15.000 Yeah, Jonah in particular had an idea that you could 0:29:15.040 --> 0:29:20.640 basically if you rolled up enough scale on digital media 0:29:20.760 --> 0:29:25.479 that you could gain leverage against Facebook in particular. I mean, 0:29:25.520 --> 0:29:27.280 you see why that makes sense. I mean it's a 0:29:27.360 --> 0:29:30.440 very classic way of thinking about a market. But I 0:29:30.480 --> 0:29:33.760 think there's this underlying problem that what these guys were 0:29:33.800 --> 0:29:36.840 selling was, you know, that it was not a commodity, 0:29:36.880 --> 0:29:40.560 that scale was infinite, that Facebook, whether or not they 0:29:40.560 --> 0:29:44.960 had access to, you know, high quality journalism, at least 0:29:45.000 --> 0:29:47.440 to the thought that they could reach every single person 0:29:47.480 --> 0:29:50.080 on the planet forever with their better mass trap and 0:29:50.120 --> 0:29:52.520 didn't really need you. Again, I think as you look 0:29:52.560 --> 0:29:55.160 at social media and you watch it unravel, it's not 0:29:55.320 --> 0:29:58.920 crazy to think about, huh, like, maybe these maybe maybe 0:29:58.920 --> 0:30:01.880 these social platforms should have taken more seriously the idea 0:30:01.960 --> 0:30:04.520 that they should have been pivoting towards subscription services with 0:30:04.720 --> 0:30:06.800 high quality content, since that seems like those are the 0:30:06.840 --> 0:30:09.200 companies that are now winning. But that was it, But 0:30:09.240 --> 0:30:11.400 it also seems inspect that was never going to happen, 0:30:11.480 --> 0:30:12.960 and it was crazy to imagine it would. 0:30:13.560 --> 0:30:16.720 So speaking of bargaining power, you know, I was an 0:30:16.720 --> 0:30:19.400 insider for six years and they were very good for 0:30:19.560 --> 0:30:22.840 my career, etc. As I wouldn't trade that for anything 0:30:23.360 --> 0:30:28.880 except that they were extremely psychologically and physically demanding. I basically, 0:30:29.640 --> 0:30:31.520 I work seven days a week. I would get up 0:30:31.520 --> 0:30:34.280 early on weekends to post. I would probably work twelve 0:30:34.320 --> 0:30:36.720 hours a day on the weekdays. I would wake up 0:30:36.720 --> 0:30:39.360 sometimes so stressed out I would like punch a pillow 0:30:39.400 --> 0:30:41.640 a few times. And the reason I bring up bargaining 0:30:41.680 --> 0:30:43.880 power is that I think a lot of people don't 0:30:43.960 --> 0:30:47.560 like that. And a number of newsrooms have unionized, and 0:30:47.600 --> 0:30:51.680 I'm sort of curious, Like I left Insider prior to 0:30:51.880 --> 0:30:56.400 that newsroom having unionized. But but BuzzFeed News did unionize 0:30:56.800 --> 0:30:59.520 while you were the editor in chief there, right, Yeah, 0:30:59.560 --> 0:31:01.600 that's right. How did that change that? Was there like 0:31:01.600 --> 0:31:04.120 a noticeable different in the way like this sort of 0:31:04.160 --> 0:31:06.920 like post post post post that I like grew up in, 0:31:07.680 --> 0:31:09.960 Like did that change or was there like a did 0:31:09.960 --> 0:31:12.240 it shift anything when the news rem union ized? You know? 0:31:12.800 --> 0:31:15.200 I mean maybe we had already moved a little past 0:31:15.280 --> 0:31:17.480 the era that you were talking about where you were 0:31:17.480 --> 0:31:19.720 in a personal foot race with Twitter. Yeah, and you 0:31:19.760 --> 0:31:23.080 were always second, which is pretty amazing, Like no one 0:31:23.080 --> 0:31:25.240 else could manage it. You were the fleetest of foot 0:31:25.240 --> 0:31:28.000 It was crazy, but it did seem stressful still. Second, Yeah, 0:31:28.000 --> 0:31:29.560 and I was, yeah, I mean I was, you know, 0:31:29.600 --> 0:31:32.240 in that race too at various times. No, I don't 0:31:32.240 --> 0:31:34.200 think people I don't think people union ask because they 0:31:34.200 --> 0:31:35.760 wanted to work less hard. I think it was a 0:31:35.800 --> 0:31:39.000 sense of wanting control over your life and your work 0:31:39.040 --> 0:31:43.000 in this very stressful, chaotic moment in America, not just 0:31:43.080 --> 0:31:45.200 in you know, in the news business in particular, and 0:31:45.240 --> 0:31:49.880 wanting protection against the downside at a pretty gloomy seeming moment. Yeah, 0:31:49.920 --> 0:31:51.680 but you know, the New York Times, Wall Street journal 0:31:51.960 --> 0:31:53.880 I had unions forever. I think it's you know, it's 0:31:53.880 --> 0:31:56.520 an industry that has a history of pretty strong unions. 0:31:56.920 --> 0:31:58.719 I mean, I think there's this other challenge right now, 0:31:58.800 --> 0:32:02.160 which is that news rooms, good newsrooms are really egalitarian 0:32:02.440 --> 0:32:06.080 and feel it, and unions are part of that culture. 0:32:06.120 --> 0:32:10.800 And at the same time, this ecosystem rewards individual journalists 0:32:10.840 --> 0:32:13.479 who get there there whatever. You know, they hate, we 0:32:13.520 --> 0:32:17.400 all hate the words like influencer and brand, but in 0:32:17.440 --> 0:32:20.320 fact that is it's an ecosystem that rewards that. And 0:32:20.560 --> 0:32:23.440 figuring out how you blend those cultures I think is 0:32:23.440 --> 0:32:25.440 a big kind of newsroom challenge. 0:32:25.240 --> 0:32:30.760 Since we mentioned Twitter. It has been interesting watching the 0:32:30.800 --> 0:32:33.960 slow implosion of Twitter at this time, but both Joe 0:32:33.960 --> 0:32:37.880 and I our careers have certainly benefited from that platform. 0:32:38.280 --> 0:32:41.840 What would be the impact of Twitter, you know, suddenly 0:32:41.880 --> 0:32:45.840 going away or either becoming irrelevant on the media industry. 0:32:46.520 --> 0:32:48.400 I mean, I think we're halfway through that process and 0:32:48.440 --> 0:32:51.800 you're seeing it. I think it means that as a consumer, 0:32:52.400 --> 0:32:54.080 I mean, I'm currently and I don't know if you 0:32:54.080 --> 0:32:56.360 feel this or if your listeners feel this, but I 0:32:56.400 --> 0:32:58.000 wake up in the morning and I want to My 0:32:58.120 --> 0:32:59.920 main use case for Twitter had been what is how 0:33:00.000 --> 0:33:00.520 happening there? 0:33:01.040 --> 0:33:01.200 Right? 0:33:01.240 --> 0:33:03.320 And it doesn't do that anymore for me, just like, 0:33:03.360 --> 0:33:05.280 what are the four news stories I need to be watching? 0:33:05.280 --> 0:33:06.400 I need to go to the front page of the 0:33:06.440 --> 0:33:09.600 New York Times or the Drudge Report or seventeen other 0:33:09.680 --> 0:33:11.960 places and actually a lot of it some forore, like, 0:33:12.000 --> 0:33:14.320 that's definitely like a job we feel can be done. 0:33:14.440 --> 0:33:16.680 What we're trying to do every morning with Flagship is like, 0:33:17.000 --> 0:33:18.960 here's what is happening in the world, because that is 0:33:19.000 --> 0:33:22.280 a service Twitter used to provide. They have what Netwi 0:33:22.280 --> 0:33:25.640 Twitter that provides is this riveting story about itself, which 0:33:25.680 --> 0:33:27.640 I find very interesting as a long time Twitter user, 0:33:27.920 --> 0:33:28.680 but I watch it. 0:33:28.760 --> 0:33:30.600 That's most of the value now is to see what 0:33:30.640 --> 0:33:32.040 people are saying about Twitter. 0:33:32.240 --> 0:33:36.239 Yeah, but it doesn't do that particular thing and it 0:33:36.280 --> 0:33:38.560 doesn't you know, and it's yeah, and it's just so so. 0:33:38.600 --> 0:33:41.280 But I think as a newswire, as a sort of user, 0:33:41.360 --> 0:33:44.080 it's become less useful. As a journalist, it was a 0:33:44.080 --> 0:33:45.760 good place for people to build their brands to some 0:33:45.800 --> 0:33:47.840 degree still is I think in certain spaces. I think 0:33:47.840 --> 0:33:52.680 in economics AI there are really interesting like threads of 0:33:52.720 --> 0:33:55.160 conversation that are still there and you could imagine. I mean, 0:33:55.160 --> 0:33:57.200 I think Reddit is a really interesting example, like there's 0:33:57.200 --> 0:33:59.560 a social network that didn't go away, actually probably the 0:33:59.560 --> 0:34:02.160 best place on the internet, but it's also not centrally 0:34:02.200 --> 0:34:04.600 relevant to news in culture, and I think there's a 0:34:04.640 --> 0:34:06.040 path for Twitter that is that. 0:34:06.320 --> 0:34:09.320 Okay, so you mentioned AI. Actually it's funny, Tracy it. 0:34:09.400 --> 0:34:12.440 I recorded an episode earlier in the day and we 0:34:12.640 --> 0:34:14.560 decided that well, from now on, I guess there's always 0:34:14.560 --> 0:34:16.600 going to be an AI question, probably in every interview 0:34:16.600 --> 0:34:17.320 at least, it's. 0:34:17.200 --> 0:34:18.960 Usually going to be how is AI going to make 0:34:18.960 --> 0:34:19.520 this worse? 0:34:19.840 --> 0:34:24.719 But actually, like, as someone who makes my living with 0:34:24.840 --> 0:34:28.040 words in one way or another. A. I'm pretty blown 0:34:28.080 --> 0:34:31.360 away by what AI can do, and in my mind, 0:34:31.480 --> 0:34:34.880 I have a fair amount of anxiety that at some 0:34:35.000 --> 0:34:37.440 point in a few years someone could say, you know, 0:34:37.520 --> 0:34:39.680 I'd really like to hear Ben Smith on the Odd 0:34:39.719 --> 0:34:42.840 Lots podcast, and rather than waiting for us to like 0:34:42.880 --> 0:34:45.399 book Ben's Smith and then get it out a week 0:34:45.480 --> 0:34:48.520 later or whatever, they just say, what would it be like? 0:34:48.640 --> 0:34:50.879 And then they run it through a voice generation thing 0:34:50.960 --> 0:34:52.600 and they have like a pretty good version of the 0:34:52.600 --> 0:34:55.799 Odd Lots podcast where Joe and Tracy interview Ben. I'm 0:34:55.800 --> 0:34:59.800 on ironically anxious that this is like a real possibility, 0:35:00.440 --> 0:35:02.680 but in like the next few years, Like, doesn't it 0:35:02.719 --> 0:35:03.399 worry you at all? 0:35:04.440 --> 0:35:06.759 It worries me. I don't think I've quite figured out 0:35:06.800 --> 0:35:10.440 the scenario that's really gonna freak me out, because I 0:35:10.440 --> 0:35:12.319 don't I'm not sure it's that. I mean, I think 0:35:12.560 --> 0:35:15.520 I don't. I think there's already enormous amounts of sort 0:35:15.560 --> 0:35:20.040 of you know, copy pasta random grated content on the Internet, 0:35:20.080 --> 0:35:21.359 and the fact that you could get someone to read 0:35:21.360 --> 0:35:23.200 it aloud in my voice. I'm not sure that's four. 0:35:23.560 --> 0:35:25.560 Like I'm not sure we're I mean, I think there 0:35:25.600 --> 0:35:28.040 was this sort of Google centric view of the Internet 0:35:28.040 --> 0:35:30.919 where if you just sprayed garbage content everywhere, you would 0:35:30.920 --> 0:35:32.080 ocasually make a few pennies. 0:35:33.719 --> 0:35:35.560 My concern is that it's not going to be garbage, 0:35:35.680 --> 0:35:39.200 That it actually will scan the corpus of all Ben 0:35:39.320 --> 0:35:42.360 Smith content and be pretty good and sort of figuring 0:35:42.360 --> 0:35:44.520 out what you were going to answer, That it'll scan 0:35:44.800 --> 0:35:47.600 Joe and Tracy episodes and kind of and be good 0:35:47.600 --> 0:35:50.360 at figuring out the questions we would ask. And I actually, 0:35:50.600 --> 0:35:51.279 I actually. 0:35:51.080 --> 0:35:53.880 Don't worry about that. What I worry about is because 0:35:54.080 --> 0:35:57.879 it will come up with something predictable. What humans will 0:35:57.880 --> 0:35:59.719 have to do, what human journalists will have to do 0:35:59.800 --> 0:36:03.440 is come even more extreme and were unpredictable. 0:36:03.200 --> 0:36:05.560 A really interesting I mean, I don't think your audience 0:36:05.640 --> 0:36:08.480 wants that, Like I think you underestimate your audience, Like 0:36:08.840 --> 0:36:11.080 I think if you if you flagged in advance of 0:36:11.120 --> 0:36:15.160 this episode was entirely AI generated from from re scrambling 0:36:15.200 --> 0:36:18.239 the corpus of things we've said before, they wouldn't listen. Yeah, 0:36:18.280 --> 0:36:20.200 I don't know, but I also and I also I 0:36:20.200 --> 0:36:22.160 guess I sort of come from like the sort of 0:36:22.200 --> 0:36:25.000 scoop world of journalism, Like I care a lot about reporting, 0:36:25.040 --> 0:36:26.680 and it isn't And that's a kind of journalism where 0:36:26.719 --> 0:36:28.200 not only is it's sort of a little harder to 0:36:28.239 --> 0:36:31.359 see AI disrupting it, but also over you know, over 0:36:31.400 --> 0:36:34.600 the last twenty thirty years of editors getting worn away 0:36:34.640 --> 0:36:37.520 in newsrooms, there's been this thing that I've noticed where 0:36:37.960 --> 0:36:40.319 there's a kind of journalist who was not a particularly 0:36:40.360 --> 0:36:42.960 good writer. And in the old days of tabloids, like 0:36:43.000 --> 0:36:44.480 you know, you were a runner and you had a 0:36:44.520 --> 0:36:48.360 rewrite guy. And as these metro newspapers ran out of money, 0:36:48.360 --> 0:36:50.280 the first people to go were these kind of rewrite 0:36:50.280 --> 0:36:54.839 mid level editors. And it really disfavored people who did 0:36:54.880 --> 0:36:58.000 not have fancy educations and or were not good writers, 0:36:58.360 --> 0:37:01.040 but were really great reporters. And I don't know, if 0:37:01.040 --> 0:37:02.839 you have somebody who can really report and can't write 0:37:02.840 --> 0:37:04.719 and wants to use some writing tools, like that's fine 0:37:04.719 --> 0:37:04.880 with me. 0:37:05.120 --> 0:37:08.040 I remember hearing a story Tracy from I Forget, who 0:37:08.160 --> 0:37:10.080 is someone at the New York Post talk about how 0:37:10.280 --> 0:37:11.919 you know, they'd have the guy go out and it's 0:37:11.960 --> 0:37:14.799 like a doctor was found dead in a hotel room 0:37:14.840 --> 0:37:17.040 with his girlfriend and then the rewrite gown being okay 0:37:17.120 --> 0:37:19.960 doc with Gail Pale, like could translate it into New 0:37:20.040 --> 0:37:20.719 York Post. 0:37:20.520 --> 0:37:22.560 Speak like and that's and that is and that's like 0:37:22.680 --> 0:37:25.480 literally what what what chat GVT is best at? Right now? 0:37:25.640 --> 0:37:27.799 There was someone at the FT who was exactly like that. 0:37:27.840 --> 0:37:30.319 I'm not going to say who, but I imagine. 0:37:30.120 --> 0:37:31.040 You would make it more boring. 0:37:31.280 --> 0:37:33.400 No, there was someone who is very, very good at 0:37:33.480 --> 0:37:36.120 reporting and getting the story, but had to have all 0:37:36.160 --> 0:37:37.440 of their copy rewritten. 0:37:37.480 --> 0:37:41.520 Oh, they're legendary, fabulous magazine writers whose names we all 0:37:41.560 --> 0:37:44.880 know and admire, whose editors write every word, and like, 0:37:44.920 --> 0:37:45.680 what's wrong with that? 0:37:45.760 --> 0:37:47.080 Like, I think that's a different jobs. 0:37:47.080 --> 0:37:49.360 It's a great form of news production. It's sort of 0:37:49.360 --> 0:37:51.000 too bad that it's all been flattened out. And if 0:37:51.000 --> 0:37:52.920 some of these tools help people write, it's not the 0:37:52.960 --> 0:37:54.000 most important part of the job. 0:37:54.480 --> 0:37:56.400 So one of the things I wanted to ask you 0:37:56.520 --> 0:37:58.799 was I was reading. First of all, I really want 0:37:58.800 --> 0:38:01.080 to read your book. I haven't done it yet, but 0:38:01.200 --> 0:38:03.880 I'm looking forward to it. I was reading instead one 0:38:03.920 --> 0:38:04.879 of the reviews of the book. 0:38:04.880 --> 0:38:07.360 I think it was the one to read the reviews, 0:38:07.400 --> 0:38:09.520 like in that movie Metropolitan, just read the critics. 0:38:09.560 --> 0:38:12.200 I think it was probably John Gapper or someone like that, 0:38:12.400 --> 0:38:14.640 but they had a line in there saying that they 0:38:14.680 --> 0:38:17.680 felt that in the book there was no moral conclusion 0:38:17.920 --> 0:38:21.560 about this whole episode of digital media. So I guess 0:38:21.560 --> 0:38:23.799 I'd love to hear from you, you know, here's your 0:38:23.880 --> 0:38:26.960 chance at a clear moral conclusion, like what is the 0:38:27.000 --> 0:38:30.319 big takeaway of the past ten or fifteen years in 0:38:30.400 --> 0:38:31.400 digital journalism? 0:38:31.440 --> 0:38:34.560 It's the old apocryphal John lie thing, So too soon 0:38:34.600 --> 0:38:36.440 to tell, But I think I don't know about a 0:38:36.440 --> 0:38:38.400 moral conclusion, but would say the thing that surprised me 0:38:38.480 --> 0:38:41.480 most in the reporting was that that world that we 0:38:41.600 --> 0:38:43.879 that I was reporting on, that we were all in 0:38:43.880 --> 0:38:46.480 in the kind of early Internet I think was assumed 0:38:46.600 --> 0:38:49.680 thought itself to be politically progressive, like without really thinking 0:38:49.680 --> 0:38:52.760 about it, these were the Internet was where young people 0:38:52.800 --> 0:38:55.640 got together to elect Barack Obama. And you know Barack 0:38:55.680 --> 0:38:58.520 Obama pays a visit to Facebook. Obviously Facebook. You know, 0:38:58.520 --> 0:39:01.400 it goes with that saying book is a democratic place 0:39:01.880 --> 0:39:05.200 where that is friendly to Barack Obama. And I think 0:39:05.320 --> 0:39:07.640 the people, some of the people at Huffington Post totally 0:39:07.680 --> 0:39:10.560 explicitly their job was to elect Barack Obama, and I 0:39:10.560 --> 0:39:14.040 think it was a surprise to me and the reporting 0:39:14.080 --> 0:39:16.160 to see that the sort of people who created the 0:39:16.200 --> 0:39:19.400 populist right. You know, the guy Chris Pool who founded 0:39:19.400 --> 0:39:21.600 four Chan worked out of BuzzFeed's offices. I don't think 0:39:21.600 --> 0:39:24.400 he was a conservative, but he built that. Andrew Breichbart 0:39:24.440 --> 0:39:26.759 was a co founder of Huffington Post. Steve Bannon comes 0:39:26.760 --> 0:39:28.920 through and learns from Huffington Post and so on and 0:39:28.960 --> 0:39:31.800 so on. And then, like I think, if the people 0:39:31.840 --> 0:39:34.839 who thought that the election of Barack Obama was kind 0:39:34.840 --> 0:39:37.840 of the apage of this whole moment, yeah, turn around 0:39:37.880 --> 0:39:40.759 and suddenly, actually the election of Donald Trump is the 0:39:40.800 --> 0:39:42.759 apogee of the moment, and the people who thought they 0:39:42.760 --> 0:39:46.560 were the main characters actually were the supporting characters. And 0:39:46.640 --> 0:39:49.759 the main characters were these conservatives who'd been we thought 0:39:49.800 --> 0:39:51.799 had been hanging around the edges, but actually were the 0:39:51.840 --> 0:39:52.600 central thrust. 0:39:53.080 --> 0:39:56.239 One thing that you know, since we're talking politics, you know, 0:39:56.280 --> 0:39:59.360 we have the various cable networks on TV, like in 0:39:59.400 --> 0:40:02.359 the newsroom, and they're all on mute, so I don't 0:40:02.400 --> 0:40:05.120 really listen to them. But one thing I definitely noticed 0:40:05.280 --> 0:40:08.120 is that like CNN and like maybe some of the others, 0:40:08.400 --> 0:40:10.879 they've never been able to quit Trump. I mean, it's 0:40:10.920 --> 0:40:13.839 like Biden has been the president for like over two 0:40:13.920 --> 0:40:16.359 years now, and I'm pretty sure at least I see 0:40:16.360 --> 0:40:19.680 as much Trump pretty much constantly. I don't know, I'm 0:40:19.680 --> 0:40:21.480 just sort of curious, Like the last thing like this 0:40:21.719 --> 0:40:25.360 very like strange love hate. I kind of think the 0:40:25.360 --> 0:40:28.040 media mostly loves Trump, even if like the words are 0:40:28.120 --> 0:40:31.040 kind of anti Trump. Like I'm just like, what like 0:40:31.200 --> 0:40:33.840 the Trump era and beyond has like done to the media. 0:40:34.560 --> 0:40:37.800 I mean, the rise of this you know, reality show 0:40:37.920 --> 0:40:41.720 star turned would be authoritarian is obviously the biggest story, 0:40:42.080 --> 0:40:44.160 you know, in this period of American history. So I 0:40:44.160 --> 0:40:47.640 don't think it's crazy that the media covers it or 0:40:47.640 --> 0:40:50.880 that its viewers are very interested in it. And but 0:40:50.600 --> 0:40:53.080 I but obviously also, you know, TV has its own 0:40:53.120 --> 0:40:55.680 form of traffic, which is ratings. Yeah, And there's a 0:40:55.719 --> 0:40:58.879 sense in which Trump in twenty sixteen was like sort 0:40:58.880 --> 0:41:01.960 of providing free syndic content to CNN that was just 0:41:02.040 --> 0:41:03.759 putting it on and people were watching it. I mean 0:41:03.800 --> 0:41:07.200 Newsmax was competitive with other channels the other day because 0:41:07.200 --> 0:41:11.200 it just put a Trump speech on unfiltered, and CNN 0:41:11.320 --> 0:41:15.839 is going back to the well and on town hall 0:41:15.880 --> 0:41:18.799 with Donald Trump. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think 0:41:18.840 --> 0:41:21.359 it's you know, I think sometimes the media overestimates our 0:41:21.400 --> 0:41:24.120 own role and our own power. And you know, Trump, 0:41:24.120 --> 0:41:27.000 in fact, basically was banned from cable Rupert Murdoch said 0:41:27.000 --> 0:41:28.360 that he was going to make him a non person. 0:41:28.719 --> 0:41:31.040 He was banned from the social networks, and he remained 0:41:31.200 --> 0:41:34.319 very popular because a lot of Republicans really love him 0:41:34.360 --> 0:41:37.400 and like what he's selling. And maybe we overestimated the 0:41:37.480 --> 0:41:39.560 role of the media in that, like they weren't confused 0:41:39.600 --> 0:41:42.640 about who he was, they hadn't been tricked. They just 0:41:42.719 --> 0:41:46.239 really like him. And so it's not particularly healthy for 0:41:46.280 --> 0:41:48.560 a country. Like when a country's consuming as much news 0:41:48.600 --> 0:41:51.560 as this country was in the period twenty sixteen twenty twenty, 0:41:51.560 --> 0:41:53.680 that's like not a great sign. It was probably a 0:41:53.719 --> 0:41:56.720 more normal country that consumes less news, and we're headed 0:41:56.719 --> 0:41:59.560 probably to another national panic attack and consume a lot 0:41:59.560 --> 0:41:59.919 of news. 0:42:00.239 --> 0:42:03.960 I do remember before Trump won the presidency. I think 0:42:04.000 --> 0:42:05.799 I was in Abu Dhabi at the time and I 0:42:05.880 --> 0:42:08.920 wasn't watching cable news, and I remember coming back to 0:42:08.920 --> 0:42:12.560 the US for a visit and seeing CNN and it 0:42:12.600 --> 0:42:15.920 was just Trump like wall to wall coverage of Trump, 0:42:16.000 --> 0:42:18.319 and up until that point, I thought like, oh, this 0:42:18.400 --> 0:42:20.279 is crazy, but then you see him on TV all 0:42:20.280 --> 0:42:22.080 the time and you're like, oh wait a second. But 0:42:22.239 --> 0:42:24.759 just on that note, I mean, so I think the 0:42:24.800 --> 0:42:29.040 thing that traffic and cable news all kind of has 0:42:29.160 --> 0:42:31.680 in common. And going back to the question I asked 0:42:31.719 --> 0:42:36.200 earlier about the hate read, is a way to get 0:42:36.239 --> 0:42:40.760 people's attention is obviously to provoke outrage or to play 0:42:40.960 --> 0:42:46.360 to previously held opinions. Once that can has been opened 0:42:46.800 --> 0:42:49.640 or once that box has been opened, can we ever 0:42:49.760 --> 0:42:54.240 go back to that sort of like classic maybe nineteen fifties, 0:42:54.320 --> 0:42:59.720 nineteen sixties era of you know, unbiased media coverage, bipartisan coverage, 0:43:00.080 --> 0:43:03.480 heels to all types of people, or is that just gone? 0:43:03.560 --> 0:43:05.719 I mean, I think that specific thing you're talking about 0:43:05.760 --> 0:43:09.520 isn't so much classic as a sort of temporary product 0:43:09.520 --> 0:43:12.759 of post war metropolitan newspaper businesses that were that you know, 0:43:12.800 --> 0:43:15.480 we're selling, you know, we're these monopoly advertising businesses that 0:43:15.520 --> 0:43:18.520 wanted to sell to everybody. But I also think, you know, 0:43:19.120 --> 0:43:21.640 the sort of suddenly the lights turned on when the 0:43:22.239 --> 0:43:25.560 data from digital media came in, and suddenly these people 0:43:25.560 --> 0:43:30.040 who've been not only flying without instruments but kind of sleepwalking. 0:43:30.480 --> 0:43:32.000 You know, they've been doing the same thing for years 0:43:32.040 --> 0:43:35.320 and years and in a pretty in a declining industry, 0:43:35.640 --> 0:43:37.480 and suddenly they could you know, they were flying with 0:43:37.560 --> 0:43:40.120 instruments and we could all suddenly see and you know, 0:43:40.840 --> 0:43:44.400 exquisite detail everyone who was reading everything and it and 0:43:44.440 --> 0:43:48.800 in many ways probably you know, over overtrqued toward that lesson. 0:43:48.840 --> 0:43:51.320 All right, I have one last question. It's very self 0:43:51.360 --> 0:43:55.279 serving for me and Tracy, but I feel like, to 0:43:55.400 --> 0:43:58.800 some extent, and tell me of you disagree to some extent, 0:43:59.239 --> 0:44:01.359 I feel like when you look at all of the 0:44:01.400 --> 0:44:05.040 big changes that have undergone the news business, in a way, 0:44:05.120 --> 0:44:07.480 business news is a bit of an exception and that 0:44:07.560 --> 0:44:10.920 it's been more stable. And I remember an insider when 0:44:10.960 --> 0:44:13.960 you like, I'm a huge admirer and was at the 0:44:13.960 --> 0:44:17.400 whole time of like BuzzFeed News, but I remember I 0:44:17.480 --> 0:44:19.759 was like paranoid when you guys launched a business section 0:44:19.840 --> 0:44:21.640 because I was like, oh, now you're gonna come and 0:44:21.640 --> 0:44:24.240 it didn't really click in my opinion, like it didn't 0:44:24.280 --> 0:44:27.799 really work. And generally speaking, it does not feel like 0:44:27.960 --> 0:44:31.719 the level of disruption and sort of like tumult that 0:44:31.880 --> 0:44:34.720 many parts of the industry has faced has hit business 0:44:34.760 --> 0:44:36.719 news quite the same way. And the Wallshet Journal is 0:44:36.719 --> 0:44:39.840 still powerhouse and Bloomberg is still a powerhouse, et cetera. 0:44:40.000 --> 0:44:42.400 Is there Do you feel that that's the case? Like 0:44:42.440 --> 0:44:44.920 what it was it about business news, even at BuzzFeed 0:44:44.920 --> 0:44:48.120 that made it unlike say some of these other categories. 0:44:48.440 --> 0:44:50.600 Well, I think it was more competitive, and it was 0:44:50.719 --> 0:44:54.840 better resourced, and you had healthier institutions. And that's because 0:44:54.880 --> 0:44:57.480 business is where the money is. I mean, I think 0:44:57.520 --> 0:45:00.680 that's actually why it's a better business than general christ news, 0:45:01.120 --> 0:45:03.160 you know, just for the literal reason that people are 0:45:03.480 --> 0:45:06.360 making money on what you and what you produce, and 0:45:06.400 --> 0:45:09.040 so they can and trading on it and subscribing. I mean, 0:45:09.040 --> 0:45:11.440 this institution is probably the best example of that. 0:45:11.719 --> 0:45:14.520 I'm not kidding about the psychological effects on me in 0:45:14.560 --> 0:45:16.319 those years. I mean I've like gotten over it, and 0:45:16.480 --> 0:45:17.879 it's not one of these things like oh I needed 0:45:17.960 --> 0:45:21.520 years of therapy, but like those were really extremely stressful years. 0:45:21.520 --> 0:45:25.600 And I remember before BuzzFeed launched its business section just 0:45:25.640 --> 0:45:28.160 being like insanely stressed. I was like, my life is 0:45:28.160 --> 0:45:31.480 stressful enough. And now like the news entity that's the 0:45:31.560 --> 0:45:34.160 juggernaut of all things is coming after business news and 0:45:34.160 --> 0:45:34.680 now we're done. 0:45:34.680 --> 0:45:36.799 But well, I'm glad we didn't. We didn't push Thank 0:45:36.840 --> 0:45:37.680 you that one. 0:45:37.719 --> 0:45:41.120 Thank you for not Thank you for Ben, Thank you 0:45:41.160 --> 0:45:42.719 so much for coming on Odd Lost. This was a 0:45:42.719 --> 0:45:43.200 lot of fun. 0:45:43.280 --> 0:45:44.719 Thank you so much for having me on. 0:45:44.920 --> 0:45:45.959 Thanks Ben. That was great. 0:45:46.040 --> 0:46:01.280 Yeah, that was great, Tracy, that was a lot of fun. 0:46:01.440 --> 0:46:04.360 I hope the listeners found it fun because for me, actually, 0:46:04.440 --> 0:46:06.480 like I could talk about this for hours, Like there 0:46:06.480 --> 0:46:09.719 are not many topics that we discussed on the show 0:46:09.719 --> 0:46:11.839 in which I feel like I have expertise, like that's 0:46:11.840 --> 0:46:15.120 why I'm the interviewer, but like on the digital media 0:46:15.160 --> 0:46:17.279 business of the last fifteen years, which were both in 0:46:17.400 --> 0:46:18.920 I kind of consider us both experts. 0:46:19.160 --> 0:46:21.040 Joe, you know which one of us got more traffic 0:46:21.160 --> 0:46:21.600 last year? 0:46:22.360 --> 0:46:23.560 Uh? It was you? It wasn't it? 0:46:23.560 --> 0:46:24.320 It was me? Was it? 0:46:24.440 --> 0:46:26.359 It was like one of those housing store what was it? 0:46:26.440 --> 0:46:28.000 You had so many? I had a bunch. 0:46:28.200 --> 0:46:31.000 I was just behind Matt Levine in the in the 0:46:31.040 --> 0:46:34.320 traffic ranks. But I actually that's something we didn't talk about, 0:46:34.520 --> 0:46:37.440 is the data visibility, because this was one of the 0:46:37.520 --> 0:46:41.360 like defining things of digital journalism, which was you could 0:46:41.480 --> 0:46:45.840 see how many people were reading your article in real time, 0:46:46.000 --> 0:46:48.719 and that really helped you focus on the type of 0:46:48.760 --> 0:46:49.640 content you were producer. 0:46:49.640 --> 0:46:52.200 There's a lot there. I mean, so an insider, it 0:46:52.239 --> 0:46:54.160 was on the walls, like it was on on the 0:46:54.320 --> 0:46:57.200 like a scoreboard. It was on the scoreboard for everyone's. 0:46:56.800 --> 0:46:57.640 Just that's crazy. 0:46:57.719 --> 0:46:59.760 It was I'm telling you, I don't want to totally 0:46:59.760 --> 0:47:03.840 over exaggerated and say scarred for years, but the stress 0:47:04.360 --> 0:47:07.520 that caused people to like see everyone's traffic on the 0:47:07.600 --> 0:47:09.120 walls and all the time, it did two things that 0:47:09.200 --> 0:47:13.239 drove people crazy, and it turned people into absolute juggernauts. 0:47:13.280 --> 0:47:15.120 And you could take someone out of school from like 0:47:15.400 --> 0:47:19.319 Columbia Jay School or UNC or Duke or Northwestern, and 0:47:19.480 --> 0:47:21.160 in a few months they were a traffic moster. 0:47:21.280 --> 0:47:24.640 But see, this is also why I asked that question 0:47:24.760 --> 0:47:28.480 about hate reads, because you can produce a headline that 0:47:28.520 --> 0:47:30.719 will get a bunch of people to click on it, 0:47:30.880 --> 0:47:34.640 but not necessarily in a good way. And I feel 0:47:34.640 --> 0:47:37.600 like a lot of digital journalism was about provoking that 0:47:37.760 --> 0:47:42.240 response and not necessarily building up a dedicated audience. 0:47:42.600 --> 0:47:45.160 Henry Blodgett, what it's like to actually eat a cheeseburger. 0:47:45.360 --> 0:47:47.359 What it's actually you know, like those were like hate 0:47:47.360 --> 0:47:49.440 reads and Veterans is so good. 0:47:49.520 --> 0:47:52.920 But like, but you know, there's no differentiating between someone 0:47:52.960 --> 0:47:56.440 reading something because it's fair and balanced and accurate and 0:47:56.480 --> 0:48:00.640 insightful versus someone reading something because it's provocative or stupid 0:48:00.960 --> 0:48:02.640 or extreme in one way or another. 0:48:03.480 --> 0:48:06.560 Your point is something I'm very concerned about about AI, 0:48:06.760 --> 0:48:09.680 which is if there's this perception that's sort of like 0:48:09.800 --> 0:48:12.160 AI is going to be really good at the sort 0:48:12.200 --> 0:48:16.640 of commodity normal, and all these people in media think like, oh, 0:48:16.760 --> 0:48:19.479 I got to really like I have to AI proof 0:48:19.600 --> 0:48:20.200 my career. 0:48:20.719 --> 0:48:23.600 You have to turbo charge the hot takes. 0:48:23.719 --> 0:48:26.719 Yeah, I'm like, this is what social media did, and I 0:48:26.719 --> 0:48:28.480 think this is one I don't know. I think it's 0:48:28.520 --> 0:48:29.800 going to be even more extreme. 0:48:29.920 --> 0:48:32.160 Yeah, that's what I think too. All Right, on that 0:48:32.280 --> 0:48:33.879 happy note, shall we leave it there. 0:48:34.040 --> 0:48:35.279 Let's leave it there, all right. 0:48:35.400 --> 0:48:38.240 This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. 0:48:38.320 --> 0:48:40.759 I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at 0:48:40.760 --> 0:48:42.000 Tracy Alloway. 0:48:41.680 --> 0:48:44.600 And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter 0:48:44.760 --> 0:48:47.760 at the Stalwart. You can follow our guest Ben Smith. 0:48:47.840 --> 0:48:52.000 He's at semaphore Ben and check out his new book Traffic. 0:48:52.440 --> 0:48:56.000 Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman and dash 0:48:56.000 --> 0:48:59.600 Ol Bennett at dashbot. And for more odd Lots content, 0:48:59.680 --> 0:49:02.839 go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd lots, where we 0:49:02.920 --> 0:49:05.480 post the transcripts. We have a blog, a newsletter that 0:49:05.520 --> 0:49:09.400 comes out every Friday, and we have a discord Discord 0:49:09.440 --> 0:49:12.040 dot gg slash odd lots. Listeners are in there twenty 0:49:12.080 --> 0:49:14.719 four to seven talk about all this stuff. It's really fun. 0:49:14.800 --> 0:49:17.200 It might even be the future of media we can do. 0:49:17.360 --> 0:49:19.719 It's really great. I love it. It's a great place 0:49:19.760 --> 0:49:20.239 to hang out. 0:49:20.360 --> 0:49:22.960 Leave Twitter and joining us, join us on discord 0:49:23.200 --> 0:49:26.320 On ironically that go check it out and thanks for listening.