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