Latest / Journalism 2050 / Ben Smith: A look into a career that’s been a reliable indicator of the state of journalism.

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Ben Smith: A look into a career that’s been a reliable indicator of the state of journalism. · Journalism 2050

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_03: Hello everyone and welcome to Journalism 2050.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_03: This is a podcast about the future of journalism and about the past of the future of journalism.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Emily Bell and I'm joined by Heather Chaplin and today our guest is Ben Smith, the founding editor of Semaphor.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, Ben, welcome.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_03: Very good to have you here.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for having me.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for coming all the way up to Columbia.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: To Fortress Columbia.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: I know it came through a lot of locked doors.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there's a story behind that.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: No way.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: We might get into that later.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's great to have you here.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: I uh just being reminded, so Heather and I are doing this podcast which is about the past of the future of news, and then hopefully a bit about the actual future of news.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um you kind of wrote the book on this with traffic, uh, and we're gonna come back to that, I think, because there's lots of that sort of historic, recent history that we want to go back to.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: But you were really talking about this pretty intensely when the book came out sort of two years ago, and I was just thinking, listening to some of your interviews, um, how much has even changed in two years?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: So you're just starting sample now.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_03: We're kind of two years on.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: Tell us first of all how it's going, but also how's the landscape now for journalism and how is it different to how you maybe thought it would be when you were getting going?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny, it's going great, but of course it's not really what we exactly imagined.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, things uh I guess I do have some like basic conviction that stories and reporters aren't going anywhere.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: And if you have great reporters who break great stories and you are then very, very relaxed about figuring about everything else, you'll be alright, and that's definitely how we've seen it.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: I think you know, a bunch of different cultural and political and you know, digital shifts have happened in directions.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, I didn't totally anticipate.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, for us that's meant it's meant different things.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's meant that this trend toward a sort of connection with individuals rather than institutions has kept accelerating, and that's certainly something we've could built around.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's meant that in-person convening.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: I think particularly post-COVID has taken off in a way.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't totally anticipate.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we knew it would be a big part of our business, but we've really been able to build a big business around that and kind of a journalism business in the heart of a convening business.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um why why do you think I mean post-COVID everybody wanted to get out and meet people.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_03: Why do you think uh the in-person convening is so big, particularly when we know it's quite possible to convene and not be in the same space as each other.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: Why are webinars so awful?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um the you know I mean it just sort of it feels like the logical conclusion of the general kind of toxicity of these public digital spaces and and and sense you know it's kind of like the logi if you go from your you know from X to a group chat, the next step is it's you know meeting in person.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and obviously it's also I think for you know from from from a business perspective, it's the one it's the one media business that is r that that is has a real that that is defensible from AI.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_03: I was gonna say, yeah, we we should we should talk about that.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: Because you said something I think which is very smart in a recent interview about people just basically want to read or see things which are from humans.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_03: Which seems like such a basic point.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and maybe that's wrong.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: I have like less conviction around that than I than I uh than I used to.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean but but yeah, I think there's something somebody said to me, you know, an an AI can't intend anything.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: It can say things, but it can't intend them.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: And it's kind of an interesting distinction.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um So we get a lot of this stuff about it's not the attention economy, it's the intention economy, which drives me nuts.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_03: Well I don't even really know what that means.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell That's a great line, but I have no idea what that means.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: No, I haven't even heard that line.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I'm glad to be able to.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: Did you just make that up?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: No, I did not, but I'm pleased to introduce it to you.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds like honestly, it sounds like it comes out of the marketing.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: Our friends in the marketing business.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna forget it right now.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: I never heard it.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: Forget that.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: I do think I know we're taking you off the question we asked, but I I do find this success from a business perspective of live events fascinating.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like I keep thinking if if you were like a novelist right now, like what would you make of that?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: That there is something profound about the desire to like make eye contact with other human beings at this moment in history.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, when when when the digital space is kind of increasingly unreal.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Although we're all being told that the AI is about to take over and that we'll we won't even exist anymore, have jobs, that then we're all hungering somehow to be with other messy humans.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus Yeah, and it also, I mean, I don't know.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's I mean, there's certainly more broadly been this return to a kind of 19th-century media landscape with these partisan publications and silos and different senses of truth.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: And another feature of that is that all the great writers were you know, Emerson and Thoreau and Douglas and you know, were traveling speakers first who made their money, you know, doing gigs, and what we think of as their books was like kind of the secondary product.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's such a good point.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: I I love a historical reference.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is your talking about this language.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: We f we found it difficult to get past the levelers in this show about the future of journalism because it's like growing back.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think people forget that ideas about what the free press was supposed to be have changed over time.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a time when it was just partisan and that was just the way it was.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_03: It was paid for by political machines and a lot of I mean, a lot of what we do at the Tower Centre has been just accidentally this tracing of um Dart money going into local news systems and it's kind of ended up being called pink slime, which is not a great it's not a great word set of words for it, but it is interesting, this is exactly where we were 200, 300 years ago, you know, that parties were the people who funded the press.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um digital spaces, you know, kind of a semaphore, you've been pretty um you've been pretty open about just the fact that you have sponsors or you take sponsors for um convenings or newsletters and things.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: Advertising.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, advertising.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Is that not are we not allowed to be in the advertising business anymore?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: Did I miss that?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think that in that dynamic.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: I do feel like there was a moment, there was like a year when the future of media was subscriptions only and advertising was bad and corrupting and no one should do it.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: And now and I think a lot of people founded businesses in that moment are sort of panicking about how that turns out to be a pretty limited business.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell That's quite interesting.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: Talk about that because that's that's not always the impression that's still projected is like because it da it it is the case that advertising has been pretty resilient, actually, just the last one.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean it's a big important industry.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: It has been for, you know, a long time.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I guess I think my own view on this is that everybody talks their book and in you know in any business, and in and journalists just love to moralize.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so people moralize about their revenue streams, and it's like journalism's a tough business.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're gonna build a successful journalism business, you're gonna sell ads, you're gonna do events, you're gonna have subscriptions, you're gonna license stuff, who knows?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: And the idea and you should not go out deciding that one of these things is more moral than the other.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like they all they're they're you know, they all have their risks.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: Advertising can be corrupting, subscriptions you can really become captive to sort of a rabid partisan base the way cable television is, which is a subscription business.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um they they like they're all fraught with peril and you know the and and you know, commerce is a complicated thing.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: But but I do think it's really it's been a sort of liability for publishers to get into these sort of these virtue signaling debates about the revenue side.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's like just like uh keep your worries about virtue and ethics to the journalism and let let your let people find ways to finance the journalism, is my is my view.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: That's gonna be that's somewhat at odds with the um moralizing that we like to do.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_03: I like to do a bit of moralising.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: So moral.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Only government money is acceptable.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, exactly.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: Only government money, I'm British.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's the really pure way of journalism.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And and completely un un um completely unproblematic as well.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_03: You may have noticed.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_03: So so going for going forward, one of the things that I've been very interested in is having spent a fair amount of my career sort of predicting where we're going next.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: And when I look at you, I look at somebody who's been more successful than anybody else about predicting from a journalistic point of view where to move next just before the market moves in that direction.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um so are you gonna be leaving semaphore and setting up a small library business in um rural Vermont?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, a bookstore.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's funny, I don't think of myself as ever predicting anything.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like I'm really not a deep thinker about this stuff.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: I just swim, haven't I always swum like in the sewer with, you know, wherever and you can kind of feel where it's full of digital media.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: But no.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: But no, I think you know, I was lucky enough, and I think it's actually just to some degree when I happened to get into the business in the early 2000s that I think people a little older than me already had real jobs and felt like I'm not gonna go do this weird internet thing.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then there were just a handful of people who just partly because of just literally when you entered and what your job was, it was like, huh, these seems like you can't ignore these blogs.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm working for a weekly newspaper, the New York Observer, seems like I probably ought to figure out how to have one of these, because obviously they're a thing.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: But also I'm not important enough that I can't just kind of wander off and write a blog and it's not gonna, you know, and I actually have important work that that will distract from.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I, you know, so I started doing this blog, and it was just immediately you could feel this kind of connection to an audience.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: It was totally different.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: And the feedback loop, and I'm really like a scoop-driven beat reporter.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: And the feedback loop with sources was just unbelievable.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I was breaking so much news, and it's and they were people you could feel the people wanted the next and this is in New York in 2004, 2005, writing about the the mayoral race between and and actually scoop is a strong word for some of it.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: It was such a different moment that the the, you know, if the mayor had a press conference at 11 a.m., like I could then go there, take some notes, go out to lunch, write on my blog about it at 2 p.m., and that would be the first place that you could find out what the mayor had said until midnight when the New York Times put its edition online and might have a quote from the press conference or might not.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: So that's like a that's like sub scoop.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: But there was just this ability to put information that you knew a community of a few thousand people who ran New York City, like really wanted, or that you know, this consultant had been hired by this campaign, that Risa Hallor was going to be Chuck Schumer's new communications director.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and yeah, I remember she has this, she's a very powerful New York comms person now who has this story about like, what the hell is this?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like, who is this?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: Why is this on the internet, you know?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: And that caused this little and you were sort of constantly also like causing these little crises because people had no idea what the hell you were doing.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um which was very, very fun.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, I did that, I went to Politico and covered Obama Clinton and did the same and and broke a lot of, you know, both sort of consequential news and like really dumb news, like the John Edwards$400 haircut.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and because I was just so in it and I had always been obsessed with trap with, you know, traffic, which I don't think is a bad word, with seeing who's reading you and whether anybody's reading you, as I'd gotten them to put a to hide some code in the footer of my blog at Politico, because you weren't supposed to see the stats, but somebody had one of the engineers had like grudgingly permitted me to drop a little code tracking it that I could see on a separate site.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I could just see come 20 you know, 2000 like I covered 0708, and you know, two January November 4, 2008, Barack Obama, who's the biggest account on Twitter, tweets once.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: And the tweet is like, please remember to vote.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: And over the next two years, really, you could just see, and I could see, like just literally, I knew who my readers were in a literal sense, like I knew their names.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I could just see them moving over to Twitter from these blogs.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: And these blogs, which had been their own little vibrant ecosystem where people would basically get a new audience by fighting with each other.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Ezra Klein's an idiot, and here is a link to his post, and he'd send it to him and be like, hey, like I attacked you, but also gave you a good link when you attacked me back.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: Could you include the link?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um and there was this little funny ecosystem of conversation.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_03: But it has not changed that much, actually.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: No, basically but it well, Twitter was uh turned out to be a much more effective mechanism for all the most toxic parts of blogging.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: And um and all the most interesting parts, actually.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: And and the con you could sort of feel I had sort of because I was just so on the coal face of it, just kind of like saw the conversation move over there.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: And and when Jonah Peretti came to me with this weird cat website that was all about sharing content on Facebook and on stumble upon and and he was thinking, oh, I'm starting to see news get shared.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: How could we build a news division wrapped around these new social platforms?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like I was already living in that world because I had I just was saying, like, oh, a blog is actually a place where you write things in the hopes that they will spread on Twitter.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And and it makes me wonder in this moment where people it's sort of a uh, you know, dinner conversations tend to what are you going to do when the apocalypse happens?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: What what was your what was the vibe in 2008 when you were doing this?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have a sense of the future sort of being open and exciting?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because one thing we're really struck about here is is how much has changed so quickly.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_03: But the uh I'm of an age where fast free buses are just gonna be my reality.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't need an easy thing.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_03: But you you take my point, right?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: That it can feel so frightening right now, especially if you're thinking about the future of journalism, that that what did it feel like in 2008 when you were sort of right at the epicenter of this new wave?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well I guess I'd separate the future of sort of journalism as in in kind of the market cap and employment figures at media companies, which have been obviously in serious decline for a bunch of reasons that have to do with local American newspaper publishing that kind of probably aren't worth revisiting here.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: And the future of kind of information and discourse and democracy, which I was incredibly optimistic about.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I think people who you know, I was sort of I think anybody who was most people who, you know, kind of came up, I was in college in the nineties on the Usenet, and then and then you know, the sort of it it was j it was so um it was just so fun to suddenly have access to every publisher in the world and to go from having these sort of the information that was you that could reach you because somebody had built a printing press or had a broadcast tower in your area or had mailed, posted you a magazine, to this sort of wide array of perspectives.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's worth remembering this is right after Iraq, in which the US government had used that centralization around, you know, of the New York Times, of CBS News, of this handful of kind of dominant platforms to, you know, tell the story that turned out to just like lead the country into a total catastrophe.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: And you see, you I remember thinking back then, like, wow, like imagine if in and I guess you know, if if in 2003, like the Iraqis were all on Twitter saying, like, you know, being like, hey no, like things aren't cool, like they're looting the museum.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: And there wouldn't have been this the the way in which the US government had been able to say just to describe things that were happening on the ground in a foreign country totally inaccurately.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: And which and then there was, I would say, a 15-year period in which it was hard to do that, and by the way, now that's back.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: But I was just gonna say we don't that we now seem to be talking about the same thing.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But but there was a sense of like, wow, this you can get this incredibly diverse array of perspectives, you can have these arguments that are often really around shared facts, but from dip perspectives that have been totally shut out of the conversation, left and right, you know, culturally diverse, international in particular.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: It was incredibly exciting, actually.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell And I was, you know, and I was had this blog, and there was this I was this great Polish writer, um Michael Kalanko, who um I think now a big Polish political reporter, but he was at some weird Polish blog and he'd be sending me like, here's this crazy story in Poland and how they see Obama, and that would then go viral in the U.S.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: And it was just I mean, it was very kind of open, and there's just a sense of kind of real openness and optimism.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I've seen you quoted as when you wrote traffic that your central question was, what was that?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what just happened what just happened?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's so what's the answer?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: What happened?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I wrote it in right, you know, I s I guess like after 2016, like in a sort of gosh, I published it in 2022, but really like it felt to me like there was a mo there was some point, and I guess this is, you know, obvious like I left BuzzFeed in 2018, and there was some moments like where I the clearly some episode had ended, and I and I was did wonder to myself, like, yes, this is that, like what what just happened?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um You know, and I think basic and also sort of when that idea that what this was was this very open, democratic, utopian space.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: And honestly, like it could have been maybe it was open and democratic, but not utopian, right?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like there was I I don't I think that a lot of this is very democratizing, and maybe people have are less enthusiastic about small D democracy than we all thought.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I mean I think you know the core thing that start happened starting in like 2014, 2015.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: There's a day in March in 2015 that people describe as the last good day on the internet.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: Charlie Warzell wrote a piece about this.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: In the morning, some llamas got loose in Arizona, and everyone in the whole country was just like watching and tweeting about these llamas evading the local sheriffs on on as helicopters filmed the whole thing and they ran around strip malls.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: And then in the afternoon, some a woman who'd been at a wedding in Scotland, in the Hebrides, I think, um messaged the Buzzfeed Tumblr account and said, Hey, my mom took this picture of a woman wearing a dress and we can't decide whether it was a and I think it was white and gold and she thinks it's black and blue, and it's so weird.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: BuzzFeed, could you help us figure it out?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: And pretty soon everyone's standing around behind the woman who runs the Tumblr account arguing about the color of the dress, and so she puts it on the internet, and it became this kind of like very silly global phenomenon instantly, and a kind of instant global culture I'd never seen before.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, my colleague of mine was in Jakarta that day giving a speech at a conference that morning at 8 a.m.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: a.m.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: in Jakarta, which was, I don't know, like six or seven p.m.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: in New York.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: And by the time he got on stage in Jakarta, it was all anybody wanted to talk about.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: And there and we had this sense of like, wow, this is this really kind of positive phenomenon.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: This is like silly but fun, totally harmless, instant global culture.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think looking back about it, the thing about that that was like so fundamental and the reason it spread was that it was divisive.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: Just in the literal sense.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: It divided between people who saw it one way and saw it the other, provoked our, you know, silly and good-hearted, but fundamentally arguments in and and which the platform saw as engagement and amplified it to everybody.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I think and we then picked that up in you know, it was buzzfeed.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like I think we we were sort of thinking about, okay, like what else is divisive like that?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: And olives are very divisive.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: Some people like olives, some people don't like olives.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: So we provoked some arguments about olives.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: But then you know, we had a much we had actually in some ways a fairly traditional attitude toward journalism and toward, you know, being fair and telling complicated stories, and so resisted the temptation to treat our political journalism that way.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: And when I ran into Steve Bannon the next year when he was running Trump's campaign, he he's he was just like so puzzled by why we hadn't taken that insight to attacking Hillary Clinton and promoting Bernie Sanders, which would have been the obvious logical conclusion of it.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's super interesting.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: That is so interesting.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_03: So the dress is responsible for the Trump campaign.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: I believe so.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: That woman in the Hebrides is the butterfly who flashed her.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_03: I was going to say this is this is the flapping of the butterflies, but that's that is so interesting.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_03: Or at least it's so interesting.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: It revealed what was happening inside the system.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't nothing.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_03: And the platforms and the platforms um benefited, as you say, sort of hugely from likes and shares being.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: I remember Corey Seeker coming to one of my classes and saying to my students, Well, you have to really understand is that likes and shares equals revenue.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_03: And it was like one of those things where it's we all understand that now, but uh I think at the time it took journalists a while to really understand how the currency of discourse was like a real-time trading um room.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean I don't think the I I think the platforms were not that cynical and the people running them didn't really understand what was happening either and were looking at it from kind of the other end of the telescope.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like they're just they're just seeing a system and they're trying to drive time on site and engagement.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: They are not saying, hey, like this is a really clever way to make a little more money, and we don't mind the fact that we're going to be hauled in front of Congress next year and be accused of ruining.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think they saw understood what was happening at all.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, I remember when we Because they were, yeah, they were looking from the other side of the telescope.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: They were just like, oh, these people seem engaged.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: These users seem engaged.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think, you know, I remember at the time Jonah had gone to see a senior executive at what was then called Facebook and said, hey, like, remember that dress thing?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like, wasn't that cool?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: And the guy was like, no, that was terrifying.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like, we're not sure what happened there.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: We do not want it to happen again.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: We're going to start breaking these connections so that doesn't happen again.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well, why?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: What was the articulation of it?
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's a sense that they'd kind of lost control of this system.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, think things ran out of control.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: So fast.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: I remember something everywhere in the whole world in an hour.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you were at this meeting, but I remember going to a meeting where um Facebook uh Facebook's um offices downtown here, where they were showing a group of um journalists and academics the social graph and saying, Hey, and now you'll be able to just make these connections.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_03: And we immediately started going, oh wow.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: So if there's like a high school shooter then in f and you could see them actually the panic in their eyes could be this is not how they think about the world.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_03: And it was not how they thought about the world at all.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: And we had all gone to the very worst, darkest kind of use for this thing that they were going to be able to do.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and they're professional optimists.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very good thing.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_03: But that's not the case now.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: I mean the the mar the the kind of the do you not think the blinkers are off and No.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: I mean the way that the way when you talk to people running AI companies, I mean they have this sort of to me marketing thing about how maybe it's going to cause the apocalypse.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: But most of the people working on it are just really excited about it and full speed ahead.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: I talked to a guy yesterday who's very excited about um about the possibility of AI to smell things and also emit smells.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: And and and that's A, I think is actually a very cool company in the perfume space, but also I think he's trying to disrupt dogs.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's incredible.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: Trying to disrupt dogs.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_03: Oh good luck with that in New York City.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: You don't need a dog to sniff things anymore.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: You can carry a giant nose.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_03: Disrupt AI overlords and lasers.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: If it'll get rid of dogs all over the because I think No, I think we're totally doing it again.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I think that's sort of the whatever.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: That's you know, that's that's America.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: We get excited about stuff and just kind of run with it.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: And kind of run with it.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: And you that would include a kind of, you know, authoritarian techno-authoritarianism as well, which says that everything now has to be aligned.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, there was a question I wanted to ask you about um something you've been been asked about a lot, which is when BuzzFeed did not sell to Disney.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I wondered, is like, do you think if you'd taken that deal, or if Joan had taken that deal, would you now be either a Nate Silver or B Barry Weiss?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: So another word.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_03: Me personally?
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: You are kind of No, I think I think but I mean if Disney it was when BuzzFeed was, you know, much was sort of on you know rising very fast, but was also this very pure idea about a kind of a future of of social of news on social media that ultimately wasn't gonna work.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like we didn't know that.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: But the the ecosystem that we imagined was gonna shape up in which there was revenue that was not.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: And actually Disney, when it didn't acquire BuzzFeed, acquired a company called Maker Studios, which was a uh an attempt to be a middleman in the YouTube space that went to zero and went out went away.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think actually we would have I mean the reason I was against it, and now my colleagues make fun of me for this.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't think it was not gonna work.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I would have wound up as a consultant to ABC News for a year or two and then wandered off and back to blogging.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_03: So Barry Weiss, in fact, can consultant to a large news network.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think I mean I think it's I I would not want that.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think that's a very hard job for Yes.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, I mean I kind of wrote a piece which I was slightly annoyed that CJR didn't give it my original headline, which was the silencing of Barry Weiss.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_03: But the idea that actually, you know, this kind of idea that there's freedom within those um very large conglomerates to have any kind of effect at all, I think is probably and I think I mean I don't know how far we want to go down this rabbit hole.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like I actually think they are trying to, and she is in all good faith, trying to make CBS news a good thing people want to watch.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's like almost impossible.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like given their cost structure.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you watch I watch I turned on 60 Minutes the other night and was just like, oh my god, this is unbelievably slow and boring.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_02: And it's programmed for the elderly people who've been watching it for a long time, so they can't change it, because that's their remaining audience and they'll go away.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: But I can't watch things that move this slowly.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell They do warn you with the title.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, six this is gonna be sixty minutes.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: I watch things for sixty minutes, but there's just there's more information in them.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there are very few things.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_03: I d I have a I have a war on lengthy films and things like that.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_03: I like actual.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: So let me ask you, in in 2011, when you uh started at BuzzFeed, how would you have described what the landscape was then and what the problems were that journalism was facing?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I mean it was that these legacy publishers had didn't understand the opportunity of this kind of w wide open new social web with um with the potential of you know vast scale free distribution and a totally immediate kind of intimate connection with your audience.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And how would you describe it now?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh-huh.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, now and it's now the I think the core problem for consumers is information overload, right?
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's just that you're drowning in information and that you don't know who to trust.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: And that's I mean, that's that was sort of our core thesis, starting semaphore.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: That you you know, and and I think I think it's like it's complicated.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think that there's it it's a moment because I think a lot of the legacy publishers that grudgingly put themselves on the internet because it was never a good business and kind of hated it, are are basically relieved that that whole thing is over and it's blown up.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: And now if you're the FT, if you're the New York Times, like come back into our walled garden, you can just live amid New York Times articles and we'll send you an email with 17 New York Times articles if you don't have enough.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I actually think that's kind of a bit of a mi and we are so relieved that we don't have to deal with this kind of open internet that we're sure our consumers are similarly relieved.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: I actually think that's kind of a misread.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like everybody loved having access to the greatest of greatest journalism from everywhere in the world.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: And the fact that this delivery system for it has collapsed into a total mess doesn't mean people want to go back to like, well, I only get one newsletter and one one newspaper and one television station, and I don't want that diversity of voices.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think Substack's success kind of proves that.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: But and so we definitely are trying to, you know, be a synthesis of those things, to say you've got, you know, we're gonna give you great original journalism, but we're gonna spend a lot of energy and take very seriously the idea that we're reading everything for you and trying to give you the best of everything.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: Try to give you views that deeply disagree with each other and maybe with us, because that's part of understanding the whole landscape.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_03: So it we train journalists here, and I was very heartened to hear you say earlier on I fundamentally just the business of like what is a story and how do you go after a story and reporting it and getting it before everybody else and maybe better than everybody else is still the kind of that's still a function that has value.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: Is that we sort of believe that right as a kind of training mechanism and to say, no, but I I I mean I think that um we were talking about what is the biggest problem for journalism at the moment.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_03: I said I think that one of the the biggest problems we face is that there are a lot of people who just don't want us to do journalism, that they want journalism to be something different than what it is, which is you know a mechanism for telling people what's going on in the world with a amount of with a kind of a basis in fact.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's not what corporations want.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's not really what political parties want.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, the it is hard it feels to me like it's harder to do journalism today, but do you think you'll you look skeptical about that?
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: I I I think we tend to spill I I tend to we tend to romanticize the past a little and and I mean I think there was this period in the twentieth century when for totally technological reasons when for purely technological reasons, really the expense of and the expense and regulatory constraints around broadcast towers and spectrum, the sort of expense of of m large-scale printing and distribution meant that it things that publishing was very, very, very consolidated around a few voices, and for reasons having to do with the advertising industry, these voices wanted to reach members of both political parties to sell them all mattresses, and like that was intrigued- you know, in that period had its positives and its negatives, and I guess I th I sort of feel nostalgic for it too, but I don't think it was the norm or and I and I don't think that there was some j and I think people tend to look for some journalistic or political sin that like, you know, through got us tossed out of Eden.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it was obviously a technology a period that was shaped by technology in a short time.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But one doesn't have to glorify the past to see the threat of the future.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell Oh, no.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell We like to see the threat of the future here.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess I'm I'm struck by the look on your face of of sort of doubt when Emily was saying that, because do you feel that journalism sort of isn't under threat right now?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus I think let's see.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I I guess I would sort of break it down.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I think that the the the U.S.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: federal government right now is threatening these is using federal power to threaten these consolidated media companies in a way that's, yeah, I think terrible and and you know and certainly like outside U.S.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: norms.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: I've you know argued with Brendan Carr about it.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: And yes.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: Do I think that you know American journalists exposing facts about corruption are being arrested and attacked physically?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like I haven't seen that.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you have.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: No, no.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: It it it's interesting because I feel like it's more um hard to name and hold on to that the level of noise or that sense of people not knowing who to trust, in a sense, has a similar effect of neutering the ability of journalism to do what it's supposed to do.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: Let me put it.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: So if if the culture keeps moving in the direction that I think it's not impossible, like if there's if there's a multiple possible futures in front of us, there is one, it seems to me, where the noise continues and people's distrust continues and this sort of sense of it's impossible to know continues.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: That is effectively a kind of censorship or a kind of neutralizing journalism that it looks different than arresting us or something like that.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: So the impact of journalism.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why even when you were saying, oh, it's about the good stories, I don't know if I agree with that, because if if they don't have any impact, you know, if a good piece of news uh lands in the forest and the tree doesn't fall, I don't know what the does it matter.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_03: One newspaper being opened up.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, I mean I think I agree with you.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, we didn't just sort veer into AI, the kind of the liar's dividend of here's a p of of being able to deny the reality of anything is in a way the scariest part of AI.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: Not not the fake things, but the sort of Exactly, exactly.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder whether you kind of feel less affected by the threat of this, partly because you're more of an optimist than Hezar, I'm not very optimistic, it has to be said.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: But also whether because you're addressing in at semaphore, you're addressing business audiences, and there's a very long and strong tradition of um businesses uh only paying attention to really high quality information, whether it's you know the Bloomberg Terminal, the Reuters fee, you know, whatever, like paying for like paying for higher quality information, paying to talk to each other directly.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_03: It uh one of the things that I think is interesting is how the business press is very unaffected by a lot of this because you have to make money in the markets.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_03: You need to know what's going on.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um and that feels to me like a separ that that feels like there's a bifurcation now of the market between those people and everybody else.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think I mean I think it was a yes and yes.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like obviously I wouldn't be doing what I was doing if I wasn't kind of a maniacal optimist.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: But also the you know, we definitely think of ourselves as talking to a kind of subset of people who don't who are who have to make decisions, who who don't treat news as entertainment, who understand and are sick of the kind of game of writing uh of telling you what you want to hear in exchange for subscriptions and clicks and whatever, and and really, really can't afford to be lied to, whether it's because they're business decision makers or people making decisions in other spaces, but who actually really feel some compulsion to understand what's happening, even if it's not exactly what they want to hear.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: The headline of your first column at the New York Times in 2020 was the success of the New York Times may be bad news for journalism.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: Do you still feel that way?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Yeah, for sure.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I think I see this uh you might you'll have to check this stat, but I think I read that sort of more than one in ten journalists in America work for the New York Times.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's bad for the Times.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: It makes them I mean it's probably good for their business, but it makes them a kind of target for and a metaphor for Capital J journalism.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: Anything, any mistake they make is a metaphor for what's wrong with everything in America.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: This is my least favorite part of being at the Times.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: I would tweet something stupid, and the immediate response is what people would quote tweet it and say, New York Times reporter.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, no, no, I'm just an idiot.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's not, you know.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: But the um and it just yeah, and it and there's a these digital businesses, you know, like search being the most extreme version, just tend to consolidate.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like they're, you know, they tend to centralize.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the Times to a degree has done that with a kind of, you know, whatever you want to call it, center-left national news.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I think it means that they can it's just competition is healthy, and the more of it the better.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: And my question, much more mundane than that's a good question.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_03: I actually remember you emailing me because I'd written something in The Guardian saying, I think the New York Times has hired Ben Smith, and this is actually a terrible thing.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_03: And then you wrote me saying, I'm gonna steal this column, and then actually you did.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then and then you wrote actually a much better version of it, which was very annoying for me.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_03: I did steal your idea, I go back to the right.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_03: But no, no, no.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_03: But it was it was actually it was actually you going there which had made me think, oh god, ever like time is a flat circle, and you know, what kind of progress are we making here?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_03: But if you go back to um, you know, Ben at sort of 22, 23 when you're kind of indie star and then into like the New York Tableau Press, um if you're 22 or 23 now, uh would you still be being a journalist and what would you be doing?
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah, I would just want to get scoops.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: I just think if you can get scoops and you can break news, I mean that is just the atomic unit of journalism, and go do that and don't worry about it, and there's a ton of demand for that.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_03: Go out, break scoops.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_03: Ben Smith, thank you very much indeed for coming all the way up here to Fortress Columbia.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_03: And sharing your thoughts and inspiring our inspiring our audience to get scoops.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you guys for having me.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: This was a fun conversation.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks for coming.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_03: Let's go.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_03: Journalism 2050 is a co-production of the Town Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, the Columbia Journalism Review, with help from our friends at the Journalism and Design Lab at the New School.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_03: Our producer is Amanda Darrick, our production coordinator is Hannah Joy, and our researcher is Sam Earl.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_03: Find us wherever you get your podcasts.