It can feel like the news industry is in a moment of crisis. Over 500 journalists were laid off from news outlets in January 2024 alone, according to a report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. These layoffs are part of a broader trend of seismic changes within the media industry over the past few decades. As disinformation concerns continue to rise and we prepare for another consequential election, why are newsrooms drastically reducing headcount? Ben Smith is editor in chief and cofounder at Semafor, a recently launched digital news platform. He is author of “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral,” which unpacks the ups and downs of the digital media business. Smith is also a former New York Times media columnist and the former editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News. He joins WITHpod to discuss how we got to this moment, the impact of evolving news consumption habits, changing revenue models and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Ben Smith: The New York Times actually continues to wrestle with the fact is a big print business that’s declining. If people like internet people sort of forget that that’s still this huge albatross around a lot of journalism is that print is a terrible business, getting worse every year. And coming from a place where a local newspaper was just one of the great businesses in the world, it was a local monopoly where if somebody wanted to sell a mattress in Akron Ohio, the local paper got 10 percent of that purchase price for advertising.
And basically every local retail transaction built a huge tower next to city hall, hired investigative reporters, everybody had lobster for lunch. You know what I mean? It was a great business and it’s very hard to see how that ever returns.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
I’m going to be 45 years old when you listen to this. And I guess I would say I started in journalism when I was like 22. Probably right out of college, I started freelancing for an alternative weekly in Chicago called “The Chicago Reader” and was a writer for years. And during that entire time, the only constant in media has been change. It’s been one of the most sort of most tumultuous periods, right? Like the dawn of the internet and then blogs, and then online news sites. And then, the rise of social media.
And through this all, there’s been this like steady panic that media was dying. And this was particularly acute sort of first when the internet came out and gain popularity, first started eating into newspapers really acutely after 2009 in the great financial crisis where the financial pressures took anything that wasn’t thriving and just pushed it under. And now in the last year, I would say it’s been the worst year for the media business of my life, which is saying something given what I lived through. And we’ve just seen this crazy round of layoffs all over the place.
I mean publications shuttering, layoffs happening left and right. Paul Farhi writing at “The Atlantic” about whether we’re up against, what he calls, an extinction level event for media. And we’re also in what to me is the most terrifying and bewildering information environment I’ve ever been in. Like I have no idea, I cannot mentally model how the median 30-year-old voter gets their news. I don’t know. The algorithm feeds them stuff. They follow people on YouTube.
That’s what Pew tells us basically, like they watch YouTube, they go on Facebook and then Snapchat and TikTok and Instagram. Well, I don’t know. Where are they getting their information? Where is anyone getting their information? Can democracy actually function if the whole thing goes under, if the industry of media becomes like poetry? You know, like it’s a thing that people do, like people will always write poems. They’ve been writing poems since basically humans had language. People write poems today. Right now there’s people listening to this who write poems, but you can’t really make a living as a poet.
It’s not really an industry. It can’t sort of support itself in a market level. It’s kind of relegated to the academy to a kind of like offshoot adjunct of life, where in certain civilizations it was the central part of that civilization. Poetry was what culture meant. It’s what culture was, right. It was central to everything. Now it’s just like, I don’t know, it’s just the thing some people do somewhere. That’s my fear for journalism. And my question for journalism is like, can you run a democracy under those conditions?
I’m not convinced you can. And I think a lot of what we’re seeing happen in this country is directly related to the death of media. And one of the sort of smartest people I know on this question, but also sort of uniquely situated because he has a lot of tangible experience is Ben Smith. So, Ben was a reporter for Politico in the 2008 campaign where he was a real kind of pioneer in internet reporting, internet media. He then went to Buzzfeed News where he helped grow this incredible colossus of online media that has basically been shuttered and died.
He then became the media reporter at “The New York Times”, the media columnist, and then started another startup which is called Semafor, where he’s editor-in-chief, which is a digital news platform. And he’s also an author of a book about all this called “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral”, which sort of talks about the digital media business and his experience at BuzzFeed. And I’ve known Ben for a long time. Ben, welcome to the program.
Ben Smith: It’s nice to be on. Yeah, we’ve been having a running conversation about this stuff for a really long time.
Chris Hayes: Well, first, can we just talk about just like brass tacks, the last few months of just like just a blood bath in media, including my own company, NBC, which has announced layoffs. The Wall Street Journal has announced layoffs, the LA Times announced layoffs, Pitchfork got folded into GQ, Sports Illustrated basically shuttered, Time has done layoffs. I mean, everyone everywhere is firing journalists, outlets are closing. Why is this happening?
Ben Smith: You know, I actually think I disagree with the notion that what’s happening right now is something particular and special. What we’re seeing are forces that have been really in play for the last 20 years. And there have been bad years and worse years, I would say this is among the worst. But I think, you know, a lot of the layoffs have been on your and my particular screen of sort of national, political and economic journalism.
And so maybe it’s a little more salient to people in our world. And I think there are in some sense, three things happening, you know, and just by far the biggest is the devastation of local news in the United States. And most of the jobs, most of the journalist jobs in America were at local newspapers, I think still are to some degree. But that is companies that are trying to catch a falling knife. That’s The LA Times where, you know, along with being run by a particularly feckless billionaire, you know, their big problems is their print revenue is still declining. And it’s gonna keep declining until it’s zero, right?
The New York Times actually continues to wrestle with the fact is a big print business that’s declining. If people like internet people sort of forget that that’s still this huge albatross around a lot of journalism is that print is a terrible business, getting worse every year. And coming from a place where a local newspaper was just one of the great businesses in the world, it was a local monopoly where if somebody wanted to sell a mattress in Akron Ohio, the local paper got 10 percent of that purchase price for advertising.
And basically every local retail transaction built a huge tower next to city hall, hired investigative reporters, everybody had lobster for lunch. You know what I mean? It was a great business and it’s very hard to see how that ever returns. And you can have other things going well because there is another story that national investigative reporting, national political reporting, financial reporting, technology reporting, never been healthier in the United States, never been better. Also, trade reporting is going well.
But there’s just this massive downward pressure from local news falling apart that can’t, that isn’t, that outweighs everything else and creates just this steady stream of losses. And then I would say the third factor and one that I think is ought to be, you know, scary for people in your profession and in, you know, a lot of it is that the forces that hit newspapers 20 years ago are really starting to bite at linear television.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Ben Smith: You know, everybody kind of knows intellectually that young people don’t watch the evening news. But those businesses remain vibrant and people working there get paid a lot of money and there’s lots of people working there. And I think what you’re seeing, in particular at CNN right now, is a kind of realization that those days are gone and not coming back. And they have to figure out a different and basically smaller business to replace what had been cable news which, again, had a kind of particular business model that made it really profitable.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, so a few things there. One let’s talk about, there’s sort of two things I want to talk about. One is the sort of death of local newspapers. I mean local newspapers and then local news are sort of the workhorses of journalism. They were for a very long time.
Ben Smith: End of democracy, right?
Chris Hayes: End of democracy.
Ben Smith: They’re the kind of substrate of it all. I mean we’ve both worked in local news and you know, if you’re writing something about a thing that happened on the street corner, there’s really no space for the politician to say to people, you know, who are you going to believe, me or you’re lying eyes. You know, there’s just a tangibility to it that once you float up to national politics sort of goes away and you have a total lack of agreement on basic facts.
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point. Right, there’s a tangibility to it. There’s also a lot less ideological and partisan balance —
Ben Smith: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — to it.
Ben Smith: Totally.
Chris Hayes: It just, you know, I’ve covered stuff, feuds between two warring kind of local ward figures on the northwest side of Chicago, the committeemen and the guy who’s the alderman who, you know, had been aligned and then went to war, okay. And, you know, it’s not a story that has some red, blue valence to it. There’s no side ideological. It’s a great story, it’s good. It was a good story. It was about a feud and some people were on one side and some people on the other. So, it could be polarizing that way, but it doesn’t contribute to or sort of result from a partisan or ideological lens.
So there’s that, but then the sort of next connection to that, I think, is that what we’re seeing is the nationalization of American politics which is, I think, directly related, right? Like this sort of idea that the sort of Marjorie Taylor Greene figure which is like, what’s she doing for her district in Georgia? I don’t know. Maybe she’s doing a good job, maybe she’s not, but like that’s not really where her bread is buttered. And like, increasingly, you know, we’re seeing it even in the Republican Primary where like local issues don’t matter. People aren’t really going to like kowtow to the ethanol kings in Iowa. All that stuff sort of gone away, like all politics is national now.
Ben Smith: Yeah and it’s a trend that’s been, you know, underway for a while. And I remember in 2008, going out to Iowa and asking somebody what they thought about the candidate. And they said, well, what Chris Matthews thinks is this. And that’s like, you know, I could have stayed in New York and figured out what Chris Matthews thought, like I want to know what you think.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ben Smith: But there was already, and I think cable news was a precursor, you know, was part of this, a sense that people who cared about politics and public life had a national stream to draw from a national conversation. They were kind of participating in an increasingly and hewing to, and I do think social media in particular, you know, accelerated, intensified that, just as we’re saying, local sources, local centers of gravity, political, cultural of all sorts of kind of falling away. And now, you know, the most important power broker in Iowa is Sean Hannity.
Chris Hayes: Right. And you’ve got a situation too, where even in a city like New York, you know, I just did a fundraiser recently for a great publication called “The City”, which I read and support. I support “Hell Gate“, which is another sort of scrappier kind of outfit but they do good stuff as well. Like The New York Times metro section is fine, but it’s not really a local paper. You’ve got the daily news. The New York Post is just a, you know, some of their reporting is fine.
But again, it’s so overdetermined by the Murdoch machine but you know, New York city is the size of Denmark. Like you should be able, in New York City of all places, to support this business, like real and everyone is struggling. If you can’t run a local, a vibrant and profitable local newspaper in New York, then where are we?
Ben Smith: Yeah, I mean, you know, this is something I’m also very close to, was involved in the city. And my wife ran Brooklyner (ph) for years, which was, was local publication. And just the gap between, you know, how much people are interested in this information and want it and the total lack of a business model around it is pretty shocking actually. And you know, I think people often get into the business just figuring. This stuff’s so important, it’s so interesting. The market is so big. And 30 years ago, people were making hundreds of millions of dollars doing this.
It can’t be that hard, but the reality kind of everywhere you look, it is that it is in fact very, very hard. You can, you know, painstakingly build very small things or maybe medium-sized nonprofits that can do really great accountability work. But the notion of a city that’s kind of wrapped around a really vibrant daily newspaper or a dozen of them, that are, by the way, also covering sports and food and real estate and all.
And the entire sort of city conversation wrapped up in immediate conversation. I mean it’s just a million miles away and I think it’s a fantasy that that’s going to be rebuilt. I mean it’s a real problem for the city as well where —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ben Smith: — you know, talk about national politics. It also removes the accountability from local politics. And, you know, probably the most read, local political publication in New York City is the e-mail that Eric Adams sends to people.
Chris Hayes: Right, probably true. And the reason we should just zoom in on this, the reason the business model doesn’t work is because the advertising has been taken by other people. I mean when we talk about this, it used to be the fact, to go back to the Akron mattress, you know, store, there were geographical lines around businesses. And those geographical lines were the same as the geographical lines around the media, which was the news. And so if you wanted to reach people who were there in Akron, you’re selling mattresses, that’s a place to reach them, right?
The local radio, the local TV, all that’s been obliterated by the internet. And this new advertising intermediary has arisen, which are the platforms that are wildly profitable, and they’re just taking all of the profit. I mean Google, Facebook particularly are just, you know, they print money. And the reason they print money is because if you want to find where to buy a mattress, that’s what Google does. That’s where they make their money.
Ben Smith: Yeah and they’re great at it. And it was sort of historical accident that news publishers happened upon this incredible monopoly, essentially these regional monopolies. And that’s gone now and it’s just a very daunting, sort of real, kind of hard to talk your way around feature of the contemporary American landscape I think.
Chris Hayes: The second thing, so the local issue is to me so important and when you say the substrate, it’s like the plants in an ecosystem, you know. Like if they’re gone, then everything starts to go above it, you know, —
Ben Smith: Yeah, that’s right.
Chris Hayes: — where everyone sort of eating, it’s a great chain of being, right?
Ben Smith: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So, that’s a huge problem. But then when you talk about like the things that took out the newspaper, you know, coming for other parts of the system or other parts of the ecosystem, the way I think about it is like, everything is going the way of the music business. That’s not just journalism. You’re seeing it in Hollywood, you’re seeing it in TV, which is like the tech model in which everything is streamed. There’s a huge amount of VC capital and like you make a play to sort of, you know, lose a dollar in every transaction, but make it up in volume which is what Amazon did for 20 years in grouping (ph) it up.
Ben Smith: And that’s how we succeeded the BuzzFeed.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly. Yes, BuzzFeed was a perfect example, but like that model is now infected every aspect of media. And I don’t mean media in the narrow sense of journalism. I mean all media where everyone is turning around, being like, wait a second, why do we trade a business where we used to make a sandwich that costs us $3 and sell it for 7. And now we’ve traded it for a business where the sandwich costs us $3 and we give it away for 10 cents. And somehow we’re hemorrhaging money, and I feel like this has happened everywhere.
And I’m no business genius but the whole time have been like, boy, it just sure seems like it’s a better model to sell fewer sandwiches at $7 that cost you 3 than to sell millions of them for 10 cents, if it cost you $3. And everyone was like, no, that’s not what the smart money says. The smart money says, you can make it up in scale. And I’m like, I don’t know, man, but maybe I’m wrong, but I wasn’t wrong.
Ben Smith: Well, the smart money was thinking about a world in which there can be only one winner in each market. So, either you are the winner or you are bankrupt. And so in that environment, you have to just throw everything you have at absolute victory, because there’s no alternative. And you wind up with these landscapes like search actually. And I think these digital environments where every consumer can choose between every publication say, and then the best one gets more money, reinvested in better journalism, gets better and better.
You go from a United States where you had, you know, 50 really strong metro newspapers to one where you have The New York Times and maybe The Washington Post, right. And I think it’s like a feature of digital economies that’s real. And so it wasn’t these people aren’t crazy to be saying like, it’s like The New York Times or bust because that’s literally what happened.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ben Smith: Searches like that, right, where you being the third search engine doesn’t get you anywhere, where it used to be being the third newspaper was great. And so that said, like that’s the logic for why people played roulette and put all their money in one number.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I made the joke that media executives have two modes. One is like six-figure Christmas party with goody bags. And the other is, we regret to inform you everyone is fired. That those are the two modes of media executives.
Ben Smith: I mean I do think that, you know, those of us who kind of came out of that era, like I certainly have converted myself to the Chris Hayes school of trying to make more money than you spend. And certainly I think there’s a generation of media now, some force (ph) part of it, I would say places like Puff and B-Inkler (ph) and Punchbowl where, you know, we’re very, very careful about how much we spend.
We are very, very focused on bringing in revenue. And we’re pretty cognizant that it’s gonna take, you know, years or decades to achieve a kind of real scale and kind of global ambition that we may have. But the notion that you can just set a bunch of money on fire and shortcut there, I think is kind of over.
Chris Hayes: Yeah and I think that it also depends on what your ambition is, right? I mean the VC money that’s going into these places is to be the winner take all in the winner take all society and end up —
Ben Smith: Right.
Chris Hayes: — being the Google, right?
Ben Smith: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Whereas my understanding of what you and Justin Smith who is the co-founder Semafor is like —
Ben Smith: No relation.
Chris Hayes: No relation, is that you guys want to build a profitable reporting business that is profitable. This is not charity.
Ben Smith: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But that produces good work and is sustainable and makes some money. And not, maybe I’m wrong, but that you’re not gonna be the Amazon of journalism.
Ben Smith: Yeah, that’s correct. And that we think there’s a group of people, which is not a hundred percent of all people, that are really gonna like what we do and feel connected to it. And that we can build a great business around that. People who are interested in complex global news, and that’s not gonna be everybody. I mean I think that gets to something else which is, I think, what’s happening now in the kind of like green shoots and leaves growing amid the kind of, you know, post-nuclear —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ben Smith: — pavement in the rubble. You know, is this kind of smaller things, smaller and the biggest things like Fox News are all getting smaller. And nothing is getting big like that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: I mean I think actually the right-wing television ecosystem, which I think a lot of people like spend a lot of time obsessing about, so it’s kind of a good place to look for these trends, is really interesting right now. Because I think that’s sort of a sign of what’s happening, which is Fox is shrinking, becoming less relevant. It’s still by far the most important player, but it’s diminishingly important and will keep diminishing as, you know, its viewers pass away. And what’s replacing it isn’t one thing. It’s not like Newsmax is making a run at it.
Chris Hayes: No, right.
Ben Smith: There’s a bunch of medium-size things. Megyn Kelly, who was kind of like laughed out of television, started a podcast. I think you would’ve said, wow, this is probably 1/1000th as relevant as she was when she had a show on Fox or NBC. Now it’s like, I don’t know, maybe she’s 10 percent as relevant as Fox. Ben Shapiro —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: — maybe he’s 20 percent as relevant as Sean Hannity. And then there’s a thousand things that are small. I think the most interesting statistic I’ve seen on this is Joe Rogan. You know, if you ask people what their favorite podcast is, a lot of people don’t have a favorite podcast.
Chris Hayes: There was data on this the other day. I saw that, yeah.
Ben Smith: Yeah. And of those who do say that, you know, obviously Chris Hayes is number one but Joe Rogan is a close second.
Chris Hayes: Yes, with a bullet.
Ben Smith: And Joe Rogan is the dominant figure, but he’s the dominant figure with like 5 percent of the market. It’s a market —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: — where the number one share is 5 percent. Everything else is smaller. And so some people try to build small to medium sized communities, you know, build small to medium businesses out of that, it’s interesting. I mean I kind of think it’s a healthy retreat from the screaming matches of social media but also creates new bubbles.
Chris Hayes: Totally and one of the things, we’ll stay on this for a second and then there’s other stuff I want to get into, but Anil Dash is a really interesting digital writer, thinker. I don’t know if you saw his essay. He just wrote called “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement and his point is that in some ways the podcasting platform as an open platform is sort of the last open platform on the internet. And the idea that it’s an open protocol, like an RSS feed. RSS developed by my dear late friend, Aaron Swartz, may he rest in peace.
That it’s an open platform, means that podcasting feels the most like that period of the blogosphere in sort of the pre-social media winner take all universe, when you talk about sort of mid-size audiences. And because I think there’s actually a technical reason for it, a little bit, which is like, you’re not locked into any platform. Like anyone can get up and start a podcast and start publishing. You know, Spotify thought they could use their network power to drive people to their content. And it turned out that that really wasn’t the case.
Like people have experimented with all kinds of ways of sort of paywalling, you know, exclusive podcast hasn’t really worked. Something that I find really exciting and awesome about podcasts is which there’s a whole bunch of different levels of this ecosystem. There’s the huge ones, Joe Rogan being one of them. There’s a bunch of comedy podcasts. SmartLess is another huge player, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s really good, that’s small in the relative sense, but is really good.
Ben Smith: I want to go back to the thing you said when you started this which was wherever you get your podcasts. Because that’s a phrase that you’ll hear at the end of the show, come find us wherever you get your podcasts. And what is so radical about it is you can’t say, you know, read my tweets wherever you get your tweets.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. Exactly.
Ben Smith: Watch my show wherever you get your shows.
Chris Hayes: That’s right, that’s right.
Ben Smith: And it is a big difference. And I think there is some hope, that is the internet kind of falls apart and remakes itself. There is, I think, some very smart people working pretty intentionally to widen that space.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ben Smith: Which is, you know, I think that like at its edges, it’s kind of anti-capitalist and anti-corporate in a kind of crunchy, wholesome, earnest mastodon and it kind of works for some people way. But I think there’s also kind of like as with podcasts, just kind of a pragmatic different way of organizing information where you control what’s being fed to you quite a bit more, you make more choices. And among other things, the people who make the content get more of the value than the middlemen.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ben Smith: And so I think there’s some really interesting off (ph) quite nerdy and technical steps in that direction. I mean one of the most interesting though is that, you know, for totally sharky business reasons, which are about killing Twitter I think basically, Mark Zuckerberg is sort of pushing threads into these open protocols, which like is pretty important and meaningful.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, exactly. I agree it’s for totally sharky reasons. But yes, the sort of, you know, the open protocol internet, which is the internet that I kind of grew up on, it was an open protocol internet. It’s the one that I joined when I was 14, where I got a internet service provider to give me like a direct con (ph). I didn’t do AOL or dial up. Then they tried these, what were called, walled gardens, AOL prodigy, these services. And those were the sort of the first social networks. They were sort of, you know, comprehensive little worlds that you operated in.
And they were very profitable. AOL was, you know, the AOL-Time Warner. This was the first dot-com bubble. And then they fell apart and the open protocol internet sort of destroyed them. And what the open protocol internet was like sort of anyone can kind of point to point share with each other. You could publish a blog, I could publish a blog and you can read it, Ben Smith. And this produced an incredible flowering and flourishing and then got re-uncirculated by closed protocols through social media. That’s the quick version of this and we’re rediscovering and I think podcasts are the last open protocol and there’s a reason they’re so popular.
Ben Smith: E-mail is the other.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s true.
Ben Smith: Is a wide open protocol where it’s not like I can only communicate —
Chris Hayes: Oh right.
Ben Smith: — with you on Gmail on your Gmail.
Chris Hayes: Right, right, right. And that’s why you publish on that and that’s —
Ben Smith: It’s one of the reasons of course. It’s one of the last places publishers can build a business is e-mail because it’s open. And you know, the nice thing about it is it’s not actually a particularly great business to run an e-mail service or a blogging platform. There’s a reason that the tech companies, you know, are desperate to pull you into platforms where they have total control.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ben Smith: And that where publishers should be pretty desperate to get out of those environments.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Let’s stay on the business, one more question about subscriber versus advertising. And I don’t want to go too much. You wrote a book that’s partly about this, is about sort of attention markets and how that functioned in the news business. I’m writing a book right now about attention and I don’t want to like cannibalize myself too much. But the short version of this is Benjamin Day comes up with The Penny Press back in the 1830s in New York where he says, I’m gonna sell newspapers at a loss, but I’m gonna sell advertising against it.
And that becomes sort of the model for like basically all media for a really long time. There’s, you know, some niche publications that can get by just in subscription revenue. But basically the audience is the product. You grab the audience, you sell ads against it. There’s been a big shift towards subscribers. And I’m curious like how sustainable, growable that is because that’s another place where like, look, if you can find 10,000 people to subscribe to you, you can do some interesting, good and profitable work. You’re not going to be “The New York Times” but you could do good stuff and continue to survive.
Ben Smith: Media is such a hard business. Journalism, it’s such a hard business, such a hard way to make money. You know, my son had an internship at one point in a company that operates car washes. And he would come back and just be like, do you know what a good business car washes are? Like why are you in media? All you guys talk about is breaking even, like these guys are all wildly profitable.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: But also we have like, we love to like tell ourselves stories and to get really kind of ideological about how businesses operate. And I think that, you know, really good media businesses make money lots of different ways. If you can —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, great point.
Ben Smith: — produce really interesting information.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Ben Smith: Get people to read it, you should sell advertising, you should sell subscriptions, you should host events. I mean the best media business in American history is Disney. And if you ask like what business is Disney in?
Chris Hayes: Everything.
Ben Smith: It’s like, well, they’re in like 17 different businesses.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: And they have kind of like corporate suits who manage each of them like very carefully.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: And I actually think is a danger to media that we start like arguing about whether like advertising or subscriptions is better for democracy. Like journalism’s really good for democracy, like stop trying to prevent people from supporting it. We’re currently in the ad and event business, but we’d love to do subscriptions and I think that’s sort of where successful media companies will go.
Chris Hayes: I totally agree with that, except for the fact that I do think there’s connections. The reason that we have these ideological battles is because the content really matters and that the business incentives can affect the content of the margin.
Ben Smith: Oh for sure.
Chris Hayes: And so that’s the reason we have them and you don’t have them in the car wash, right, because you’re just washing cars. As long as the cars are getting clean, whatever the model is, like for us it’s like a clicks business might drive you to do more local crime stories that are really lurid, like Benjamin Day’s Penny Press, where he was the first person to send a reporter down to the local courthouse to report on crime. He also, here’s another example of perverse incentives, had a long, full page spread about what the moon was like, because there was in a telescope that could view the moon, according to Benjamin Day’s, The Sun.
Ben Smith: There were winged people on it.
Chris Hayes: They were winged people.
Ben Smith: Running around, yeah.
Chris Hayes: So there’s an example where because the size of his audience mattered more than what was factual, like the business incentive did have an effect on what he did and that’s why —
Ben Smith: Oh for sure.
Chris Hayes: — we have these ideological conversations. But that all brings us, to me is like this second question, which is like all right, you and I, I have a pretty good idea of what your media diet is, you know, just broadly and generally. I’ve known you for a long time, we’re sort of the same cohort. I don’t know, I truly do not know, how the median 18-to 30-year-old, 35-year-old, their news almost is too reductive, like gets actual true information and facts about public life. Let’s put it that way. Yeah.
Ben Smith: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I think the information environment is cloudier and more opaque and more terrifying than I’ve ever experienced it.
Ben Smith: I mean it’s definitely cloudier and more opaque. I mean I think that it is hard to imagine an information environment more terrifying than the sort of late teens in which basically the only place you could get information was one of two open air, insane asylums where you would like step out into Twitter and Facebook and a bunch of strangers would just scream at you and at each other and you would flee. And I think that people are totally reasonably reacting against that. And retreating into, I mean forget platforms, you’re retreating into group chats —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: — to a large extent. And you know, it’s funny you mentioned the median because I think like this is a case where median isn’t that interesting. It’s like you want like the mode, because I think there are like —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: — there are a thousand different consumption patterns and a thousand different podcasts and a thousand different medium-sized discord groups or you know, streams that you and I aren’t watching or influencers on TikTok or on YouTube who are informing, for better or for worse, medium-size numbers of people. And you just don’t know what’s in somebody’s EarPods when they’re sitting on the subway. It’s a very like diverse, scattered media environment right now where people really don’t have the same facts and the same information. And a lot of it is closed like a telegram group (ph) and a lot of it isn’t open to you and me.
Chris Hayes: Yes, the closedness and also the closedness of even the sort of closedness of the algorithm which we call the algorithm, which is funny. It’s almost a kind of like religious invocation. Like —
Ben Smith: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — the capital T, capital A, like the algorithm. It’s like there are —
Ben Smith: I mean what it is —
Chris Hayes: — just a bunch of code but —
Ben Smith: Yeah, honestly, what it is, is mystification by the platforms —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: — to make it seem like what they’re doing is too complicated to regulate.
Chris Hayes: To be honest, it doesn’t seem that complicated to me. Like honestly, it’s like I look at something for a while and then it sends me more. Like there’s a comedian out of Austin who I saw for the first time. I was like, oh, that’s kind of funny. I watched the whole video. And then it sent me a lot more to that, like this is like splitting the atom.
Ben Smith: When people talk about how complex the algorithm, it’s like every 11-year-old in America has mastered it, like —
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Ben Smith: — you can too. And actually when I did my, one of the interesting things in writing this book, was writing about this moment at BuzzFeed. We had sort of like inside sources at Facebook and so we would get tips on like what, you know, this mystical algorithm and how it worked. And the tips were of the form like, well, you know, we’ve shifted around, so that one share is equivalent to four likes in the waiting. Like this is something that you and I could explain to each other.
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Ben Smith: I mean there’s this whole profession called data science, which is meant to sort of mystify the use of like Excel spreadsheets that a lot of people could probably figure out. I think there is —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ben Smith: — an impulse in the tech industry to make what they’re doing seem very hard and proprietary when in fact it’s not.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. The one thing I will say though is that whether the actual black box algorithm is particularly sophisticated, it is pretty individuated. And so what that means —
Ben Smith: Yes and getting more of both, more sophisticated now.
Chris Hayes: More sophisticated, more individuated and what that also means is none of them are publishing data anymore in any sort of aggregate sense. So, it’s like we literally just don’t know.
Ben Smith: Right.
Chris Hayes: You know, Netflix per the WGA writer strike, successful strike, the streamers have started to have to actually publish some data, right. And we found out, for instance, the most watched show on Netflix was “Suits.”
Ben Smith: “Suits”, yeah, shocker. It turns out everybody is just watching “Suits” and “The Office.”
Chris Hayes: Which is also like amazing and a useful piece of information I’m happy to have. Like I’m glad that that was something that they fought for in that contract. But you know, you could look at individual video numbers on TikTok and you can see something has 4 million views and a ton of engagement. But I would be super fascinated just to see that, just to see that version of like, here’s all the kind of like political videos roughly or videos roughly about public life, right, not like dancing.
Ben Smith: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And what are the top 20? It could be the top one is about how the mRNA vaccines are going to make you have, you know, children who don’t look like you, which was a tweet the other day. If you told me right now that a video saying something truly deranged about the vaccines was the number one watched video on TikTok last year, I would, a hundred percent, believe you, which has enormous consequences for the country.
I mean life and death consequences. I mean this is the place where like this information environment question becomes like literally life and death. Like there is a body count. There are tens of thousands of people who have died, who shouldn’t. But I don’t know the answer and no one, I don’t think, outside the company knows the answer.
Ben Smith: No and the platforms both kind of mystified and put their thumb on the scale where they need to. I think when TikTok was under all this pressure over when, you know, U.S. lawmakers were saying, it was sort of radicalizing young people in favor of Palestinians. They were both producing data, you know, that suggested, as I’m sure, lots of people who love Israel were getting served clips about they loved Israel. But they were —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: — massaging data that seemed to support that claim. And also I would, who knows, but they also have the capacity to be like, hey, we got to juice those Israel numbers. We’re in trouble in Washington, then they’ll do that.
Chris Hayes: A hundred percent true, yes.
Ben Smith: It’s all happening kind of —
Chris Hayes: I mean that’s within their control, point being. The other thing is that like, as a lot of people noted, and this is sort of an adjunct question that I’ve done a podcast about is like, you know, it’s an independent (ph) country that is under the control of a authoritarian regime and the Chinese Communist Party.
Ben Smith: Right, right. No, these executives, the executor (ph) sort of see it. There are TikTok executives in Washington being yelled up by congressman, panicking and moving levers around to please them. And similarly in Beijing and the ones in Beijing are actually running the place.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So, what I encounter right now, is this kind of opposite problem of a bunch of the theorists that were writing in the 1920s, is like the second week in the row I’m referencing Walter Lippmann’s “Public Opinion.” But you know, a bunch of people writing about mass man and Ortega y Gasset in Europe, which is basically this idea of like the mass man, right. That like mass media and these sort of great undifferentiated masses, and they’re all getting the same propaganda.
And they become extremely malleable towards whatever goal, fascism being one of them or communism. And this concern about this sort of everyone is watching the same thing and then, the whole massive people will become malleable. And we have kind of the opposite problem. It’s like I have no idea, no one has any idea. And like the question of like whether you could even have a public domain or public discourse under those conditions becomes incredibly unanswered.
Ben Smith: No, I mean I agree with that. And it kind of brings a little back to the one place where it feels like that is so within reach, which is like your street, your block, your neighborhood, where there is no information at all.
Chris Hayes: Wait, say more about that.
Ben Smith: In my career, I’d always felt that the antidote to this kind of increasingly sort of like nonsensical detached from reality national politics had been ultimately, like I remember doing a story, you know, like one kind of story at BuzzFeed and particularly (ph) we do is like an expose of sexual assault at a, you know, at a school. And sometimes the perpetrator or the administrators would start to yell about fake news and no one cares, no one listens to that. Like these are your kids. Are you kidding me, that they’re trying to blame the messenger and the media.
When you get to a level of tangibility, I think all of these questions about what somebody saw in TikTok kind of fade. But there’s now just so little information, so little journalism, just so little being produced in those environments. I mean that’s where, to me, that local news had been, if not an antidote, kind of a check on some of this and that’s part of why it’s so scary what’s happening.
Chris Hayes: That brings us back to this problem of reporting. The value of reporting as a market commodity, particularly in an intention commodity. So, reporting is incredibly important, has incredible civic value. It introduces new facts into the world. And I remember this incredible feeling I would have where I was a young reporter, I would go to an event, okay. Maybe an alderman was showing up again for some local story and I was the only reporter in the room. And I would be like, I am the portal through which this moment in time is entering the record, is entering history.
I am the witness here. I’m the only one. I’m the only one who’s going to write this down, right? And there’s two things that have now replaced that. Now everyone has smartphones in the room. People recording everything all over the place. So, you don’t need the reporter anymore. And number two, the market value of that, of introducing new facts is pretty unclear. Like Joe Rogan’s not introducing new facts into the world. He’s very popular. He’s very talented at what he does. But the market doesn’t select for people doing what you’re talking about, that sort of investigative reporting.
Ben Smith: Yeah, reporting is expensive. The CEO of Medium, which is a tech company that has made a kind of earnest run to get into journalism a number of times and keeps falling on its face, but doing it in kind of a quite earnest and high integrity way I think.
Chris Hayes: I agree.
Ben Smith: He had this very kind of frank interview with Reed Albergotti where he said, it’s really cheap to write about your own expertise because you already know. If you’re a doctor writing about being a doctor, that’s great but it turns out to be like really expensive, if you have to go out and learn anything and gather new facts and new information. It’s just too expensive. Like we here at Medium can’t afford it, so we have to have people write about their own experience.
And then there’s this corollary problem that the people who are best at writing about their own experience and most eager to write their own experience is people who’s in experience is in social media marketing. And all they want to write about is how to write about your own experience, so that other people will learn to write about their own experience. And so we’re having to figure out a way to kind of push them aside also and it was very kind of frank.
Chris Hayes: That’s great, that’s great.
Ben Smith: But the kind of underlying thing was just the sort of realization from I think kind of an earnest and smart tech entrepreneur that journalism is too expensive. Sorry, we can’t do that under, you know, with the sort of economics of tech, which require huge margins and not paying too much for content. And it’s just a reality. It is in fact expensive, you have to hire people to go and discover things and you can use these miraculous tools of distribution.
You don’t need a printing plan anymore. Like it actually is much cheaper than it used to be. You don’t need trucks, you can use AI tools in certain ways to help gather information, you know. But there is this underlying reality that doing this well is pretty expensive and you need a business model that supports it.
Chris Hayes: You just announced that you’re doing an AI thing.
Ben Smith: Yes, that’s what I was referring to. Let me talk about my AI thing.
Chris Hayes: All right, talk about your AI thing. And just for the viewers at home, I’m making the most skeptical face a human can make, but go ahead.
Ben Smith: So, one of the real curses of the internet right now, which I think anybody reading the internet knows, is that if news breaks, a thousand publishers will race to write one sentence about it, to get a Google link, which was lots of traffic saying, hey, this report just came out of, that says that Trump is guilty or innocent. And then, you know, maybe they’ll fill that story in a little bit, but they’ll basically just move on.
And so, we felt like there’s a big opportunity to say, to wait a minute, say here’s the facts that we’ve gathered of the thing that happened. But then here are 10 people who’ve written really interesting, insightful things about it from all over the world, and we’re going to try to give you. And those opinions may differ with each other, shared facts but there may be quite different perspectives. And like that’s sort of our DNA at Semafor is to provide different perspectives on the shared facts.
And so that’s been a successful format for us. People like it, it kind of is reminiscent of the blogosphere you and I grew up on honestly. But also searching for interesting insights on a global story across, you know, 10 or 20 languages is a lot of work. And actually machine translation is a marvel and has made it easier. But one of our reporters and editor kind of figured out how to use a combination of ChatGPT and Bing to say, hey, is the Japanese press saying anything interesting about this right now?
And that’s just an incredibly useful tool that we use all the time for research. We do not then create a bot that tries to have a conversation with our readers in Japanese or anything like that. Like it’s a research tool for journalists, but it’s an incredibly, honestly, miraculously powerful tool. And so we use it that way. I think there’s a lot that’s quite scary about AI, but this, for us, this is just this incredibly powerful tool.
There are other very powerful tools, Grammarly actually, which has, I think, genuinely started to replace copy desks, but is an incredibly powerful tool, allows you to publish faster, more cheaply, more accurately, is not about to like emerge from the bots and set up robots on street corners to gun —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ben Smith: — people down.
Chris Hayes: Yeah and I think that the one very clear use case, I think, that the reason that you saw it launch with Bing is as an adjunct to search. And partly that’s because actually search has gotten a lot worse, I mean this is really a wild trajectory.
Ben Smith: Incredible.
Chris Hayes: I mean you can’t find things anymore. Like I saw someone made this, someone had a post on Bluesky or somewhere where they said like there’s a whole generation of young people that we as say, 40 year olds, are telling to go Google it, not realizing that that doesn’t help. It just doesn’t work the way that it did 20 years ago for us or 15 years ago. I totally get AI as the kind of way of making search really work again, makes a lot of sense.
Ben Smith: And working across language is pretty spectacular and magical.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: Like Tower of Babel was a major incident in the Bible and they’re —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: — reversing it and who knows what the consequences are but it’s pretty cool.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, no, I agree. I find that even now with just the translate feature where I can go watch Israelis arguing about a story in Arets (ph) where I’m just translate, translate, translate. And like I could get the gist, like this minister said this and now different people are mad about it or defending him.
Ben Smith: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Just that, which wasn’t really working even five or seven years ago is pretty incredible.
Ben Smith: Yeah and I mean I would say before we start doomsaying here, I think there’s actually more to be optimistic about in these technologies than journalists often say.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, well, let’s end on that note because I did my first TikTok the other day. Because I feel like I want to be like part of the solution, which is like, well, if people are getting their news from TikTok, I should go talk to people on TikTok. And one of the things that I think is really interesting is I remember feeling really optimistic and almost utopian and excited about tech. I was like a wired subscriber. I was, you know, on news group. I learned how to code. I loved computers.
I thought the internet’s the most incredible thing in human civilization maybe since the printing press and now everything scares me. You know, now everything feels dystopian, and I can’t figure out if I’m just getting old. And that’s just what happens as you get older or it’s just the experience we’ve had and the mood. And the one thing, I think, is that the reason I discount it as just me getting older is the people who are the most pessimistic and dystopian are like 25. So, it doesn’t seem like just a product of age. It seems like, I don’t know. Why is that do you think?
Ben Smith: I mean I think I probably agree with you that politics right now globally are genuinely dystopian. And even as we sort of live in this age of technological miracles and wonders, which I think maybe even are driving these populous tendencies and the extent to which people feel disoriented and scared and are kind of embracing, you know, crazy politics that, by the way, are amplified and empowered in some ways by these technologies. And, you know, the erosion of the notion that you can believe what you see, which is probably the scariest thing about AI can be (ph).
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: It also feeds these very kind of radical political tendencies. I mean you sort of have to be, I think, basically optimistic to do what you and I do. And I’m also a product of this. I feel like we’re of this microgeneration where we are like in our hearts are incredibly utopian about technology —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: — and have to keep me kind of like slapped in the face to temporarily fall out of it. Obviously, I wouldn’t be doing what I was doing if I didn’t have some of that in me. Yeah but I do keep getting slapped in the face about it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that thing about, you know, not being able to trust what you see. Like I don’t know if you’ve been following, just reporting here and there about the sort of front edge of scams with AI voice calls, people getting a call from like a loved one who’s in trouble.
Ben Smith: You need a code word for your family it turns out.
Chris Hayes: It’s wild. First I started hearing these anecdotally like friend to friend, and I couldn’t tell if it was urban myth, you know, because sometimes these things can, but then I’ve started seeing reporting about it. And now, you know, and then there was a scam the other day of like some company got scammed out of something because they had a Zoom video of a person they thought was an actual person but wasn’t. And that stuff is wild.
And that to me I’m little less worried about that in the “disinformation sphere” than just the scam sphere. Because I do think that one of the things that makes me pessimistic about the internet is like how much it feels like a scam machine, like a barrage of scam machine, little scam machines. But I guess on the last question here, how is Semafor doing?
You’re actually doing it. You’re not a theorist of this. You are running a business. I read Semafor, I really like it. You’ve got some writers that I, you know, been reading for 20 years and truly, truly admire and are great reporters, Dave Weigel, Meti Harland (ph), two that come to mind but a lot of other ones. How is the business going?
Ben Smith: You know, it’s going really well because I think, and we’ve both lived through this, but I was at Politico when we started, BuzzFeed News. And we started these moments of, you know, massive change in the media when readers and viewers really feel this sense that like they’re not getting the thing they want. They’re getting, right now, flung all sorts of fragmentary kind of polarizing information at them. And so there’s a real advantage to starting from scratch and just saying like, what would you as a consumer want?
Like you’d want someone who does the job that Twitter used to do, of looking around finding the most interesting voices on different sides, but not on the fringes and saying like, here are really thoughtful insights on the news that maybe disagree with each other, but have shared facts. You’d want reporters who both take the fact that social media does give you as a journalist, a big voice and a personality and a sense of who you are that you can connect to readers with.
But also, you know, an ability to separate the facts from your opinion and your analysis. And I think there is in this, in the old newspaper environment, the sense you got to kind of merge those together and sort of smuggle your opinion —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ben Smith: — into the news. And I think for us, we’re trying to take really basically old fashioned news reporters. That’s basically what I am. I’m not really an opinion guy but say, hey, look, I’ve been covering media a long time. Here’s what happened today and here’s my analysis of it. Maybe here’s somebody who disagrees with that analysis, but to keep that kind of openness to sane disagreement which, by the way, I think is a feature of the better parts of the new internet. I think podcasting actually is a space where —
Chris Hayes: Agreed.
Ben Smith: — on the right and on the left. There’s a sense that, okay, wait, we’re like our job is not to sort of intimidate or bully people into thinking one way or another, it’s to open real conversations. And that is what we try to do.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, the format is, it’s the best format for those exchanges. And I think everyone kind of understands that particularly because social media is the worst format for those exchanges.
Ben Smith: Yeah. You know, I mean fundamentally this is about a reaction against social media, right. And not just of publishers, but really consumers —
Chris Hayes: Everyone.
Ben Smith: — who are looking for what’s the antidote.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Well, my book is the book length treatment (ph) of this, but I’ll just say that the sort of profound stalking sense of alienation that we all live with in what I call, the attention age, is it’s wild, how ubiquitous is a feature of our sort of social, psychological landscape.
Ben Smith: I mean I think a lot of people who in public life, in journalism and politics kind of, you know, as our sort of brains and our information consumption were rewired around Twitter in particular.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ben Smith: You know, and I think we’re trying to kind of pull away from that now and figure out, you know, how to do this better.
Chris Hayes: I totally agree. Well, I feel better coming out of this conversation than I went going in, so that’s something.
Ben Smith: I’m glad. You know, I guess I feel perhaps irrationally optimistic about this stuff. I mean I think, although it is, there’s something scary and new about being unable to see what everybody else is talking about and thinking about. There’s also something nice about it and sometimes you poke into those spaces and you’re pleasantly surprised by how thoughtful people are being.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s well said. Ben Smith is the editor-in-chief at Semafor, which is a recently launched digital news platform. You can check them out. He’s also author of “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.” He’s a former New York Times media columnist and former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. Ben, it’s great to have you on.
Ben Smith: Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Ben Smith. We’d love to hear your feedback on all this, whether you are a consumer of media or work in media. Both of which I’d love to hear what you have to say about that conversation. E-mail us at WITHpod@gmail.com. Get in touch using the #WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can also follow me on Threads at chrislhayes and on Bluesky, and what was formally known as Twitter.
“Why is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News. Produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. Engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?