Ben Smith

EO

When you look at the media landscape right now, what’s the underlying logic most people still don’t see?

BS

At the big-picture level, there’s so much conversation about what the media messed up and where “Media” with a capital M supposedly went wrong. People point to the pivot to video, or CBS’s coverage of George Bush in 2004, or the timing of paywalls, or the belief that they should have hired more journalists from the Midwest. And a lot of that is true. But it misses the larger point. The real challenges in media come from a massive technological revolution. They don’t have much to do with tactical managerial decisions on either the business or editorial side. It makes sense for people in those organizations to focus on what they can control, but you can’t understand how media is changing without recognizing that the so-called golden age of media—if it even was that—was also a technological artifact. For most of the twentieth century, you couldn’t reach a mass audience unless you owned a broadcast tower or a printing press.

Those were incredibly expensive pieces of infrastructure, and only a handful of companies had them. That gave them regional monopolies or near-monopolies. They printed money. They made great entertainment and great journalism, but the whole ecosystem was shaped by that commercial environment. And that world is totally gone. The idea that we’re going to return to that model is delusional. It didn’t exist because people were smarter or more virtuous; it existed because technology centralized power in a very specific way, and people should stop being nostalgic for it. They can be nostalgic for it, but there’s no path back.

EO

In this emerging landscape, what does consolidation actually signal to you? How do you read it?

BS

There’s a whole new set of dynamics right now. We’ve just come through this incredible splintering of individual creators and very niche media. And because the pendulum always swings, people say the media only does two things: it bundles and it unbundles. We’re at the peak of unbundling, and it’s become annoying. You subscribe to too many newsletters on Substack and it gets ridiculously expensive. I went to watch something last night, realized my Hulu subscription had lapsed, and assumed it might also be on Peacock. That whole experience has become frustrating for consumers. So there’s going to be a reconsolidation where you might get a single Substack subscription that gives you access to several newsletters, or Paramount merges with HBO and you get one subscription. Some of that will happen, but it won’t recreate the very centralized world of the twentieth century.

EO

If distribution is no longer free or abundant, what assumption replaces the old one?

BS

That’s such a good question. I find that shift personally puzzling, because I grew up in an era when it was assumed distribution was free, which was a crazy assumption. I could put my blog on the internet, anyone could read it, anyone could share it, and it was almost literally free. I was paying a few bucks a month for hosting fees and maybe twenty dollars a year for a traffic meter. But in earlier generations of media, distribution was a huge cost. You needed printing presses and trucks to deliver newspapers, and the person who ran distribution was a very senior executive. I think we’re headed back into a world where finding and reaching your customers—and marketing to them—is, again, an important muscle.

It’s a bit of a lost art. We have a great head of audience who grew up in print, finding subscribers to British magazines using mailing lists and thinking about the cost of reaching somebody and what that return would be. That whole skill set is very much a lost art. Now the only thing anybody knows how to do is buy ads on Facebook. But the question of how you use resources to find your audience, market to them, build a community, and just accept that it’s not going to be free—that’s really interesting, and it’s still new to me.

EO

Do you think appealing to an audience—and cultivating that audience through marketing and advertising—is itself an art?

BS

For sure. Marketing in media really is an art. It never totally disappeared; The New York Times and The Economist have always run great advertising campaigns. But I came up in an era when social media made it feel like the content could be so viral that it marketed itself. And to some degree, that will always be true. A great story markets itself. A great media brand spreads for free and people discover it that way. But there was this idea that there was unlimited free scale, that scale was free by definition, and that finding people was free by definition. I don’t think that’s true anymore.

EO

What’s the difference between institutions and platforms—for instance, The New York Times versus Substack, or CBS?

BS

The big challenge to institutions is that individuals have become the center of gravity. Audiences are far more attached to an individual than to an institution now, almost by definition. It’s true in sports, it’s true in music—it was always true in music. There was only a brief moment when people said, “I love Columbia artists.” And in book publishing there actually was a period when people identified with Scribner’s. But across a lot of fields today, loyalty is shifting toward the person rather than the house.

In news, that dynamic creates its own tension. A news brand, if it does its job well, can still provide something real: standards, trust, legal and professional support for journalists who often find themselves in public conflict. It gives them something to stand behind when the audience wants reality to bend toward preference. And if you’re purely dependent on subscriptions, there’s a very strong pull to tell people what they want to hear. So a strong news brand can offer real value—to the journalist and the audience—but institutions now have to ask what they’re providing for talent. It used to be “What can you do for me?” Now it’s “What can I do for you?”

EO

What do you think “the news” is today?

BS

I think the main thing the news is today is overwhelming. People are drowning in information and incoming noise. That’s partly TikTok and Instagram, partly AI. And there’s this new willingness—even for me—to live with a level of uncertainty about the news. I was looking up where the phrase “shipping news” comes from, and AI gave me a very clear answer. I thought, this is probably 90 percent accurate, and that’s good enough for a question I don’t care that deeply about. Similarly, I saw a screenshot on TikTok of a poll saying Mamdani supporters were more likely to have been born outside the city than Cuomo supporters. Seemed plausible. I clicked for the source, couldn’t find it, DM’d the journalist—still waiting for a reply. And yet I mentally slotted it in as a plausible data point.

The news has always been plural. It’s been wire services, ideological campaigns, tabloids, everything. It has never been one thing. But at our place, a lot of what we think about is how to serve the person who needs to see the world in high resolution—to know what’s true, to understand how different perspectives land on the same facts. And it’s interesting that the people being driven most insane by the information overload are the ones who should have the best access: the President, CEOs, major decision-makers who don’t feel like they have a reliable way to understand what’s actually happening.

EO

So let me ask it another way: if that’s the diagnostic, what do you think the news needs to be today?

BS

I don’t think it’s useful to imagine it becoming one thing again. It never was as homogenous or as good as people remember. That centralized twentieth-century media world? People were just making things up all the time and you couldn’t check it. Not even maliciously—just making characters up. Jimmy Breslin, who I think is an amazing columnist, invented a mobster he quoted constantly. The FBI literally went looking for him and realized he didn’t exist. So we romanticize the past.

There are lots of ways to do news, and lots of truly awful and toxic incentives out there right now. Not just partisans yelling their ideology—that’s always existed—but this cynical machine of inventing nonsense for small amounts of money, monetizing chaos on X. The incentives are so bad. And that’s more depressing to me than the ideological noise.

EO

YouTube has become the dominant news-delivery system without ever declaring itself as one. What does that reveal about where authority lives now?

BS

It’s so much about individuals. People’s attachment is to individual voices. And YouTube has emphasized that from the start—they popularized the term “creator.” It’s their way of saying: we want to deal with atomized individuals, not fleets. That fits the spirit of the age. What’s interesting now is how professionalized it has become, especially in news. The biggest people on YouTube are Piers Morgan, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson—the most successful TV broadcasters of the last decade. They have real television chops. And Piers is smart: he’s building his YouTube show partly by inviting on creators with huge followings and absorbing their clout.

And he destroys them. It’s like watching a professional athlete play against an amateur who you thought was good, but then the pro is operating on a different level entirely. That doesn’t mean the shaggy long-form podcasts won’t thrive. But there’s this great Rogan clip—Rogan and Dave Smith talking about Piers—and they’re both stunned. The economics are now such that Piers can make more money from YouTube than from News Corp. So you have polished professionals moving into what used to be amateur spaces, while some amateurs professionalize and succeed and others get washed out. I saw this with the blogosphere; I’m seeing it again with podcasts.

EO

And now podcasts are becoming video and video is becoming podcasts.

BS

Yes, right. Everything is blending.

EO

How do you think about trust as a design problem rather than a moral or institutional one?

BS

It’s a hard problem because so much of it is driven by big social and technological shifts, not tactical fixes. There are tactical things we can do—ways to improve connection with an audience and make people trust us. But the centralized “you have to trust us” model is shattered. Trust in every institution is collapsing, and media has fallen the farthest. Most of what’s happening is structural, not something you can solve with product tweaks.

That said, there are different ways to build trust. Fox News is the most trusted outlet in America. MSNBC is next. Being highly partisan and telling people what they want to hear is, nationally, the most effective way to become trusted. But many people find that alienating and understand they’re being manipulated. There’s also a widespread sense that the media is trying to pull one over on you. If you can communicate openness, genuine curiosity, a careful relationship to facts, and a willingness to acknowledge uncertainty in analysis, people appreciate that. And structurally, we’ve tried to build our product around separating news from analysis, and being open to differing opinions.

EO

Can you speak to how that parasite spreads outside media? What does that collapse of trust mean for cultural institutions and for those kinds of brands?

BS

I think it’s part of a much larger condition of the age. And honestly, it resembles the nineteenth century more than anything uniquely modern. That may be the norm we’re reverting to rather than some new symptom.

EO

What part of the news ecosystem feels invisible to most people but decisive to you?

BS

It used to be that there were inside voices who influenced the influencers, and those currents eventually surfaced in the mainstream. As the mainstream has shrunk and those inside voices have grown, the center is much harder to locate. Someone like Laura Loomer, for instance, isn’t subterranean anymore—her influence is fully out in the open. That shift says a lot about where power circulates now.

EO

What shift in distribution do you think is most underestimated right now?

BS

I’m not sure what’s under- or overestimated because the landscape is so unpredictable. But the future of the phone feels existential for anyone in media. The web seems to be collapsing. Email is vulnerable to AI disruption. Apps are basically little databases waiting for an agent to scrape them so you don’t have to open them. And then you have Jony Ive trying to invent something that replaces the phone altogether. If the phone disappears as the center of gravity, what are we? Where do people actually encounter content? That’s a huge open question.

Everybody also hates their phones. If you told people they could spend less time looking at them, they’d say yes instantly. That’s not a great sign for the medium that currently organizes almost everything.

EO

What did the early digital era get fundamentally right, even if the timing was off?

BS

People are very down on the utopianism of the early digital era, but the underlying idea was powerful: you were no longer limited to a geographical, national, or local point of view. You could read anything from anywhere. You could see narratives that contradicted the official one much more easily. I still think that’s incredibly important.

As social media fell apart—Twitter in particular, which had become a major news channel—the big publishers pulled back into their walled gardens and app businesses. They were relieved. But most consumers liked seeing stories from the Times of India, The Guardian, wherever. Even if they didn’t fully buy it or understand it, having those other perspectives was useful. And that’s one of the things getting thrown out with the bathwater as social media collapses: access to diverse points of view.

EO

Do you think the next major change in distribution will come from technology or from cultural fatigue with the current system?

BS

I think it will be technology meeting consumers wherever they want to go. Probably some combination. There’s clearly a lot of fatigue, but new technologies will figure out ways to serve people what they want—both for better and for worse.

EO

Semafor is positioned globally rather than nationally. What drove that logic?

BS

Even as nationalism sweeps through different countries, the biggest stories are global. If you look at the defining stories of the last decade—COVID, social media, the rise of populism—analyzing them purely locally means you miss what’s actually happening. And the real action often sits in the corridors between places: the US and the Gulf, the US and Europe, Europe and China. To understand those movements of money, power, and ideas, you need to see from both ends.

Our audience tends to be people who want to understand those shifts. And if you start from the assumption that New York or London is the natural center of things, and you’re just feeding information back into that center, you get a flattening. You lose perspective.

EO

Is that a direct response to Brexit, or more contemporary happenings?

BS

The US media has been pulling back for years from any kind of global perspective. Social media briefly countered that. I used to think that if the Iraq War happened now, people on the ground in Iraq would be able to say what was happening, and it would be much harder for the US government to mislead anyone. I thought that a decade ago. Now I’m not sure. You can see in Gaza how governments are reasserting control—there’s essentially no journalism coming out of there.

But sophisticated consumers still want to understand what’s happening and how events look from different places. That impulse hasn’t gone away.

EO

What have you learned from operating in a global frame that wouldn’t have occurred to you ten years ago?

BS

I first encountered it at BuzzFeed, where we had a very global operation. One thing you learn internally is that, yes, there are commonalities among journalists from different cultures and political contexts, but there are also irreconcilable differences. You can’t assume everyone in the newsroom will have the same point of view on a story or on journalistic practice.

So you have to decide what’s core—getting things right—and what’s stylistic, national, or local. And you also have to leave room for the fact that not everyone will agree on who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are in a given conflict. That’s part of the ethos, and it’s healthy.

EO

And when you’re shaping a newsroom within that frame, what are you looking for in staff? Are you developing people young, or hiring more established voices?

BS

At BuzzFeed we focused on finding great young reporters who were great at the internet—people who could use their relationship to social media to break news and move stories. At Semafor we’re very small, very focused, and have built around highly experienced reporters on key beats—Wall Street, AI, others—people with long careers and strong reputations in those areas. It’s a different talent model, and it involves far fewer people.

EO

So how much of early digital journalism was driven by optimism about the internet versus a misread of audience behavior?

BS

I actually think we read audience behavior correctly. People were reading the hell out of BuzzFeed and our competitors. The misread was the business model. We assumed traffic would convert to revenue the way it had in earlier eras, and it didn’t. Scale wasn’t worth what we thought.

EO

Buzzfeed reporting drastically shifted the landscape and introduce the direct mode of address. TikTok feels like the aftershock of that era.

BS

Yeah. You were suddenly right up against your audience in a totally new way. A lot of TikTok still has that early-internet optimism and shaggy amateurism that feels real. But it’s already competing with people who are paid full-time to make that content. The pure amateur era is fading. Most users aren’t watching their friends anymore—they’re watching people who get paid to be on TikTok. And that trend eventually pushes the whole thing toward “lean back and watch Netflix.”

EO

When you think about that era, how do you understand the relationship between Hollywood and New York—not just city to city, but the Hollywood system versus the media ecosystem?

BS

I’m really a New York person, and I’ve never totally understood Hollywood, even though I’ve covered it a lot. I’m not native to that system built around huge talent, slow timelines, enormous capital, and obsessive control of IP. They struggled with the last era of the internet, but this new one—built around celebrity, marketing, and video—may actually suit them better.

EO

Did the internet democratize cultural production or flatten it?

BS

Aren’t those the same thing? Yes, it democratized cultural production. A lot of so-called professionals suddenly found they couldn’t compete with outsiders who were smart and good at what they did. There was a real shakeout in that first wave, and the same thing is happening again with influencers and TikTok across different media. Then you get the second phase: a reconsolidation. You’re starting to see podcasters and influencers doing increasingly sophisticated, complex deals with big companies.

EO

Do you think the next dominant news format will return to institutions, or will it be built around individuals who function like small networks?

BS

Institutions aren’t going away, but they need to figure out their relationship to individuals who have their own direct connection to the audience. They have to support those individuals rather than take them for granted.

EO

And what happens to accountability when persona becomes the product?

BS

Accountability shrinks. There’s much less sense of adhering to rules or standards, because anyone can simply say, “I don’t care,” and go out on their own. You see plenty of people doing exactly that.

EO

What does reporting become when the reporter is no longer the primary interface between information and the public?

BS

I’m not sure the reporter was ever the primary interface. It used to be the publication itself—a faceless institution—with the reporter’s byline attached. Increasingly the individual journalist is the interface. That’s often how you get someone to trust you: they know who the information is coming from.

EO

With the rise of AI, what does that mean for institutions? Do they need to foreground the human? How are you thinking about that?

BS

This is answering a slightly different version of your question, but: the two most valuable parts of journalism are gathering information and delivering it. In between are all the production tasks—writing, editing, producing, filming, cutting—and in most publications, production dominates. Digital media already ate a huge portion of that production. AI is going to erode even more of it. If you were starting a media company from scratch today, the real opportunity is to invest more in reporting and in direct audience relationships, and less in everything else.

EO

Last question. What keeps you up at night, and what excites you most in the morning?

BS

We’ve built our business very much around in-person convening, partly because it fits what we do well and partly because there’s enormous uncertainty around every surface where media gets consumed. We feel good about newsletters for the next few years, but long-term the fundamental question is: what is the surface? Is it still the phone? Will it even be called a phone? That feels genuinely unresolved.

I’m not anxious about it, but I think about it a lot. I don’t expect the environment to stabilize into some orderly system with a few newspapers and a few TV networks operating at a predictable standard. But I do think there’s enormous, underestimated consumer demand. When you see polling that says everyone “hates the media,” somewhere in that anger is a signal: people want something that feels closer to what they’re actually asking for. And there’s a big opportunity in meeting that demand.