SPEAKER_00: hey everybody we've got a great show for you today ben smith yes you know him the co-founder and editor-in-chief of semaphore joins us to talk about all things tech and media he of course uh was uh the founder of buzzfeed news and uh he before that worked at the new york times writing their media column a lot of things went wrong and he just wrote a book the book is called traffic genius rivalry and the delusion in the billion dollar race to go viral this is a book about gawker and nick denton versus jonah and buzzfeed both of those businesses have burned up in a just huge barn fire he was there he saw it happen he explains all of that and more plus we talk about the standoff between media and tech we talk about vc dollars going into media companies being a bad idea including the 10 million dollars that ben took from sam bankman freed of ftx fame and now

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SPEAKER_06: all right i'm very excited about today's guest everybody ben smith the co-founder and editor-in-chief of semaphore is here he was the creator and editor-in-chief of buzzfeed news just recently shut down we're

SPEAKER_08: going to talk all about that and he was a media columnist at the new york times and i um and he's got a book coming out today tuesday may 2nd and this is a book that i was on the periphery of uh the book's

SPEAKER_06: title is traffic colon genius robbery and delusion in the billion dollar race to go viral benny described described the book as a post-mortem on the aughts media revolution of nick denton jonah peretti i guess

SPEAKER_12: i'm mentioned as an old rival to nick denton um ben welcome to the program thanks so much i was just

SPEAKER_16: talking to your producer that how about how if all in had been as big when i was writing it as it is now i probably would have like mentioned jason calcanus a few more times yeah i've only got one calcanus

SPEAKER_08: reference in there oh it's okay i mean if we look back on that time uh nick denton had started gawker i started weblogs inc we had a bit of a rivalry uh i dominated him uh in gadget dwarf gizmodo and joystick dwarfed kotaku i think it was his video game brand um and uh we had a dogged fight i sold weblogs inc 18 to 24 months after we started it for 30 million dollars and uh i think everybody knows

SPEAKER_24: he probably made what 10 million bucks 20 million bucks at the end of the day after the whole cogan stuff do you know how much money he actually made on the sale i do not um how much he walked away with

SPEAKER_25: he sold it years later though it was sold for 150 yep but i don't know how much of that he wound up

SPEAKER_08: with yeah very little i think because he had taken a huge uh investment like an emergency investment as you probably document in the book um but let's start here i mean so many things for us to talk about i want to make sure we talk about your book i want to talk about semaphore i want to talk about media writ large uh and i'm sure you have questions for me this is always problematic for me when i have a journalist on especially in media journalists because you always want to ask me questions so

SPEAKER_31: hopefully we can keep this focused on you but i will allow a couple of uh in the interest of full disclosure uh and i'm an open book about these things but it's fun it's fun to talk to you i feel

SPEAKER_20: like i've been talking to you on the internet for years one way or the other so it's nice to

SPEAKER_06: yeah nice to see you so when did you first get into media reporting or just media in general just

SPEAKER_08: to set the stage here and then when did you get involved with buzzfeed yeah i mean i've always been

SPEAKER_35: a reporter and really mostly a political reporter my first gig i was a summer intern at the jewish forward

SPEAKER_16: covering the cutthroat politics of the upper west side in the late 90s um wound up uh back in new york covering city hall in the early 2000s and you know watching all these bloggers actually for both the political bloggers like andrew sullivan and then gawker and and and your guys the tech bloggers um in you know i guess it was 2004 very early and there was nothing really like that in local politics in new york and so i started a blog when i was at the new york observer that covered local politics and i thought it was really successful actually like it was it sort of dominated that extremely small space and i remember once having a having a drink with jessica cohen who i thought was incredibly cool who ran gawker which was like a real blog and um and and asking her how much traffic she got she told me she got a hundred thousand views a day and asked me asked me how much i got and i was sort of like spat out my drink and and changed the subject because i got one thousand so i got one thousand views a day but i really had thought that was a big number well how old are you if

SPEAKER_06: i may ask i'm just curious i'm 46 now okay you're 46 i'm 52 so you're right behind me you're a gen xer yep um and what people don't realize about that time is that for gen xers we would wait in line to be allowed to publish uh and to get our bylines in print typically and then on websites and what blogging did was it created a path for people who were over performers who didn't need an editor to go and just talk directly to an audience which seems sort of obvious in the age of twitter and

SPEAKER_08: tick tock substack and other platforms but at the time journalists just simply weren't allowed to publish without going through multiple layers of editors and you had to like kind of wait in line in

SPEAKER_44: your publication to be allowed to write a feature story so maybe you could describe sort of what you

SPEAKER_06: think is special about that era of publishing and specifically the two principles in your new book

SPEAKER_37: yeah i mean another thing about that era that i think it's it's sort of it's you know it's funny it's hard to get your head back there because it was so different um was just that you know the we're still it was an era where you know there were a few few broadcast channels couple cable channels

SPEAKER_16: um newspapers but they you know at the end of the new york times would put out it it's edition that midnight and if you wanted to know what had happened say in new york city during the day you could wait for that or i could and that's where i saw an opportunity or i could just write it down and blog it and you could see it 10 hours earlier it was a very in some ways very easy competitive environment if you were on the internet um and the sort of these opportunities to have arbitrage information were just so obvious um but also the media i think as much as people now sort of have gripes with a much diminished mainstream media the mainstream media conde dast the new york times the big networks were were very very powerful and had and were in the process of really i think profoundly discrediting themselves in the iraq war and people to some degree felt that then but then in the aftermath of you know oh four or five or six or seven there was this like real alienation from and questions about the mainstream media that i feel like have been a little forgotten but really did fuel a lot of the anger and reaction against the mainstream media the eagerness to hear other voices of all sorts from the outside and great media criticism that was all over the place in that moment

SPEAKER_08: and that was a valid criticism not only of the media uh but of the administration which basically lied

SPEAKER_06: to the american public uh or just the most cynical as they lied about the wars the most generous would

SPEAKER_08: be they they were duped or did a poor job of recognizing weapons of mass destruction etc and and we've had this slow veil uh being removed for all institutions uh and cons what was previously a conspiracy theory could turn into a pulitzer prize right we've had many things uh you know

SPEAKER_44: that have been discredited at first and then become super um award-winning right i mean it was this

SPEAKER_16: moment of real like rage against these institutions that yeah like was pretty justified in that moment actually like it's a little hard to it's funny i think that comes gets written out of the story it wasn't just there was this new tech it was also there was an audience that was really eager for alternative voices of all sorts and just and interested in new stuff and you also had the birth

SPEAKER_06: of link bait at this time so if it bleeds it leads has existed forever we can both agree on that but there was something more pernicious about link baiting which is it became a science and it became a science um that was mastered by two publications uh gawker and um buzzfeed in one hand you had gawker

SPEAKER_08: which would print things that people were talking about but maybe weren't fully sourced i i think would be most people's perception they were a little bit looser with uh what they would publish things that came into the tip line and then at buzzfeed they were just incredibly good at you won't believe what

SPEAKER_62: these 10 cat kitten photos would be so maybe you could describe those two publications and why you

SPEAKER_15: decided to base a book on those two yeah that's right there these were these two guys jonah peretti

SPEAKER_16: nick denton who had come into this moment when as you say suddenly publishers could see exactly who was reading them and coming from where and it's sort of like everybody had been navigating these these aircraft and suddenly they had instruments and suddenly they could navigate with enormously more precision and all the temptation to pander to your audience to give them exactly what they want even if it's in some way inappropriate had always been there like it's not like that you know like the media were saints before but it certainly allowed us to for better and worse just know exactly what people wanted and give it to them and the what interests me so much about nick and jonah is they very they're both very ideological actually like they were they are not people who came out of operating businesses they were not and i think part of the reason that you sold when they didn't was that you were a business operator who was looking at what was the right moment to sell a company and they were sort of visionaries for better and for worse ideologues who had like really distinct views of what the internet was going to be for nick it was about essentially like ripping off the mask of hypocrisy from society from the media you know what if people if what people actually wanted was pornography he would give them pornography there was a porn site called flesh bot and and that sort of ran through some of the coverage it also you know and it also meant

SPEAKER_37: we're going to print what journalists say to each other in bars but would never really say in public and by the way sometimes that was pretty great there was a lot of like the young women writing for it in the early days brilliant writers and real outsiders with no power and so they would like you know one

SPEAKER_16: of them went to the cadenas cafeteria and wrote this great send up of this kind of hallowed media institutions foibles and and there's a tradition of like poking fun at the giant calcified mainstream media that a lot of it was really great actually if you read it sort of captures the weirdness of new york in that moment some of it was really cruel sex tapes publishing sex tapes against people's

SPEAKER_37: permission some of them yeah including one that looked like assault yeah we're sort of a logical extreme of that ethos that they did and it's very hard to even put your head into a place where

SPEAKER_15: that could have been possibly considered acceptable um and then there was also outing people which was

SPEAKER_31: one of nick denton's passions was to out and again i agree with you about the hypocrisy i've had many

SPEAKER_16: discussions with him i mean he had a real ideology that uh sort of that was about exposing secrets with no limits and i don't think that's what most people believe but it was also heartfelt and it flowed through these things and it did connect to this sort of unfiltered new internet and jonah was in many ways

SPEAKER_37: sort of the opposite like he particularly a couple years later really was among the first to see social media coming to really understand this huge tidal wave coming of facebook twitter and he and start

SPEAKER_16: to experiment with what content would work in that context those content as you say that people wanted to share often it was like it seemed really dumb and silly though actually often a lot of thought and data went into the dumb stuff example you know i mean there were in the early days of buzzfeed there

SPEAKER_46: was a lot of these silly lists like one of the great ones what was really big early on was you know

SPEAKER_16: 23 images that will restore your faith in humanity a great reddit genre actually and and the reason but

SPEAKER_46: of course it was made for a new world where people were going to share things that would sort of make them look good to their friends among other things like where the distribution mechanism was people handing

SPEAKER_16: content to somebody else and they had a theory which was partly true that it was going to be very like positive light silly stuff sometimes really positive stuff like here's a fight there's a fundraiser for earthquake victims things that would make you look good to your friends and actually one of the things that we really believed at first was that in this public new social network nobody's going to be screaming at each other about horrible politics because it makes you look like a psychopath to your friends i mean that did not did not turn out to be how social media worked

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SPEAKER_08: fascinating uh sort of piece to this so you have nick who wants everybody to be honest he's making a pretty

SPEAKER_06: penny running these publications he's got all these young people working for him and he was you know the king of new york uh in some ways media if you were good at media having experiences at silicon alley reporter

SPEAKER_08: uh when i covered the dot com era and then in gadget you know you get um a lot of attention in new york and a lot of power accumulates at least at that time to media folks i think this might be the last era of that if i'm and i'm interested in your take on it owning a media brand uh but their strengths ultimately led to their demise outing people uh publishing sex tapes the the desire to you know have this radical transparency and honesty and fight hypocrisy hypocritical people in new york led to denton's

SPEAKER_06: demise and the dependency on facebook and doing data analysis and having the headlines and the stories

SPEAKER_08: not be driven by morals ethics art whatever you you want to uh base your headlines and your editorial on but basing it on data science to get max clicks uh when facebook decided to slit jonah peretti's throat um he he was helpless to do anything another company is a 50 million dollar company with 200 million in revenue and they just shut down buzzfeed news so maybe you could talk a little bit about that which

SPEAKER_44: makes us strong uh and that is clever could also lead to our demise yeah i think i agree with like two

SPEAKER_35: thirds of what you said so i'm just going to pick out that part let's go and and i think denton

SPEAKER_93: i think we it's really true that gawker's strengths or what brought it down there's also one other thing you mentioned sort of how much power it you have as sort of a media figure in new

SPEAKER_16: york and really at first like that wasn't true at all they were like weirdo outsiders on an internet nobody took seriously as were you as were we all right and you didn't feel that you had power you felt like you were a weirdo outsider who people like didn't invite to things and if you wrote something you got dismissed as a blogger and i think that one of the things that it actually is

SPEAKER_37: certainly true of me it's probably true of you like when you're in media at some point you get power

SPEAKER_16: and if you have sort of come up as an outsider and you don't necessarily know it and i think with gawker they were acting like these kids in the back of the class throwing spitballs you know as they grew more and more powerful and as the people they were throwing spitballs at went into crisis and suddenly you just look cruel you know and i think you know right you gawker in 2012 kicking at condé nast is like what are you doing they're falling apart you're very successful and and i don't think they really it's easy to see how you don't realize that that dynamic has shifted but

SPEAKER_37: i think they were acting like outsiders and started to feel to some people like bullies such a great observation i think ben yeah but also there was this ethos i mean there are two two there are two i mean two parts of their ethos that brought them down one was sort of at some point times like with the

SPEAKER_16: sex tapes like with the hulk hogan sex tape irresponsibly exposing people who were just no one in society or the court thinks you ought to be able to do that the other was being really obnoxious to powerful people who can destroy you in this case peter teal who funded hogan suit which is hogan you know who who financed this lawsuit that i think you know was a totally valid lawsuit but secretly ran a

SPEAKER_72: campaign to destroy them and succeeded and that campaign was based upon nick denton outing uh peter

SPEAKER_46: teal teal said later said it wasn't actually the outing and the outing it's a complex complicated

SPEAKER_37: word teal wasn't in the closet to people who knew him so it was but the thing that he it was very

SPEAKER_103: quiet yeah it was very dangerous for him to be a gay man at that time it was life or death because he had saudi investors and he traveled to the middle east i don't know if you cover that in the book yeah

SPEAKER_16: it wasn't i mean he didn't want he didn't want a sexuality written about and that's something yeah i mean like i i wouldn't i wouldn't have written that i i agree with that you just think also this is

SPEAKER_23: 2005 it's a different time period at that time yeah uh tim cook but also closeted but teal said

SPEAKER_93: yeah that's right no i agree and teal also later said that he was perfectly upset that denton had

SPEAKER_37: written in the comments just about how with it teal was this weird okay like sort of written something basically kind of mean about him personally in the comments that that was really what triggered it but in any case you know so hey this was a case where actually gawker had they written something

SPEAKER_16: mean about somebody with less power they would have gotten away with it but teal had the money and power to go after them and that also was their ethos was saying the unsayable and saying it about really powerful people and that was the dangerous road for them in various ways for better and for worse um yeah yeah the buzzfeed story i mean i was much closer to and i think you're right yeah the big picture the biggest picture is what you said it was a it was a bet really the bat very very literal sense was that facebook was a new the new cable company they were gonna be content and they were gonna be paying people for content and that or somebody would be paying for it a little hazy and that those companies would be the new viacom like that was basically the bet do you think that was a

SPEAKER_46: crazy bet from the start or do you think it would just panned out wrong so i've had this experience

SPEAKER_73: because when i did mahalo after weblogs inc we were became dependent on google traffic and then they cut our traffic 10 million dollars in revenue all of a sudden went to 500 000 right and i have

SPEAKER_116: i know sergey i know larry i know marissa mayer i knew the people there they had no problem you know

SPEAKER_08: cutting off our traffic and killing the company uh at that time and so i have been through this dependency issue over and over again and the mistake is when you have a dependency like that what you're supposed to do is use it to collect emails to collect phone numbers and to build direct

SPEAKER_06: traffic but building direct traffic is hard as you are learning with semaphore you have to have actually something unique that makes people type semaphore.com into their web browser and go direct

SPEAKER_08: jonah peretti got addicted to it he didn't understand he was outmatched by zuckerberg and that the relationship driven media business in new york where people don't shank each other is very different than how zuckerberg thinks there is no partner zero partners who went to bed with zuckerberg who didn't wake up with their throat slit there is no company he's acquired where the founders of those companies don't hate him so you have jonah peretti coming from the collegial but competitive new york media environment and then ramming into the silicon valley cutthroat environment where they don't even pick up the phone to tell you they've shanked you they just watch you they didn't even watch you bleed out

SPEAKER_06: they just shank you and walk away and drop the knife these are mafia based hits they're not like

SPEAKER_08: done in a very like uh you know we're going to talk about it uh we're going to negotiate it i got shanked by google as did you know ehow and countless other content companies that were building

SPEAKER_44: content at scale yeah and he got shanked by facebook but by the way so did instagram started whatsapp founders so did uh all the game developers zynga mark pinkus john just wasn't paying attention and he had a dependency of at the peak what 80 of his traffic was coming for social

SPEAKER_16: i think yeah and it was really the core idea of the business because i see we were totally aware

SPEAKER_77: of the dependency and were in various ways trying to build away from it but it's really it's so hard

SPEAKER_08: to play with your strength yeah and not only did you do that but you raised money based on that dependency and you sold that dependency and you raised that what 2 billion from andreason horowitz

SPEAKER_16: that was another critical area i think it was you were even raised at the valuation yeah

SPEAKER_77: it was about 2 billion back then or something it was it was we raised from uh nbc at 1.7 was the

SPEAKER_73: 1.7 yeah and before that andreason horowitz and so you know media businesses don't get that big

SPEAKER_08: right uh you know blogs don't get that big these things don't grow to the moon you're lucky to get them to low six-figure values huffington post 300 gawker 150 but uh business insider 300 which one

SPEAKER_90: i said politico a billion there's been some inflation through the years i mean yes political but i totally

SPEAKER_16: that would be the upper value with you these aren't businesses that are appropriate for someone to think you know maybe i'll put in 10 million and take out you know it's not going 50x yeah exactly and so that

SPEAKER_73: is the core issue is that people started to try to frame them i think buzzfeed tried to frame it you and jonah as a tech business tech business it was not and so that's another critical era uh in terms of setting expectations i think nick was very good at just like hey listen it's just a little business that's gonna make i think he made you know a couple million dollars a year in profits maybe 10 20

SPEAKER_15: million it was a profitable business that was doing all right yeah and for him you know being able to go

SPEAKER_08: um you know on incredible vacations and be a celebrity and do something he loved every day

SPEAKER_73: and discover new that's pretty good i think that was enough for him what happens to buzzfeed now i

SPEAKER_08: understand jonah has like some kind of superpower ownership over this so yeah yeah yeah right jonah has

SPEAKER_16: i mean i don't it's not as i mean i'm not the expert on this either but he has one of these structures where he controls the company um you know what did your equity do your equity in buzzfeed became

SPEAKER_08: worthless i assume like all the writers there you still know i mean it was you know it's backed remember

SPEAKER_153: right so you were able to get some liquidity yeah yeah i mean i think people were very you know not

SPEAKER_16: at the numbers that were once promised but i'm not but also i think like a lot you know like i don't think most people you know i don't want to speak other services people are very angry about it i i

SPEAKER_08: obviously no the media i mean people were promised you know hey listen you're at the next facebook you're at the next uber and you know journalists or even if people didn't quite believe that there was when

SPEAKER_16: buzzfeed spec there were execution issues that left people holding it was just the whole thing was

SPEAKER_73: which is what like they had six months six month holding periods and the stock just plummeted

SPEAKER_16: nothing that's sophisticated they had a they had to switch the paper shares had to be transferred in some way and during the weeks that was happening the stock dropped and people were understandably

SPEAKER_44: incredibly upset about it yeah i mean there are lottery tickets uh you know stock options everybody and if you your your number hits great but yeah your salary is kind of you know what this is all about

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SPEAKER_08: your sock two there were two other companies um that i don't know how much uh you know information you cover in your thing but vice became a five billion dollar company this time and collapsed yeah it was another train wreck disaster and then you have vox uh which jim bankoff who was an executive vp at uh aol when he bought my company weblogs inc and then he took the engadget team and the joystick team and he created verge and then started buying stuff and created vox yes um talk about

SPEAKER_93: those two sure i mean two very different to the opposites actually vice incre you know an incredible

SPEAKER_16: brand that really stood for something and had people who loved it and kind of knew what it was in a very in a way that like great brands do but really was barely an internet company at all like did not really have traffic really had hype and incredible at hype and spun that hype into being a fairly successful television production company for a time and did a big deal with with hbo to produce a nightly news show but when that but that's a production deal you know that's like you think the internet business is bad right like that that's cost it's basically getting paid for salary

SPEAKER_77: yeah you make 10 profit and when the show gets canceled you're you're in huge trouble and that's

SPEAKER_178: ultimately what happened to them to lay off all those people which is why people in hollywood work

SPEAKER_15: on a project basis not on a staff position basis yeah and and shane took you know an enormous amount

SPEAKER_16: of money out of that company met we reported a couple of weeks ago that it was more than a hundred million dollars some people think a lot more you know that's from a company that you know did not deliver any value to his shareholders and is now i think owned by effectively owned by fortress which is the

SPEAKER_15: private equity firm yeah which was the scene which was the senior most investor yeah but you know creditor um and then vox you know vox sort of interesting because jim is much less ideological

SPEAKER_16: much less and much less of a sort of a fixed vision of exactly how the internet ought to be put together a bunch of different companies managed them carefully i think never had the kind of cultural upset you know this had never cut through culturally or sort of the same exact scale but he is a solvent functioning company right now which is you know i think is pretty impressive

SPEAKER_62: actually um having worked with him and having bought my company he's an executor he is management

SPEAKER_44: he is good at managing talent he's good at managing a collection of brands which you know matt that is

SPEAKER_06: one of the hardest issues managing a collection of brands it works against everything that the human

SPEAKER_73: brain thinks about consolidation every mba has been trained which is well if you own curbed and or if

SPEAKER_08: you own joystick and engage it and huffington post and tech crunch well they overlap in these different

SPEAKER_06: places so make it huffington post slash video games which is what they did to joystick right and i'm like that's death for that brand you just killed it that would be like people making vogue a section of vanity fair or vanity fair a section of bon appetit like it's not the cooking section it's like for people who are

SPEAKER_93: obsessed with cooking you don't break it into sections like that i think vanity fair was a section of vogue

Chamath Palihapitiya: for a time before they revived it with tina brown but just imagine like then trying to reverse engineer that which is what like what this is what always happens you buy a collection of brands and then

SPEAKER_06: you're like oh yeah we'll just redirect that brand over here and then it meant something to 10 million people and now you keep 2 million of them and right you know you just it's it's hard for people

SPEAKER_08: to deal with media people media people are hard to manage yeah it's not the world's most rational business talk about unions and gen xers versus millennials and gen z's in journalism how are they

SPEAKER_16: different so i don't you know i don't actually totally buy the big generational you know sort of stereotypes but i do think there was this dynamic in with the came with the rise of the internet where sort of the old people who used to dominate newsroom and boss everybody around suddenly were like afraid of the young people who knew all this stuff they didn't and there was this like basic dynamic of like boomers being afraid of millennials and i always thought that like we of gen x had this kind of we were that we were able to interpret like that's our code switch yeah between and and i actually don't so much think that there's some profound generational cultural differences just literally you had a generation come up with these new tools in a generation that was like deeply freaked out by them and dislocated by them um i don't know i mean i think you know there are you know old media institutions that have like the times right now that have bitter conflict with their unions and there are you know brand new ones like buzzfeed that have bitter conflict with their unions and i think you know that's more just sort of like a fairly just how industrial relations works

SPEAKER_08: yeah these unions are hilarious to me uh because all it does is take what was a competitive environment for salaries and just normalize them so if you're an all-star writer who drives more traffic the folks who now run fox buzzfeed vice whatever it is that you decided to unionize will now just point to the pay scale and say yeah you're here four years here's your pay scale and uh you'll move up to this level and then in six years you'll be at this level and the back channel i heard

SPEAKER_44: from everybody was this is great these idiots have now given us a clear path to control their wages and they've actually lost power what's the back channel on yeah i don't want these unions so i think that

SPEAKER_37: like i don't actually i'm not i don't think the unions are the only factor but basically what you're

SPEAKER_16: pointing to is this huge like tension what in between in in these kind of industrial era journalism organizations whether they're unionized or not between what is basically this very like a nice egalitarian newsroom culture that people like me came up in and really loved like it was actually you don't you don't want to be in a situation where you have stars swaggering around treating everybody else like nobody likes that and so that is part of the culture and then another part of the culture is that you know always and increasingly um the readers connect more to some journalists than others and some work harder but some don't work hard and they say they do really well but for whatever you know but some create generate more value than others and you have these organizations that are used to operating with the you know jill abramson once said of the new york times some some star reporter wanted to raise and she said well look the new york times is always the prettiest girl at the dance like ultimately the brand matters more than the individual got it and we're in an era when individual voices matter a lot and it puts a lot of pressure on these brands correct

SPEAKER_46: in that regard i think i think from i think if you were the new york times maybe that's true but it

SPEAKER_93: is you know but maggie heberman is a pretty great reporter and a pretty big brand and how and you know by the way the union contract it's at the minimum they can pay it does not set the ceiling so it makes

SPEAKER_16: life more expensive for them it doesn't actually tell them they can't competitively pay their stars but it makes it it does it is a big challenge for these companies where like in some very cold-blooded sense the value is being generated by a diminishing number of individuals

SPEAKER_205: it's also hilarious like there's perception i think people have is like the union's going to protect

SPEAKER_08: them and these unions like you watch them tweet and they're like um we are flabbergasted by the layoffs today on buzzfeed news and it's like you have no power union it is an at will employment uh environment

SPEAKER_06: in the united states at any time the ceo god king or queen can just take a sword and decapitate whoever they like welcome to capitalism in america and by the way the star journalist can leave and start a sub stack or a podcast and you can't stop kara swisher from doing that you cannot stop if there's

SPEAKER_77: anything we can agree on it is that you cannot stop kara swisher from doing anything pretty hilarious

SPEAKER_207: she hates me now i used to be friends and now she hates me it's ever since all in it's like she like

SPEAKER_44: just unfollowed me and that's just pretty sad for me i've been friends with her for 20 well it wasn't like the intent i mean to blow past every other business and tech podcast in the world i'm gonna

SPEAKER_213: stay out of this one um the no i mean it is problematic i think if it wasn't as successful it would be easier because people are like oh it's just like four guys talking but when you become a

SPEAKER_44: top 10 or top 20 podcasts i think the jealousy comes out and people are like that that's that's

SPEAKER_15: frankly how i feel about you jason really no i mean i am i was like i don't think so no

SPEAKER_193: i mean what what does semaphore have to do with each other unfortunately i don't have a podcast

SPEAKER_116: so i don't have to be jealous of you i think it's a crazy thing for anybody to think that's why i'm always like what what's the knives out for i don't get it but yeah but it's just to go back to the labor

SPEAKER_46: thing because like go back to labor you know i just think like it was this moment when a lot of people

SPEAKER_16: in america not just did journalism organizations felt really unsettled and were looking for ways to feel more control over their lives and so unionizing was a way to do it it does protect you on the downside right like it means that you get more severance you have some predictability when you're getting laid off that's fairly yeah you know that's that's i'm forgetting the phrase here but that's

SPEAKER_08: you know better to have a great job yeah i think these unions will it's rearranging the deck chairs on

SPEAKER_16: the titanic like it doesn't ultimately change the these structure these media businesses that are struggling no it's actually the new york times union right now is like in where you want to be when you're a union which is a pretty profitable country company they think executives are getting too high a share of the profits the union would like more share of the profits that's like a nice place to be as a union you're fighting over the profits listen when you're a fund manager like me you're

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SPEAKER_08: let's talk about the clash between uh tech or just business and journalism today and just how adversarial it's gotten i'm curious your take on you know subjects now saying we'll just screw it i'll go direct to my audience i don't need to be interpreted through journalists i don't need to hire a pr firm i'm just gonna go direct and these journalists know 10 20 of the story and i can just tell my side of it

SPEAKER_44: and give whatever percentage i want uh and then maybe add in a little bit about access journalism

SPEAKER_77: and how that's changes thing yeah i mean i've thought about this a lot and i kind of i mean i

SPEAKER_16: kind of hate it like i think that i think that i mean there's sort of an obvious history here of like of journalism and journalists covering kind of the first wave of tech sometimes in a very promotional way ultimately being kind of embarrassed and feeling like they'd overdone it and and and

SPEAKER_93: for a variety of reasons to me the main one being donald trump's election turning incredibly adversarial

SPEAKER_16: i think that tech founders for reasonable marketing reasons often like to portray themselves when they get really successful as basically like political figures philosophical figures um you know men of men and women of like great principle where like fundamentally they're mostly entrepreneurs like or at least at their root their entrepreneurs trying to build businesses and i think to some degree the media took them at their word and started covering them basically as political actors and like interpreting decisions as primarily like does this help you know did facebook make this algorithm change to help republicans and it's something like genuinely misunderstood no they did it because they were getting 3.3 seconds of engagement they're trying to get 3.5 seconds of engagement like somebody like i think there was a re there's a real misunderstanding and mistranslation and then i do think like the sort of how did we get trump produced a wave of journalism that looked for culprits and

SPEAKER_230: nothing i mean by the way i think facebook screwed a lot of stuff up and like a lot of those stories

SPEAKER_37: were really good other stories like iconic stories like cambridge analytica in particular yeah were

SPEAKER_16: really like fundamentally not correct and like that didn't really affect the election and got and went everywhere and then i think founders and tech people both felt you know both rightly and sometimes wrongly like sometimes these bad things and got caught felt really really burned and misunderstood developed their own kind of counter ideology explaining why journalists do what journalists do that was like from my point of view like at least equally deranged and like now we're in this

SPEAKER_08: place where like people are speaking totally different languages i do too and um i think your take is exactly correct i think trump broke a lot of people's brains uh and it made people feel disempowered and people felt like maybe i think that's where advocacy journalism really started to click in which is we need to fight against this force of evil which i do think trump is an evil figure and a horrible human being um but i think that's when people felt like uh like the journalists are not covering this

SPEAKER_165: down the middle or you know reasonably down the middle um and the stuff we were talking about before

SPEAKER_93: i don't think it's like people were like counting the clicks but so one thing that social media really

SPEAKER_16: encouraged was you have a huge audience that's just waiting for the next installment of a story that they want to hear and there was this really real reward in telling narratives that particularly about donald trump or about whoever the designated bad guys were that made them seem worse and like you don't need to make you don't need to feed the narrative to make donald trump seem quite bad but but a lot of the stories around trump and russia like it just became this thing where every piece of evidence became more proof and it did not wind up adding up to all that much so that added up

SPEAKER_46: something i mean one of the depressing things at buzzfeed that like one of the best stories we ever

SPEAKER_16: did that totally bombed for traffic was soon after the cambridge analytica story i'd gotten this early version of it from the swiss media and i assigned a um great investigative reporter kendall tiger to look into it she came back and wrote me a memo that was just like there's literally nothing here this is nonsense these are con artists who were claiming to have affected the election and people believe them that it's not true and i was like awesome publish the memo that's a great story we published the story and no one read it no one wanted to hear it it didn't fit the narrative right and the narrative

SPEAKER_08: you know both sides seem to have a narrative and let's be honest if you pick a side like the new york times went further left fox obviously murdoch only cares about bottom line so he went full right and kind of started the trend pick a side you get paid subscribers and in fact the washington post and

SPEAKER_06: the new york times did marketing that was like if you want us to do more investigations like this i

SPEAKER_15: don't know if you saw those ads yeah democracy dies in the dark there was the right and it's not again i

SPEAKER_16: don't think it's like they're not like having meetings saying let's make stuff up about donald trump and they are trying to play it straight but the poll of subscriptions is certainly toward

SPEAKER_241: telling people when they want to hear i mean the poll media is often that tell me about your new

SPEAKER_08: company and what your goals were and setting it up what's the origin story of semaphore and and

SPEAKER_62: is this like you watch jonah do this you watch me do it you watch nick do it you watch bank off

SPEAKER_246: dude and i thought wow what a great business this is the highest great business for me to

SPEAKER_247: bang my head against the world or are you just addicted to media like me it seems like it's like not much work and like no money so yeah easy money sure just like creating sas software yeah no

SPEAKER_88: i mean i guess it's the worst business in the world so why would you do it it's a tough business

SPEAKER_15: and i've been you know i was at politico and we started started some blogs when you were starting

SPEAKER_16: blogs i've been doing it a while the one thing you you i mean it's also it's a slow moving business where the institutions move slow but the audience moves fast and so in these moments when things are changing a lot and i had left buzzfeed really mostly just because i was burned out and gone to the times had kind of a front row seat to everything that was happening as the media columnist there for a couple years and you can just feel again like how much things are changing like the whole social web is sort of going away it's being replaced by who knows what like right now the joint report is like again really influential which is entertaining and wild weird yeah and the one thing is my partner justin smith had been the ceo of bloomberg ceo of the atlantic and one thing that i think i have eventually learned is that there isn't some like one neat trick to make news a great business but like really smart experienced business operators who execute really well you know are the kind of people you want to be in business with and so and i don't see myself as a business guy and i think whatever flirtation i had with that at buzzfeed like was not the best data um and so yeah so so i

SPEAKER_37: think we're trying to like the i would say the two big things that drive because if you ask people like

SPEAKER_16: are you happy with the news you're getting the answer is mostly no i think the things that drive people most insane or that they feel totally overwhelmed but just like the sheer amount of incoming and then simultaneously don't really know who they can trust and aren't turning to like faceless institutions they're looking for individual journalists who know what they're talking about who will tell them deliver them facts and also try maybe read a lot of what else is out there and put it into one place for them and so our model is to sort of build around like liz hoffman a great finance reporter one of the moves was really the best wall street reporter at the wall street journal brother and read albergatti who broke the lance armstrong story in his day covering ai primarily out there and you know these are experts on the subject who can break news and also can tell you what they think but might be wrong about what they think and they're going to include other voices and other points of view that's the basic model um and these are and we also think there's a big global opportunity for this these are sort of like totally global issues and the best stories covid social media the rise of the far right are global stories so we launched to the u.s

SPEAKER_40: and in sub-saharan africa obviously well that is peculiar as a second market so explain

SPEAKER_16: you know the us is obviously the main investments i think like 60 of all revenue in the news business in the world is in the us but i think we sort of thought about yeah making sure that we were plugged into the global stories at birth and sub-saharan africa particularly it's like it's the fastest

SPEAKER_77: growing demographically fastest growing economies and really kind of wide open in some ways as a

SPEAKER_62: medium i say it is wide open that would be the reason to choose it you know when we did a gadget publication people were like there's not enough news about gadgets yeah oh my god yeah we'll fix

SPEAKER_260: that i know it's really hard to remember that hero right there's not enough news about gadgets

SPEAKER_23: we're like yeah that's okay because we can do eight stories about the iphone upgrade uh you know peter

SPEAKER_62: rojas will figure out a way to break ipod i believe it was well yes i mean man the stories i could tell you about in gadget fighting with motorola and steve jobs i mean it's not a lot it was crazy i don't

SPEAKER_08: heard that name in a while yeah uh let's talk about news media like uh broadcast tv uh tucker colson got fired don lemon got fired i guess that was kind of coincidental but uh what is the theme here of these talking heads and broadcast media versus say podcasting where subjects are going direct pre-prara has an incredible podcast i pay for a cafe insider and then he does stay tuned with pre he's also like comments on cnn but i get two hours of pre a week i'm good um i like to go direct and hear from the the sources that have publications i find all this like msnbc rachel maddow tucker it's like

SPEAKER_44: all nonsense and screaming and just dumb uh but what's going on there because it does seem like cnn is trying to pull itself to the middle and then fox seems like it's at a crossroads and this 800 million dollar settlement what how do you interpret each of those specific news channels fox and cnn

SPEAKER_35: so there's lots of very like specific ticky tacky internal politics at play but the biggest picture

SPEAKER_16: is that the same stuff that i think we were talking about before this sort of era where what seemed to work was the loudest shouting or the most intense pandering or you know it's kind of over and i think you know advertisers hate it and i think that's probably weighing on fox in particular as well as on cnn um but also but also explain that a little bit unpack i mean you know tucker if you if you watch tucker carlson you were getting only direct to consumer advertisements for pillows because because brand advertisers just couldn't felt like they couldn't be associated with it want to be

SPEAKER_73: uh doing a commercial in between some discussion about trans rights and january 6th and whatever

SPEAKER_177: bitterness because they don't want to lose half the audience which race has higher iqs

SPEAKER_16: yeah yeah like bell curve right stuff that was way and carlson was really unusual and that he was taking this fox audience and sort of leading them out into more fringy stuff most of fox is republican people telling the republicans what republicans should think and talking and caring about whether republicans win elections by the way which murdoch cares about however i don't think really cared about that like he was off heading some other place to the far right and and yeah and i think in a way this is in both cases kind of big corporate media like pulling back toward the center whatever

SPEAKER_24: that is but the center is driven because of advertising so if you want to understand the media business you must understand incentives incentives matter the incentives of subscriptions

SPEAKER_44: are uh one category and the incentives of advertising are a couple different categories if you go too far

SPEAKER_06: to get a lot if you go far and you get a big audience you can get great advertising until you break it

Chamath Palihapitiya: because you did stunt journalism or stunt opinion that's too edgy and then you lose the advertisers you

SPEAKER_16: know or great truth that they can't handle right it's not so you know like if you break big investigations that are also too edgy that can freak out the advertisers it's complicated and cable is super weird because most i mean their most stable revenue stream are these affiliate fees which are basically subscription yeah that come from the the cable carriers so it's a yeah it's i mean it but it is i mean it feels like it's all part of the same trend and i agree with you toward base i mean one of the really interesting things about the podcast market is saw some data yesterday i think the biggest voice in audio is joe rogan and among people who say they have a favorite podcaster which is a subset of podcast listeners five percent he's their favorite and that's a very splintered market yeah you think about radio had howard stern you think about tv they're much more consolidated and i think it is a where people are tired of this huge wide open space where everybody's screaming at everybody else and looking for voices that they feel like they connect with and can trust but yeah probably at a

SPEAKER_62: smaller scale well it is like i think it's a mid-tail if you look at the long tail concept i think it's

SPEAKER_08: the mid-tail that is emerging as super viable so yeah you know back in the day you listen to rush howard stern or don imus if you were in new york or like maybe z morning zoo whatever well you know now it's like you open up your podcasting app and you go to health and wellness in the top 200 are all viable continuously published reasonable pockets you go to finance or tech you know like there's a bunch of really reasonable great tech podcasts that all get 10 000 to 250 000 listeners each week

SPEAKER_06: and you can have a sustainable mid-tail in fact semaphore is a mid-tail company right like you're not

SPEAKER_44: displacing the wall street journal nor are you displacing an individual subset in our dreams but

SPEAKER_15: uh yeah no not right now and right and we know and i think that like we're trying to find people who really love what we're doing connect to and it's not going to be everybody in the world for sure

SPEAKER_77: and i think people are tired of sharing twitter everyone is tired slightly tired of sharing these

SPEAKER_44: huge public spaces with everyone else in the world it is definitely collapsed upon itself i believe um is like you you what makes you successful in media i think if there's a theme to this podcast and our

SPEAKER_213: discussion is like be careful what's made you successful because as you continue to dial it up

SPEAKER_44: it can then crush right the sprints that you have you know uh you know whether it's understanding the facebook click streams for for jonah uh at buzzfeed or vice understanding like what hbo listeners want and doing vice tv and this kind of stuff and then you do too much of it and you got to build a huge staff and just you collapse on your own weight media businesses should be boutique and should be owned by the principles this is the conclusion i've come to after 25 years in the business i will like this

SPEAKER_08: week in startups makes millions of dollars a year i'm never selling it to anybody and i'm not trying to make i'm not trying to have it make tens of millions all would make zero dollars but it helps me raise

SPEAKER_44: venture funds and gives me a incredible flow of founders who want me to invest in their companies

SPEAKER_08: like that's what media companies do at their best is like stay medium size don't be hyper growth right like that's the i mean look at yourselves you guys raised a ton of money and it blew back on you

SPEAKER_35: well that was a fair a very we're talking about sam bank our mutual friends and bankman free of

SPEAKER_77: gosh yeah um yeah i mean that was obviously an unusual situation what we didn't do that we actually and we did raise i you know i thought a good amount of money but we 25 million or something that's a

SPEAKER_116: report 25 million i mean that's unbelievable i saw the knives come out for that man kara swisher was upset about that a lot of people were upset about you raising that much money but you raised at a moment

SPEAKER_16: in time we we also raised it from we didn't get to take any venture money and i think like we didn't tell anybody that we were going to get them a thousand x return in four years or that that was a plausible path we told them we'd run a good profitable business and we saw a path to being you know really good growing long-term business but not i agree with you not not that kind of explosive idea you know sort of tech company basically tech company model where you can scale without more people

SPEAKER_31: the media business does not scale uh linearly it scales in a linear fashion you can be more efficient

SPEAKER_37: there is a lot you can do but it's not it's not facebook it's it's not facebook well let's put a pin

SPEAKER_08: in the uh sam bankman free thing yes you put 10 million in and that was a big portion of your cash

SPEAKER_44: yeah i guess you have to give that money back if the courts tell you to and i think you've been pretty upfront and transparent transparent about that any lessons there or is it just bad luck i

SPEAKER_159: mean you get a group of investors and yeah i think the lesson is you don't take you don't raise from

SPEAKER_16: one you don't you know take that much high i guess not that i've planted it i'm sort of a career startup guy or somebody you should take startup i um lessons from particularly but like it did seem in retrospect unwise to take that high share from one guy and that we obviously just scrambled 40 of your

SPEAKER_62: raise came from one person but you know i i know how these conversations go when i raise money for weblogs inc mark you don't say no right well i mean you're raising money you're not inclined to

SPEAKER_73: yeah yeah but mark cuban put in a hundred then he has to put in two hundred thousand then he has

SPEAKER_62: to put three hundred thousand and that's how we seeded it and he was excited and we had one investor you know he owned five percent of the company and he did great you know we returned that came out

SPEAKER_315: great for everybody and yeah great for everybody but you know like i saw it happen i was like

SPEAKER_08: if sequoia and tiger global and all these other major players don't know that sam bankman freed is running a fraud allegedly right or apparently depend pick the word you choose audience allegedly

SPEAKER_31: obviously you pick any number of words i know how to phrase this right and get sued myself but

SPEAKER_08: um i just say that's a bad beat you get an investor you know like and they turn out to

SPEAKER_165: be a criminalist that's not your fault but it is definitely that definitely impacts your plans right

SPEAKER_62: feels a little bit like getting struck by lightning yeah well you you i guess actually if the courts asked you to give what remains of the money back great but if you've deployed it then they just get

SPEAKER_320: equity in your company so they could just have an equity you'd have the core i think i i credit

SPEAKER_149: is going to be equity yeah yeah we i think we've said what we were planning to give the cash back

SPEAKER_37: yeah um that's what we've said yeah but i think the yeah i mean it's the ives and that obvious move

SPEAKER_16: i would say we were fortunate that we had a pretty strong launch and so that put us in a position to to replace them i think it would have been you could imagine a situation in which we stumbled out out of the gate and oh you found people to invest in that and then and then suddenly you know had

SPEAKER_149: that this sort of could have been a really bad situation how many people you got working at

SPEAKER_129: some before um about 50. 50 is a big number whoa it is a big that's a million dollars a month in burn

SPEAKER_93: that's a big number you know the thing that's totally different about this business from other

SPEAKER_16: i mean it's like a limited interest the news business is not like the sexiest topic in the world but at politico which was very successful in the end at buzzfeed news which really you know was not in both cases we had to have a theory about what people wanted to read and we were journalists or content people but not experienced news business people it did not not only did we not launch with real with a lot of revenue we didn't even launch with like a strong theory of what the business would be and i think part of the reason we launched with a large hour people is like half those people are on the business side and we're launching with a lot of revenue and servicing the revenue and you know justin is one of the great media business operators hired like the best revenue person from the new york times advertising and events right now got it and subscriptions or not yet i think we just

SPEAKER_31: didn't want to bite off more than we could chew we will uh events is an okay business yeah you can make some yeah i did events my whole career and they're fun loving them yeah they're fun people

SPEAKER_16: really like it's it's a funny moment i think i think it's a sort of covid bounce back thing we've been

SPEAKER_330: like the events have been great for us i mean we did the all-in summer last year and it was just like

SPEAKER_116: no one like to show up yeah i mean it was crazy how quickly we sold out seventy five hundred dollar

SPEAKER_331: tickets like boom sold out i mean think millions of dollars in revenue million you know like just

SPEAKER_62: crazy um all right listen congratulations on the book i can't wait to read it i get a mention in there hopefully it's not like too spicy or you don't you know i just realized i think it no no elbow but i

SPEAKER_93: do think it may partly be in the context of one of your great investments in a company called ratter

SPEAKER_336: do you remember that one yes i did yeah yeah yeah yeah this is before all the stuff came out

SPEAKER_37: about it oh yeah um no it was sort of it was it was when it still seemed like the wind was at the back of that i thought it was a very interesting idea he had which was brilliant talented guy yeah and

SPEAKER_44: this is before all the stuff had come out um in his famous testimony yeah and i was like ratter's like a really interesting idea he wants to do investigative journalism and he's going to put out like uh he had a very great concept for putting out bounties for stories not bounties as in like

SPEAKER_213: steel documents bounties that would be illegal but who would like here's a list of stories that we want to cover would and they would just email it so instead of having a staff he would just email his

SPEAKER_44: stringers and say here's four stories we're curating anybody want to do them for a thousand dollars

SPEAKER_118: and yeah i thought it was like i had a really good idea there me and mark cuban had put a little bit in not a lot i think i put 250 into it or something from one of my funds and yep you lose whatever

SPEAKER_44: what happens with nate silver he's super talented yeah well i mean you know he managed to talk about

SPEAKER_46: kind of great media negotiations he managed to he basically was hired by abc and which acquired his

SPEAKER_16: company but also merely licensed his models which are the heart of 538 and so i think he'll likely license them to somebody else and you know keep gambling keep playing poker he plays poker yeah

SPEAKER_343: play poker with him he's really a good poker player yeah uh listen continued success i think

SPEAKER_08: we did a good job in our hour together anything anything we didn't cover that you uh wanted to

SPEAKER_15: cover no i'm feeling good just so just appreciate i appreciate you taking a look at the book and uh

SPEAKER_344: yeah yeah yeah i can't wait to read it i lived it so you do you do the audio book yourself you know i

SPEAKER_77: read the first page in the last page but i just couldn't face reading all my words like i just thought

SPEAKER_302: i would just hate myself too much uh big mistake you gotta read it yourself everybody in the age of podcasting wants the principles to read their book brutal who is the publisher penguin press okay yeah

SPEAKER_31: penguin that's good uh a lot of the publishers don't want the um authors to read because they think

SPEAKER_351: they're not going to professional actors could read better yeah it was more just my insecurity

SPEAKER_44: it it's it's not that hard i did mine and you just have to learn how to

SPEAKER_337: do when you read it like sentences that you were like i hate this sentence i can't believe i wrote

Chamath Palihapitiya: it you start basically editing in the room and they're like you can't change that that i was i

SPEAKER_16: know that i just knew i would lose my mind and that's what i did lose my mind to a certain extent

SPEAKER_08: but what you have to do is you because of um this uh syncing that amazon does between audiobooks and ebooks now where you if you buy both when you're in your kindle it highlights the word

SPEAKER_213: uh i'd be like so if you're talking to your vc and they'd be like uh venture talking to your venture capitalist and be like okay if you talk to your vcs and like uh talking to your venture capitalists and it's like same thing vc venture capitalists like no you have to say venture

SPEAKER_44: capitalists because that's what it says here with the text is it syncing with the text and so it's a bit of a rigmarole uh but continued success everybody buy the book and we'll see you all next time in this week startups bye bye thanks so much jason