It's about ethics in journalism, with Ben Smith

Introduction to the show

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1:32Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neal I. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semaphore. Everywhere you go, people say they don't trust the media, and yet they've never consumed more of it. Audiences have moved on from legacy names in favor of substacks and podcasts and TikTok news influencers that seem to be everywhere in our feeds. Why would anyone want to start a new global news organization in the middle of all that, when even once-storied brands like CBS News can't seem to figure it out? Well, that's what Ben did four years ago.

2:04He's the guy who ran BuzzFeed News at the height of the Facebook traffic boom. He even wrote a book about it called Traffic, which he discussed with me here on Decoder back in 2023. That was around the time he'd co-founded Semaphore, which launched with the stated goal of reaching 200 million college-educated readers. You're going to hear Ben say that since then, Semaphore has evolved into what he calls an anti-scale company. It still doesn't have a website paywall, but it makes about half its money in the convening business. That's what media types have taken to calling events lately. And Semaphore throws some big events. They actually have a new one called Silicon Valley in the World,

2:36which will feature some of the biggest names in tech and AI. That's part of the events business, having the people on that you cover. So I wanted to know how that all works and what it feels like to navigate the ethical conflicts that seem to be everywhere in media right now. How Semaphore's newsroom is approaching AI, the ethics and the optics of putting the people you cover on your conference advisory boards, and whether independence is something an audience still even wants to pay for. Ben and I talk about these things a lot, usually over beers, and I think you'll be able to tell we really enjoy getting into the weeds of all this together. I hope you enjoyed this conversation.

3:07Please subscribe to our YouTube channel to get new episodes every Monday and Thursday. All right, Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semaphore. Here we go.

Building an anti-scale media company

3:26Ben Smith, you're the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semaphore. Welcome back to Decoder. It is really nice to be back. I am excited to talk to you. You were on the show three years ago, just as Semaphore was launching. It was right as BuzzFeed News, which you founded and ran for a long time, was shutting down. I keep talking to media CEOs about what is going to happen. It feels like you have figured something out at Semaphore. How are things going over there? You know, things are going incredibly well, and I'd like knock on wood as I say that. But I do think that – I don't know if we – I mean, I think we figured something out.

3:57I think there are a lot of different things to figure out, and we're in this unbelievably strange and unstable moment in media. But I do think we figured out a model that is, you know, quality journalism built around great journalists paired with really large-scale convening that, you know, is building both great journalism and a really good business, a profitable business, which is something that is, to me, as a former BuzzFeed executive, novel. Yeah. A profitable digital media business is in short supply these days. It's funny. I was looking over our conversation from three years ago. You had just published your book, Traffic, which was basically about what I would call

4:30the millennial digital media moment and everyone chasing massive scale, right? The platforms are going to deliver tons of traffic to us, and then we'll collect pennies and we'll all get rich. This was a pretty common thesis. It feels like you're saying you've turned away from that. You've learned the lesson of that time. Yeah. Our chief revenue officer, Rachel Oppenheim, likes to joke that my next book will be called No Traffic. But, yeah, I mean, I think we are really building kind of an anti-scale business. And I think, in a way, the luxury of starting in that moment, in the rubble of the traffic apocalypse was that that was obviously not the path to success.

5:03And we had to think a lot about, like, targeting a very specific audience. I also, I think the thing that I have kind of come to realize, as when, in all these conversations I listen to your show, we have a show about media that we yap about this on, you know, what's the future of media? Is it live? We were just talking about it. Who knows? But I think in journalism, I have a lot of conviction that great stories aren't going anywhere. The need for kind of really high quality insight isn't going anywhere. Great reporters aren't going anywhere. What surface this all lives on? Up for grabs. And you can't be too ideological about that.

5:34You say surface. I always say distribution. Yeah. And a theme on Decoder that we come back to over and over again is your distribution shapes what you make. It's just inevitable. The medium is the message. And to borrow that framing, if surfaces, if distribution are up for grabs, what are you holding on to? So I think I actually don't buy that thesis, or at least I'm resisting that thesis because I think the audience shapes should – the pull of distribution is incredibly powerful. The core thesis of BuzzFeed was we cracked the distribution and built for the distribution. And maybe – so maybe I'm overreacting a little to that.

6:07But I mean, we definitely think all the time about we want to reach political leaders. We want to reach business leaders. We want to reach nonprofit leaders. We want to reach people making decisions. We want to reach them in person. We reach them a lot in email. We reach them on the web. We reach them in video. But like we're thinking about that same audience across media. And in fact, I think video is particularly interesting because the pull of video is – videos replace the web in terms of the place you can get massive scale. And then conversely where there's a pull of massive scale to create – you know, to basically – the biggest pull is just to be hyperpolarizing and find ways to create

6:38polarizing confrontation. That's how you go viral or one of the best ways. And I guess we're really trying hard to build the discipline to resist that pull of distribution. We're already deep into the weeds. I hope the listeners can tell. Ben and I like talking to each other about these things. Please visit Semaphore.com. I'm excited to play some clips for you. So I'm glad that you said you were reacting to BuzzFeed. A few months ago, we had Jonah Peretti on the show. Yeah. Right after he had sold BuzzFeed to Byron Allen and the Weather Channel, a lot going on there.

7:10In full disclosure to the audience, I literally had a beer with you just before – I remember. I sat down with Jonah. I did not ask the questions you told me to ask. But he said – Were they about running? It was about running. You asked me to ask about it. That's another show. I didn't do it.

Looking back at the traffic era

7:24I was quickly in the weeds of Jonah as well. And I put to him what I think of as the original sin of digital media, which is that I think Jonah thought he could go so viral so consistently that he could crack distribution that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook would pay him money. And I'm going to play you what he said to me in response to that. And I just want to get your reaction to it. Yeah. So, I mean, first, just as a factual matter, we did get paid millions of dollars by Mark Zuckerberg. So, the prediction that they would pay for content was accurate.

7:56It just was short-lived. So, we got paid for that exploding watermelon. Okay. So, he said that to me and I was like, yeah. That was a good day in the office. It was a great day in the office, I'm guessing. But everyone knew that he wasn't going to pay forever. So, I think that there's a – I agree with Jonah on this. I think that looking back, we all say the social platforms were obviously going to always be dependent on UGC and never pay for anything. And these media companies building on social platforms never made any sense. And these investors who – and these investors, it's worth remembering, their experience had been shaped by cable, which was a different distribution platform in which companies like Viacom, ESPN, CNN, MTV, whatever, had built huge businesses on the back of this new distribution.

8:37So, they were like, oh, here's another new distribution. We're going to build big businesses on the back of it.

8:42I think we now look back and say it was inevitable that Facebook would never pay for content. But I guess – but I think it wasn't. I think it was choices made by Facebook executives at various times that experimented with different things. I don't think that if you look at – if you are the person in charge of the success of the blue Facebook app, do you think, oh, it was a great decision to continually rely on low-quality, user-generated content? Like, no, that thing is dying, obviously. They should have found a different path. It was a mistake. So, Jonah made this argument to me as well.

9:13And this is the other – I mean, obviously, I'm brainwashed by Jonah. I worked with him a long time. No, I'm just curious. Like, you got – your paths have diverged. Yeah. And you are building a very different business. Yes. And I'm just curious. This is the other clip from Jonah that I want to play for you. It is an argument that Facebook made a mistake. Here's that clip. I actually believe that it was a mistake for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and, you know, to not continue with the news tab, to not continue to pay professional content creators. You know, these platforms have way, you know, have tons of resources and could have, you know, spent a couple billion dollars a year on that.

9:50That sustained a vibrant media ecosystem, really owned media in a way that, you know, would have been incredibly powerful for them and given them charisma and relevance and authority that they just don't have today. Oh, I miss Jonah. Charisma. The claim there is if Mark Zuckerberg had continued to fund BuzzFeed, he would have more charisma. That the Facebook blue app would be more successful had they done different things? Like, that's pretty obvious. I mean, you can argue out which things.

10:22But I think – yeah. I mean, I basically think that's true. Okay. And if you look at, like, would you rather be Netflix or would you rather be the blue Facebook app? You'd rather be Netflix, right? Well, Netflix famously doesn't invest in news either. Netflix pays a lot for content. They pay a lot for content, but they don't invest in news. Oh, news is – news, I agree. News is a complicated business. We're in a separate question. But they pay for a lot of professional content. I mean, I think YouTube is obviously the big and most interesting story here because I think YouTube really has found a way for individuals to build businesses on top of it in a really impressive way.

10:54Occasional news creators like Johnny Harris, but almost the exception that proves the rule. But a lot of – you know, we just had Kareem Rama on our show, like, building real businesses, real careers on top of YouTube, paying producers, increasing the kind of moving up market. I guess the thing that I give Neil Mohan, the YouTube CEO, a hard time about is I do think YouTube, almost with the idea of the creator and the development of the word creator, built a system in which media companies, middlemen, can't really survive. There was a company called Maker Studios that Disney bought for half a billion dollars.

11:26It was supposed to be a kind of middleman between YouTube and creators, kind of to give – and that's one way, to give a group of media people leverage against the platform. And YouTube has designed a system in which it is – it's sort of like Uber. It deals with atomized individuals, not with collectives who have any kind of power. And that could be – there are all sorts of different collectives. It's a media company is one kind. And I think YouTube has probably to their own benefit, just certainly to the detriment of the media industry, built a system where it's built for individuals, not for – and no one has any leverage except for YouTube.

12:01This is kind of the big question I'm getting at. You're building a new kind of business. You're profitable. You're saying you're anti-scale. You're no more chasing traffic. I mean, I'm still personally, obviously, looking at the traffic. Well, who doesn't? It's addictive in its way. If you were raised in the swamp, you will always be a creature in the swamp. But I look at some of the other big success stories of our time. TBPN is a big success story of our time. These are not huge numbers they're driving. They're driving massive influence, and they're charging high rates to advertisers that are integrated into their content.

12:31And now they're owned by OpenAI, who they cover on their show. You look at big YouTubers. Kareem Rahman is a great example. I saw him speak in and around Cannes. And he was very much like, yeah, I make advertising for our partners. I make videos. The advertising is the thing that I make. It's the revenue. Somewhere in there is a big tension for the news, for media companies, where we can't go, we shouldn't probably make the advertising for the companies we cover. But that is actually how you monetize all these platforms at scale. And I just, I haven't found anyone who saw that.

13:03I'm curious if you've taken runs at it. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I think in the entertainment business, which Kareem is in, that's always how it's been. You know, James Bond is wearing whatever kind of watch he's wearing. Although, God, the fact that I don't remember is a real fail of marketing. But, you know, and that's, and so I think there's not that inherent tension in the entertainment business, like that you're going to sell out by doing a product placement or cutting or appearing in an advertisement, where news, it really is. And you need to be careful. I mean, again, I think the answer to that is actually audience. Like the traditional advertising business is that you are reaching an audience who the advertiser values.

13:37I think for the scaled advertising business, Google and Meta just built the best, and TikTok increasingly built the best mousetraps. And it's impossible for publishers to compete on scale. I think if you're reaching people in a very focused way in various particular environments, in person, in email, in video, that's a case you can really credibly make to advertisers. And so we've built a really big advertising and a related convening business that way. And I think that's one answer. It's not, you know, it's not the only answer, but it is one.

The convening and events business

14:06Is it, when you say convening business, that's your events business? And when I come to the relationship. Max Taney always gives me a hard time about the word convening. Everyone loves the word convening. It's good. You've gotten pilled by the revenue people because they love to say it. Everyone else is like, it's parties? We're going to come to it because there's a relationship between needing to get everyone in the room and then covering them. Yeah, for sure. Which I personally find fascinating. I mean, it's booking. Yeah. You had to not insult me for weeks to get me here. Or did I neg you every single day until you showed up? Tell me about the revenue split between those things.

14:36Are you mostly making money on journalism? Are you mostly making money in events? Which is higher? It's just about 50-50. Yeah. And is there a pull in either direction or are you trying to grow them both the same way? I mean, I think we're a startup. We're opportunistic. I think the convening business grew a lot faster. My partner, Justin Smith, has been building businesses like that. He was CEO of The Atlantic and of Bloomberg. And so it's much more his experience than mine. But he came in with this thesis, which I bought into that basically convening was the business that you could stand up fastest and make profitable fastest that was a journalism business.

15:15And so we launched really hard into that space because it takes longer to build a digital advertising business because you've got to build that digital audience. And so we launched with that. And then it's just taken off in a way we didn't really – at least I didn't see – I didn't imagine that it would be – you know, that we'd be really, like, competing with Davos this soon. Yeah, I want to come back to that too.

Subscriptions and global reach

15:32When you launched, I remember part of the plan was to go to subscriptions, right? You were going to build this elite audience. You were going to charge them lots of money. It was in there in the very beginning. Was that part of the plan? It was – early on it was part of the plan. Startups, yeah. You also were like, no, we barely need a website. It's all going to be newsletters. Oh, we did talk about that. You were one of those website people. To this day. The last. The last website on earth. That's theverge.com. That all changed for reasons that things change with startups, but the media industry and distribution changed around it.

16:03Was there a moment where you said, oh, we can keep it free? Because you are one of the last free websites. In my memory, we always thought at some point we'll do subscriptions, but I think my experience is you just cannot be ideological about revenue. Like, it's hard enough to build a business in news without getting all hung up on the sort of values of the different revenue streams. Because, you know, ad-free publishers – I mean, advertising-based publishers will tell you that democracy can only survive in a world where there aren't paywalls. Subscription publishers will tell you that advertising is corrupting.

16:34I mean, like – and at some point you just realize everyone's just talking their book. And that sometimes they're, you know, they're already in a tough business and they're talking themselves out of incremental opportunities and really successful media companies. If you look at Disney or the New York Times, like, what business are they in? Well, they're actually in a bunch of different businesses. They're managing them all really carefully. I think our view is that if at some point it makes sense to do subscriptions, we'll totally do them. But we don't really see it as sort of an ideological choice. And just when you're starting a company, you just can't do that many things at the same time. And I got mocked for this at some point. But we are insanely ambitious about our long-term growth.

17:05And we really are trying to build, over decades, a huge global company. And subscriptions, you know, are a tradeoff that caps your growth in some ways. And so that's something we think about too. But that said, we're really trying to build a good business. And if subscriptions are a part of that, I think at some point we'll certainly be a part of that. You launched with a lot of ambition. I mean, you're the first news organization of your kind really to say, we're going to cover Africa a lot. Yeah. Right? We're going to cover the Gulf a lot in various ways. That ambition was these are undercover, right? We're going to provide new information that you're not necessarily getting from other places.

17:38We'll build out that audience and then we'll monetize them in some specific way. Has that thesis proved out? Yes. And I would say this was, you know, in some of, I think when we launched, this was the thing that I think was most confusing to people. That Justin and I had worked in global news and had these real ambitions for it. But also we're very careful about sequencing. So when we launched, we were in the U.S., particularly in Washington, on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Africa. And I remember it would be like me, Justin, and our great Africa editor, Yinka Adegoke, doing an interview. And it would be like, oh, yeah, like we're America and he's Africa.

18:08And people are like, what are you talking about? Like, it doesn't make any sense. But I think we saw there was an opportunity, you know, to be very, very competitive very quickly in sub-Saharan Africa. You know, particularly Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa with great journalists led by Yinka and his colleague Alexis. And just sort of figure out that model. We're now in the Gulf. We're going to launch in Europe and Asia. And those are really growing businesses. And they're part of a network. We definitely see it less as a kind of colonial model hub and spoke.

18:39Like, they're not reporting back to New York for what people in New York care about. We're trying to build a kind of network of audiences in each of these places. Is that pulling you in different directions in terms of resourcing? If your audience in Africa grows faster than the audience in the United States, are you going to put more resources there? Yeah. I mean, we're definitely very attentive to, yeah, to what's working. I would say, like, it's just a truth that the U.S. is the biggest media market in the world by far. And I think, you know, some, it depends how you count, but I think, like, more than half of all revenue associated with media in the world is in the U.S. Yeah. That was the pull.

19:09So, actually, the pull is mostly always here. Yeah. And I think we fight against it a bit because we think this is a really good long-term investment. This is ancient history. But when I worked at AOL, of all places, there was a lot of pull to, like, we ran Engadget China. Right. We wanted to be in all these other countries. Yeah. And how we would resource and run those operations against much cheaper advertising revenue. Yeah. Pennies to dollars in some cases. Right. But the audience was there. But the audience was there. Yeah. We had this experience at BuzzFeed. This is part of why I was so excited to do some of what with Justin, because Justin had successfully built businesses in these other markets.

19:41And at BuzzFeed, we'd gone in, built big audiences, seen, like, in Brazil, in the U.K., in Japan, these very intense engagement, people wanting independent journalism of this new digital and independent journalism. And then I remember in the first meeting we were talking about this, Eric Hippo, this very, you know, smart, long-time digital investor, was like, do not do this. You will never make any money and you'll have to shut it all down. We're like, ah, forget it, old timer. You know? And then he was totally correct. We just never figured out how to reliably monetize them. And then even when you could, you'd be like, oh, the Brazilian edition was profitable this year, but bad news, they have currency controls, so you can't – the money stays in Brazil.

20:17And it was like, oh, nobody told us that. So how have you solved for it now? We're pretty careful about keeping the costs low and growing the verticals with local revenue. There's also a lot of value in these huge gatherings that we're building, that they are fundamentally global, whether it's in Silicon Valley or in Washington. And so building these global networks of CEOs, of political leaders kind of feeds that network. So that's been valuable. But we're – I don't know. You know, we're careful as part of it. I mean, that's one thing I learned from BuzzFeed. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the high-flying VC era has produced a generation of very conservative media operators.

20:52Yeah, I think that's right.

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23:31We're back with Semaphore Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith talking about what he thinks makes Semaphore different. The other big innovation I want to talk to you about the beginning of Semaphore, and then I want to start talking about what you're doing now, is the semiform.

The semiform and editorial format

23:43Yes.

The semiform and editorial format

23:44You launched with this way of writing an article. You still use it to this day. I see it all the time. And the thesis was that it would just sort of make it simpler to understand what all the different pieces are. And I always thought that was funny because you were chasing the most elite audience possible. And presumably they could already understand what was going on. Well, that's the problem. They could understand what was going on. And what is going on in a newspaper article is we have like a who, what, when, where, why sentence. Yeah. And then you have another sentence that says the same thing. And then you have a quote that is from an expert but just reflects whatever the reporter thinks, and they've picked the expert with their bias to repeat.

24:20And then you have like an unsupported paragraph of random theories called the nut graph. Yeah. And everything else is just reverse chronological order. And I think particularly the, well, you know, an expert in disinformation says this or an expert in democracy says this. I think like any reader sees, oh, this is what the publication thinks. This is what the journalist thinks. Why don't they just say it rather than do this weird move of filtering your biases through an expert? And particularly a sophisticated audience, like they're in on the joke a bit. And there are two sides to it because one is that the journalist is required to smuggle their opinion or their analysis in and other people's voices.

24:53The other is that really good beat reporters are real experts. And a sophisticated reader actually wants to know what Maggie Haberman thinks to a really high degree. They don't want her to – because the other deal in the newspaper is that you conceal your own analysis and opinion. And I think on both sides of that, the reader is sort of losing out. Like you're both treating them like an idiot because you're smuggling kind of bias and opinion in. And then also you're – particularly this is true of really senior experienced beat reporters. People read Albergatti or Burgess Everett. But like the reader wants to know what they think.

25:25Like tell me what you actually think. And so the summer form is an attempt to separate like here are the facts of the story we can all agree on. Here's the journalist's analysis. By the way, for an analysis to be interesting, there's got to be some chance it can be wrong. Otherwise, it's totally banal. And so then we go out of our way to try to find somebody who disagrees with us to include that too. And I think people like that. It's a bit of humility also. Back in my day, we just called this blogging. I would just write down what I thought all the time. I would say this was influenced by blogging. I know, we're all old bloggers now. It's so embarrassing to explain to people that you used to have a blog. I mean, what do I run to this day?

25:56It's still fundamentally the reporters say what they think. The reason I ask about this is the idea that – Someday you'll be explaining to people you had a podcast. Yeah, it'll be – it'll just be my VR avatar talking to your VR avatar, no legs. It'll be great. The reason I ask about the format in particular, right, is – again, my thesis is that distribution and formats shape each other. Some form was a new format. It was a way to go reach an audience and say, okay, we know you're not stupid. We're going to show you the structure of the story way out loud.

26:26Has it been successful? Has it actually succeeded in attracting an audience? Or is it just the trademark of how you do things now? Yeah, I mean, we hear a lot about it from our audience. I think people really like it. We also do a lot of shorter form stuff, and so that's not always broken out that way. But that kind of value of we're going to be really humble, we're going to be really kind of assertive about what we think, but also very, very open to disagreement, very clear about the difference between effect and analysis. That's really, like, core to our DNA and everything we do, including in the events.

26:57Let me ask you the decoder questions, and I want to just talk about what's going on in this industry now. Because I think you've learned a lot, and it's like four years Semaphore's been going. And those are all the big early bets, and I just want to check in on them.

Newsroom structure and independence

27:08How big is Semaphore now? We've got about 60 journalists, more than 100 employees. And then, so 60 journalists, 100 employees. How is all that structured? I'd say more than 100. It's probably about half journalists, half a commercial team that, you know, ranges from, you know, a revenue team. It includes revenue, includes a great events production team. We do all that stuff in-house. But I think part of the luxury of a startup and part of the challenge in news, you're inside at the moment one or two companies that have cracked this, but there's not a lot of talent on the business side of news for obvious reasons.

27:39Like, it's a terrible business. You go to Harvard Business School, like, you know, 30% of those people go into, like, enterprise sales, and 0.01% go into media just for the obvious reason that they like to make money. They look around for where the money is, and it's not in media. And I think we've been incredibly aggressive about trying to recruit really, really great commercial operators and people on our revenue side. And it's fun to be in a place where, you know, where the wattage on the business side is really, really high. And that's been a real luxury for us. We, but yeah, but we have a more, and then events is a, you know, it's a real,

28:12we have bookers, we have, you know, we have producers, we have people thinking about the vibes and the music. Like, you know, I think we take all that stuff really seriously. Do you have an in-house DJ? Would I call Brigitte an in-house DJ? I think that would be a reasonable thing to say. I think I don't think she would object. When we did the code conference, I was like. She does a lot of other stuff. I spent a lot of time thinking about the Spotify playlist. Yeah, you got to think about that stuff. Actually, that brings me to the other decoder question I ask everybody. You have a lot of decisions to make. You've grown up a lot over the past four years at Semaphore. How do you make decisions? What's your framework?

28:43I think I make decisions personally. Personally, like not as a Semaphore rule, but personally is the question. Either or. I mean, I personally make decisions very, very, very fast at very high volume, but am very attentive to the people around me when they think it's a mistake and quick to reverse them. And I think like, you know, I care a lot about hiring great journalists and having people who I really trust and rarely jam a decision down anybody's throat. I think like I like to, I want to be surrounded by people who are really deep experts in what they're doing,

29:15whether it's managing or building AI tools or reporting. But I think I'm very happy to lose fights. So this is a new kind of business you're describing. You want to make a lot of decisions fast. You're growing a lot of different areas. Every time I see you in person, I bring you a new journalism ethics problem. This is a real recurring theme in our relationships is I'm always struggling to be pure of heart. And well, you come from the most corrupt corner of journalism, which is gadget reviews. And so I think you've appropriately kind of figured out that in that dark cave, like, you know,

29:51ethics is this incredible distinctive thing for the incredible way for the verge to distinguish itself. It's literally what we say to our audience. We are selling you this policy that can't be bought. And maybe that's the right thing. I look at some of the creators and I look at some of their Lamborghinis and I think maybe that's the wrong thing. But that's the way it goes. I'm curious. You know, I started by playing you that clip of Jonah Peretti saying if they'd only paid for news, they would have retained relevance and charisma. Maybe the blue app would be better. I'm looking at a media ecosystem where it feels like actually there's elite capture of traditional media, right?

30:24David Ellison has bought CBS News to whatever success or failure that it's going to be. He's, depending on your point of view, either trying to get out of his Warner Brothers deal or he's dead set on owning CNN and changing it however he wants to change it. Through his family, there's ownership of TikTok. Brendan Carr is fulminating at the FCC about what happens on the broadcast stations. He wrote an entire chapter of Project 2025 about regulating content moderation on platforms. I see more influence on the media from that side of the house than ever before.

30:58You're in it, right? That's the audience that you aggressively try to go out and attract and monetize in different ways. How do you view all of that right now? I mean, I think these are really different things. I mean, I think we're in this moment of like politicized, you know, wealthy individuals buying media companies and using them to curry favor with the White House. I mean, that's just a very specific thing I've never – I mean, that is incredible.

31:23And I think, you know, I think in some sense, like if – I mean, my view in media has always been like if you actually are delivering something your audience wants, that gives you independence. They want – you know, they want – they want you to be asking tough questions. They want you to be delivering them true facts and insight. And that's, you know, that's the path. And the – I do think there's always a – I think there's a temptation particularly for places that don't have strong business models to start making ethical compromises. And you see it all over the place.

31:55I mean, in a way, I do think that because you're in the gadget review space, like you see it so clearly. I think it's true in every space that like the – I mean, the core thing of journalism and what makes it interesting is the adversarial quality and the independence and the independence of the people you're asking questions of, the people you're covering. And you – you know, and businesses like advertising obviously complicate that. But if you don't hold on to that independence, you're giving away the whole store. And so we think like obsessively about that.

32:25And I do think that for businesses that like innovating, it's just so important that you actually do not want to innovate in the field of ethics. Like that's like the one space where nobody should be innovating or you should be very, very careful. Because, I mean, if you think about like why are marketing conferences so boring, it's because they aren't doing tough independent interviews with the people. And I think our events are interesting because we're doing tough independent interviews. And giving that away is like enormous – it would be an enormous mistake. Can I ask you a really direct question?

Conference boards and tough interviews

32:52Yeah.

Conference boards and tough interviews

32:53You're doing Silicon Valley and the World. Yes. Which is the big new conference. This is you saying you're going to compete with Dava. So you're going to put on a bunch of conferences like this that compete on the bigger stage. You're convening people as I've been told. Yes. And I looked at your announcement. You were kind enough to invite me to it. And on the board is Jensen Wang and Satya Nadella. And they're advisors. But we're going to do challenging journalism. How does that work? You know, it's a reasonable question. And it's a feature of the convening business that is a somewhat new business to me too.

33:23But first of all, like we're thrilled that Jensen and Andy Jassy are going to be there and we're going to be doing Newsy onstage interviews with them. It is a feature of that business. And if you look at the way the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and our other competitors, Bloomberg, do it, part of building a community around these events and getting excitement around them is pulling the people who the newsmakers should be interviewing into the event in some way. The New York Times calls them task forces. The Wall Street Journal calls them a council. The Bloomberg actually also calls them an advisory board.

33:54But the journalism is totally independent of them. But how does that work? Like if I did a code conference, I remember thinking, I really need to get so-and-so CEO to show up on stage. Yeah. And if the day before they get on the jet to show up in California, we're like, so-and-so CEO is deeply corrupt. Here's our eight-month investigation. They're probably going to cancel on you. They're probably going to cancel. And I was like, well, that's going to be fine. Yeah. That would be great, actually. Yeah, totally. Because I'll get on stage and be like, they canceled because they can't take it. But at the same time, I knew that the people buying the tickets probably were buying the tickets to see so-and-so appear on stage.

34:29And this never actually came to a head. This was never actually a problem. It was just always in my mind. Maybe you weren't doing enough exposés. That I hadn't. Yeah. I was like, should I be causing this problem more? How do you think about that? I mean, you cover these companies at a really high level. Yeah. I mean, I think we just, you know, we do obviously write stories that they don't like all the time. And I mean, I think we try really, really hard to be fair. We don't, you know, we try not to sandbag people. But I also think, I mean, there are two different things. One is, right, did you write a story that upset them and they canceled on you?

34:59I mean, I think that's just, you just got to be willing. That's just the cost of doing business in journalism. And that'll happen. And you just can't think about it. But I do think that there's, I mean, I do think that we are trying to be grown up and fair. And one of the things that I've noticed is there's a sense, particularly if you go to these conferences that are like, like, not that, they're not run by journalists, that you don't want to ask the hard question. Like, you're like a little nervous of like, oh, there's this core question in the CEO's business or in this politician's, you know, leadership that is sort of awkward to ask.

35:29But of course, that's the question that the CEO spends all his time or her time thinking about. And then not only are they ready for it, like they've thought about it more than anybody else. They're eager to engage on it. And so I think there's like a, it's like a weird illusion that senior leaders don't want to be asked hard questions. Like, that's crazy. All they do, like the reason they're in those gigs is because they find it really interesting. They're much easier, like more relaxing jobs, right? And so, you know, if you're asking, so if you're interviewing Ford and you're not asking him, like, how are you not, you know, about this like crisis of China just swallowing their business? What are you doing? But I think there is an impulse, which I think is totally wrong, to tiptoe around the hard questions.

36:03I actually think like for CEOs, for political leaders, it's boring for them to go on stage and ask a bunch of bore, answer a bunch of, tell the same canned anecdotes about their personal biographies they've told a thousand times. Like they're there to, I mean, it's their job is to answer hard questions. Yeah. This is my, I'm always asking various comms people, why do the CEOs come on the show? Like in our YouTube comments, like why would they show up? And I'm like, the answer I've most commonly gotten is this is the only way their own employees will listen to them. Right. They want to see the challenge and the stakes and the conflict, as you've described, are present in this format, whereas no one's listening to the all hands.

36:39Yeah, I think it's important that you be respectful. I do think there's like a slice of tech journalism that really like concluded that the people they cover are monsters. And I think it's probably hard to get those folks to talk to you then. And then conversely, there's a slice of the tech industry that has concluded all journalists are in a sort of deep conspiracy to destroy them. And I think that both of those slices of media culture have kind of run their course and are both kind of toxic and boring at this point. And everybody should stop and just cover these people like important decision makers in the middle of great stories.

37:13But yeah, but I think, I mean, I think that's just the news business. And yeah, and so, yeah, so this, we, we care a lot about our independence and about our journalist independence and build it deeply into the events. I think it's more than a slice on either side, right? Like our own audience is like the, all of these people are monsters and they're reading a tech website. I look at most of the politicians in America have, they've come around to like, maybe we should stop the data centers. Yeah. Or we should at least talk about it because people will like us and we talk about it. After a decade of talking about regulating social media and big tech and doing nothing, we've never passed a privacy law in this country.

37:50You see, there's a lot of heat around these guys are monsters. We can just throw sticks and stones at them. And then on the other side, they own the distribution channels, right? They're, they're just on X doing whatever they want to do. And there's a sense that they don't need the accountability. Mark Zuckerberg just published, what, a 6,500 word manifesto that in my estimation is like freshman year political science thinking. And he's just going to get away with it because there's literally no one around him to be like, try being smarter than this.

38:20Do you, do you see that connection at your events where you, the thing you need to challenge some of these executives on is people think you have bad values, not your business decision. I think, I think when you are interviewing somebody where there's like a core critique of the thing they're doing, that is the values, like you should definitely ask, yeah, we always ask them. And that's the, you know, that's the question they've been thinking about too. I actually kind of disagree with you on the AIC as though. I think we're moving out of an era where you had kind of business leaders. I see like Mark Andreessen, sort of patient zero of this, like very, very smart guy, very influential and influenced a lot of people to think this way.

38:52Who had this sort of deep paranoia about the media and also then this sense that it wasn't relevant. I think if you look at the really great business figures of this era, of the new ones, I would say Dario Amidai, Sam Altman, Jensen Wang. These are classic showmen who love the media. Or no matter if they love the media or they hate the media, but they, like Steve Jobs, understand and like Donald Trump. They're selling something. Yeah, they're salesmen who see the media as a very important sales channel, which is basically how business leaders have always been. And I think they're running circles around the guys and the women who are sort of sitting paranoid.

39:25You know, I don't know if we can talk to this reporter. Like they just pick up the phone, right? And they're on the cover and they wear the leather jacket and they do whatever the sort of slightly corny but incredibly effective Time magazine cover style thing is. And obviously the legacy media is diminished and there are new outlets. But fundamentally they're showmen who aren't operating out of some kind of deep theoretical relationship with media that they plan to change. I mean Elon obviously the big exception to this rule as of many. But I think the rest of this new generation of business leaders have a much more normal relationship with the media.

Creators and the changing media landscape

40:00One of the things that I think is really interesting in that context is the rise of the news creator, the news influencer, where they aren't of the machine the way that you are of the machine. They don't have a Justin Smith being like, I've built a global news operation. You just do the great reporting, I'll find new business. By the way, all the big print newspapers have task forces. We will have a global conference and solve independence, right? But the influencers and creators I talk to, this is all a first impression for them. And the idea that they can be plied with gifts or access or made to seem more important, they feel it.

40:33For sure. They struggle with it at a deep level. A lot of our industrialists now, a lot of our politicians understand that that is a faster route to a bigger audience and that there's more influence to be had there over the content, over the editorial. How do you compete with that? I mean, I just think you have to have sort of courage in your conviction that people want journalism. Yeah. Like that people actually would like true facts rather than lies and independent voices rather than ones that are corrupt. And I think that's, you know, broadly in the most very optimistic view, but I think that's broadly true.

41:03And I think you're seeing that the most interesting and most successful creators are also finding that. Like I think like the great Silicon Valley podcaster, Drakesh Patel, like his questions have gotten tougher and tougher because I think his audience is – because he's very sophisticated. And I think he realizes, his audience, if you're interviewing Jensen about kind of how he thinks about chips and China, you should ask him the hard questions, not the easy ones. And that's more interesting. And it's such a – I mean, it's so obvious. And I think like journalists who sort of admire or worry about creators, there's some lacking the courage of your own convictions that, no, no, it's more interesting to ask hard questions than easy ones.

41:40Don't you need the person to show up to be asked the questions of? I think this is the dynamic that I see so many places. With the podcasters and the creators, I think what they're learning is that their audiences are durable. So you don't need the famous person. You don't need the Apple access to get your audience. If you have the big audience, you can do whatever you want, right? And my formulation of that is the less access you need, the more you get. That's a hard lesson to learn at the beginning. Yeah, and there's an old saying that access is a curse, too. Oh, access is poison. And I think you – I think one of the – I think you see in Washington – I follow politics very closely.

42:14And you see this in Washington. I don't know if you remember, but in the beginning of the Trump administration, there were all these influencers in the White House press conferences, you know, asking Carolyn Levitt like how she does her hair. And the thing is like I think they found and their audiences found that that was extremely boring. And they kind of wandered off to, you know, talk instead about paranoid fights with Candace Owen or whatever. And similarly, the Pentagon in particular, you know, brought in all these – what they saw as allied, pliable right-wing influencers to replace the hated mainstream media.

42:45And then when the Iran War started, like Gateway Pundit is grilling Pete Hegseth about, you know, about the war and he doesn't have answers. Because I think – I mean there are a lot of toxic things about audience capture and you can be pulled all sorts of crazy places by your audience. But also you can be pulled toward journalism by your audience. And I think actually what you saw in that Pentagon press room was that their audiences were nervous about the war and did not like it. And so suddenly Pete Hegseth is being grilled by these pet outlets that he put in there to avoid dealing with real questions. And there was some sense of like, oh, like journalism isn't a trade that you learned at journalism school.

43:18It is actually service to your audience that anybody can figure out if you are paying attention.

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45:48Same-day delivery. It's on Prime. Available in select areas. Terms apply. We're back with Semaphore Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith discussing the responsibility journalists have to ask people in power uncomfortable questions. One of the really interesting things to me about that dynamic in particular at the Pentagon is so many of the journalists they put in there were video first. They were making clips. Yeah. I could see them in those press conferences try to get a clip.

46:20Right? And they knew the video would play. Right. And then the platforms reward conflict. And the comments are like, why didn't you ask this question? I mean, what do you think Sam Donaldson was doing in the White House press room in the 1980s? This is not the – these are stages for performance. Oh, sure. Who was – it was Newt Gingrich figured out C-SPAN was the stage for him. Yeah, I understand. But the clip economy in particular. Yeah, for sure. Right? They're going to manufacture a clip and maybe it's the audience pulling you towards journalism or maybe it's just the algorithm pulling you towards conflict. Yeah. Yeah. There are good pulls and there are bad pulls. It's hard.

46:51Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. You're doing more video now. Yeah. And that's right next to – the semiform is there to expose the structure of the journalism because our audience is really smart and they're CEOs. And then you're going to go make video on video platforms and you're going to experience that other pull.

Video platforms and advertising conventions

47:08How do you think about managing that? Or are you not chasing scale there, right? No, we think about it a lot and about not chasing scale on video but trying to have really high-level conversations. And I think there's a big but not the biggest audience for really sophisticated conversations with leaders in media or in compound interest on our business show, CEOs on our CEO signal show, other stuff we're going to be launching. But I do think that video – it just reminds me so much of the social web, the kind of allure of infinite scale. If you just follow it toward this sort of fixed point that everyone else is also going toward and it's this incredibly like homogenizing force, like everybody is doing – everybody on the left is doing like Barry Weiss outrage this week and everybody – and it's very, very hyper-partisan.

47:54So, no, I mean I think we just like have really had a lot of internal conversations about resisting that. How do you make money if you don't chase scale on video? You have to reach a really high-quality audience. And you're just going to bake the ads in or are you going to do the ad reads? This is like the other big problem of creator world, right, is the platforms don't pay you any money. They've certainly learned to pay people less money. Yeah. I mean, yes, we do integrated campaigns with direct sold advertisers. I don't know. I think you do host reads. I think I noticed that Odd Lots, one of my – my second favorite show is doing host reads these days.

48:26This is like the biggest toss-up in all of media. Yeah, but I think that like the principle of journalistic independence is incredibly important. And the forms change and when you're in these moments – what I remember is – I don't remember this, but Google, the ads used to be in yellow. Yep. And they had a yellow overlay. And at BuzzFeed, we were like, okay, that's the convention. We'll have a yellow overlay on our ads. That's how you know it's an ad. And then Google removed it. And it was like, oh, I guess that's not the convention. I guess ads can be the same color as everything else. I think these things are, you know, signals to the audience and the forms change through time.

48:56And again, you just – you don't want to be – again, you don't want to be like innovating in the field of ethics. But you have to realize that the forms are changing. So my harshest take about all these platforms is Google made the ads not yellow and then it made them look like the content. And then it changed the economics of the web such that the only profitable thing to publish on the web is marketing content and listicles about what shoes to buy when you go hiking. And now that's all that shows up in AI overviews. And then Meta started charging you to distribute those. Right. Rather than letting them go viral on their own if they were good.

49:28So everything became advertising. And the economics of YouTube – actually, YouTube just made it harder to make money on YouTube. They changed the rules of their partner program. The only way you can make real money as a creator on YouTube and have your big staff is if you do the integrated practice. If you become an advertiser or an ad agency. And that is the pull of all these platforms is we're not going to pay you anything. We're going to take the content for free. Maybe we'll even train our AI on it. And you will integrate advertising in it somewhere. I mean, I think – And I get what you're saying about not innovating in ethics. But, you know, as someone who has resisted the many, many, many demands that I do the host reads and the checks that come along with it, that's the innovation is we're making the reporters read the ads now.

50:07Yeah. I mean, in the old days, the hosts read the ads. In the old days of TV and radio, then they stopped. Now they do it again. I guess I don't really see that as like – Yeah. I don't know. Maybe there's some study saying they were more corrupt than they were – but I haven't really seen any evidence of that. I just think these are kind of forms – you know, there used to be front-page advertising in newspapers was considered like horrifically corrupt. And now they do it all the time. I mean, so I think some of this stuff, people get caught up on the forms in a medium that's just changing really, really fast. No, I mean, I think we want to create amazing advertising that our advertisers are really happy with and works for them.

50:38I mean, that's just core to the business. And so – and it is another nice thing about starting from scratch is that you can – and I do think you can – there's a difference between when you're building a media company, as you have done, thinking about, oh, like this is a product that our audience is going to love and that our advertisers are going to love. And in that kind of like, you know, neonatal state, church and state can talk to each other a lot. Once you launch the thing, they've got to be really independent. Yeah. This is, I think, just a core challenge for our time, especially if you want to make something that gets wide distribution. You want to start a newsletter on Substack or Ghost or Beehive and charge a lot of money to a small audience, I think you can do pretty well.

51:15Yeah. Your ability to have massive impact gets immediately limited, as you've said, right? There's a cap on your audience size. It seems like you want to have the big impact but retain the elite audience. Yeah, and that is a way to build a big business without reaching huge scale is to reach a very, very valuable audience. I mean, it's not the only – again, that's not the only way to build a media company. You wouldn't want to be in a world where that was the only kind of media company. But we are totally, totally focused on that. And it is working and it is allowing us to hire great journalists to break stories. One of the things that I consider with our audience all the time because we were free until about a year ago.

51:48We had a huge audience and they were just very aware of any of our potential biases. And maybe this is just a tech audience. We have lots of commenters. You love Apple. Everything is going to be pro-Apple. It's like – Yeah. That is just the firmament in which a tech publication stands, I think. But, I don't know, Comcast was an investor in Vox Media and Vox. And we would have to disclose that – Comcast didn't like me, but we would disclose it all the time. There's just some part of – well, we think the audience is smart. They're an elite audience. They understand the structure.

52:19They might understand the biases that come with having Jensen on the board of advisors. Oh, I don't think – Having a bunch of Saudi royalty on your board of advisors. How do you feel about that? Oh, I don't think they – no, I think they understand what we're doing quite clearly. And in fact – Do they think that that gets them influence? Because that's what the consumer audience definitely believes. You know, I don't know what they think. But our kind of promise to them is that it doesn't and that we're covering these people very independently. And in fact, a lot of the people on these advisory boards have diametrically opposed interests to one another.

52:50Like there's no – there's sort of nothing – no journalistic kind of follow-through from that anymore than I think being on the deal book task force influences what you see in the New York Times.

53:00You know, I do think, though, in the biggest sense like this, as you said – just to go back to something you said earlier, like the everything is marketing. Everything is corrupt. And also that – and I find this – I think that in corners of media, including our corner, I think it's – you know, we've managed to kind of really hold the line on this. But I mean, I think if you look at a lot of social video in particular and platforms like TikTok, I mean, just totally undisclosed advertising is everywhere. And it really distorts how people see the world. I mean, and just – and in terms of just people's judgment about what's working, what's real, what's not real.

53:34And this is – you know, I think about this actually a lot in the AI space because there is so much – you see there's so many sort of anecdotes out there or videos of people doing incredibly cool things with this tool or that tool. And you just never really know. Like it's just hard to know what's marketing and what's not, what's just literally paid for and what's not. And we – we're doing a project that I'm very excited about called the Semaphore Innovation Atlas that's like just literally trying to report out here are some cool, particularly public sector AI projects that are real.

54:05Yeah. Because there's so much out there that's just unreal. But that tells a good story, which is in a way, you know, the job of marketing. I had a partner at a very, very large consulting firm telling me they had done hundreds of AI deployments and less than two dozen had yielded positive ROI. And I thought, well, can you just tell me that on the record? And he's like, absolutely not. We want hundreds more. Yeah. And it's – we're in that moment, right, where everything feels marketing, everything feels corrupt. And the thing I'm just pushing at is the audience, their base assumption, regardless of how elite the audience is, is that everything is corrupt.

54:42And I find the higher up we go, the assumption that things can be bought and paid for increases. I just think you have to – I mean I think we live in a very populist moment in this sort of widespread belief that everything is corrupt. It just diffuses society and it's partly justified. And by the way, it's partly not. Like my favorite example of this is the congressional stock trading thing where there's been a lot of research. There, I'm sure, are corrupt congresspeople front-running stocks. It's never been a big problem. And there's no studies showing that it's widespread. And to try to disabuse people of this, they passed a law several years ago saying that members of Congress have to disclose their stock trades.

55:19And now there are all these accounts finding members of – you know, there's 400 or whatever members of Congress. Some of them are winning. Some of them are losing. If you only look at the ones who are doing well, you can tell a story about widespread corruption. And now everyone believes it's incredibly corrupt as a result of a transparency measure that actually showed it wasn't. And so I just think there's just – obviously we're in a moment where there's this deeply baked in sense that every institution is corrupt. I mean we try by being really transparent and really direct and by not compromising on this stuff to – yeah, to send a message that – to counter that.

55:50But I think that's – obviously, as you say, you're kind of swimming against a big cultural tide right now. Yeah. I mean we – again, just at The Verge. No, I mean I think like the way – but I think we – I also think that for us like a big part of the marketing of our events and the way we like make them good is that they're going to be – it's going to be a festival of news. We're going to ask real questions. It's going to be exciting. Justin at some point I think called Semaphore World Economy Davos with follow-up questions. That's pretty good. But in any case, the – you know, I think that to me that – as for you guys saying we don't take freebies in reviewing gadgets, I think that's a huge selling point for you.

56:29And I think you've got to really lean into that, not away from it. The thing that gets me now is the reason I think we can market it.

Public trust and political influence

56:35If I was 10 years ago saying The Verge has an ethics policy, all of my competitors would say, well, so sweet. Right? Like I have – competitors now. I think Wired is doing great reporting. And a lot of the way they market their great reporting is they just say out loud, look at all this reporting. Yeah. We do it. Yeah. By our subscription. I think it's totally effective. I think they've cracked some code there by just saying out loud. Turns out people like journalists. They do the reporting. Saying people will pay for it. I think that's very smart. What has occurred to me in all of that is particularly our youngest audience does not know.

57:09They did not come up the same way. The water they've been swimming in their entire lives is social media, is integrated brand campaigns by creators, is a feed that is increasingly fake and bought and paid for. And I'm not sure that us showing up and saying, you know, there's an old way of doing this. See, I kind of disagree. I think people basically don't want to be lied to and don't want to be fed slop. And I think we're headed for some kind of reckoning like the big payola scandals in the radio industry. This is what I really want. Where everybody inside the radio industry kind of knew that the only way you got on the radio – like it was totally open secret the way you get your song on the radio is you pay off the DJ.

57:45But it turned out the audience was not in on the joke. And when Congress held hearings into it, it totally blew up the industry and upended everything. And I think with – particularly with influencer marketing, with political influencer marketing, people hate that. And I just – you've got to think Congress is going to come in and crack down on it. I'm actually optimistic about that. I think it's – so Adam Schiff just – Max reported recently or introduced a bill on it. That probably won't be the one. But like everybody hates this. The idea that your favorite influencer is being bribed by some politician to lie to you. Like people do not like that.

58:15And I think they're going to – I think that disclosure, which is mostly in effect or somewhat in effect like with big brand marketing, like if PepsiCo buys an ad, they're going to disclose it. There's a lot of shady stuff happening around the margins. And then politics because there's this like chasm between these – the Federal Elections Commission which sort of collapsed and the FTC which regulates other advertising. There's all this undisclosed and undisclosable political advertising. I just do not think so does people like that. I think that's going to wind up having to be regulated. I'm curious about this. There's a recent story. I think it was Politico and it was basically saying all of the young staffers on the right have no idea how to do anything because they're all like comms people.

58:54Like they're all influencers and there's like a talent shortage. I think Madison Cawthorne was like the – he was the bellwether. He came into office and he's like, I've got more comms people than policy people. And then it very quickly became clear that wasn't going to be great. But now that's the norm that we're all just tweeting policy into existence, right? We're going to stop the Iran war with tweets is a real thing that happens once a week in this country. And there's something there that's broken, right? Like political influence operations maybe we hate when they're paid for.

59:25But they are politics now. And they're part of the feed in a very real way. Yeah, I think sometimes in really damaging ways this administration – and this was the previous one – are incredibly responsive to social media. And so a story goes viral on Twitter and somebody gets their immigration status pulled because – I just read a piece from a woman who's in ice holding because there was a sort of misleading campaign saying her husband had worked for – her husband's mother had been a translator for the Iranians in the 70s.

59:56And so she's now in an ice holding cell. And the administration acted because this went viral on social media. There's always obviously been a very intense relationship between the media and the politicians. I mean the New York Times published a story and then Chuck Schumer the next day introduces a piece of legislation. It's like the oldest trick in the book. And so – but there is – I don't – I mean I actually – there's not been my experience of Republican staffers in Washington that they're incompetent. I think they're like – I'm always – I live in New York and often go to Washington and I'm in Washington a lot and people in my – in the sort of my liberal Brooklyn neighborhood will sort of say like, God, it must be so horrible to deal with those Trump people.

1:00:34And the reality is actually they're incredibly polite and responsive and it was a nightmare often to deal with the Biden people because Democrats as a journalist think that you work for them. And that writing something independent is an act of betrayal and I suppose Republicans have either appropriate or lower expectations. And that's sort of always been true. And I guess I think communications has always been a pretty important part of politics. But there's a way in which the disorganization of this administration in particular just means that they're totally reactive to random pieces of media that somebody plays Donald Trump on an iPad that is really different.

1:01:06Yeah, I just see the – we're going to tweet policy into reality is a feature of this administration. There's not a lot of rigor under that policy often. Often, yeah. Right? Or often somebody else just tweets something and it goes viral. I mean this was the story of Doge is Musk was just seeing tweets and making policy based on it. Yeah. Has that – do you think that has come to an end? We're saying people hate these political influence operations that probably they will get regulated in some way because both sides hate the idea that all the influencers will be paid for by politicians.

1:01:37No, right now we're like in the worst part of it. Yeah, this is definitely the – I mean although you're seeing the federal government that had had a lot of momentum and ability to execute things that sort of lost all of that. So the White House – I mean there's much less able to do anything right now. So there's less happening. Yeah. This is where I wanted to wrap up is it's going to break somehow, right? There is some kind of reckoning coming where people want the truth. People don't trust the tech companies. The antipathy towards AI in particular is high. But the tech companies and a bunch of billionaires own all our distribution in very significant and serious ways.

1:02:14And something is going to happen, right? The audiences are going to change in some way. There will be some reactions somehow. Do you have a view of that? Yeah. I mean I think this stuff keeps changing. I mean I do think there is a temptation to validate the populist impulses of the moment that I actually think journals should probably resist sometimes. I mean I heard your interview with Gabby about data center politics in which she pointed out that – like I loved her anecdote about how the – like a bunch of – there was a rumor that going around that data centers were killing cattle.

1:02:44And she tracked it down to one Texas farmer who had lost one cow. And I actually think the role of journalism is not always to amplify the populist reaction even though it's so easy and social media validates that. So I guess I think it's a little more complicated. And I actually would hesitate to predict whether things are getting better or worse. Silicon Valley and the world is coming up. If I had to make one prediction about the midterms, it would be that surveillance and data centers will cause some sort of left-right realignment.

1:03:15They scramble the lines in very populist ways. Yes. But they also cause alignment, right? They bring together very disparate groups of people. How do you expect that class of billionaires at all wants things to react to what I feel like will be a surprising story of the midterms? I mean I think that – I think there are different strains of this. Like I think the data center story, which right now is so hot and maybe – I'm in the minority here. I think most people think this will be a huge political issue for a long time.

1:03:46I think like companies trying to build facilities in people's neighborhoods and then they go in and they sponsor the Little League team and they pay a bunch of carpenters and they sponsor the parade. Like that is actually something corporate America is pretty good at. And it's unbelievable how badly they screwed this up. Yeah, it's very bad. With data centers. But I actually think that is because they aren't actually causing stillborn cattle. Like I think fundamentally with the exception – they're going to have to navigate the energy – they're going to have to find a way to not elevate energy prices.

1:04:19But I think some of that probably does fade as companies figure out how to do this without infuriating neighborhoods and doing it in places people want it. I think that maybe becomes less of an issue. I mean I do think the big questions around regulating AI are just fascinating. And you're right after, as you said, not regulating social media and then sort of beginning the Trump administration with this incredibly accelerationist point of view, they are now just doing it. They're just regulating this technology day to day. They're going to have to figure out a framework for it. Every political candidate will have to have some point of view on it. Pretty unpredictable though what this is going to be.

1:04:51But I do think we're in a new era. And then particularly the biggest part of the new era is just that the federal government is now this huge participant in the economy and in the economy of tech. And is – owns a big chunk of intel, is trying to shape technological policies, picking winners and losers. Executives are in Washington constantly trying to make their case. I think that whoever the next president is, that probably doesn't change. And that that's a really massive structural shift that we're all going to be covering. Do you think that you can run as a populist if you want to take a big stake in these?

1:05:24I mean – Or is that a redistributive move that you – I mean I don't think populism is necessarily that. I think that there are lots of – I wouldn't get too far into the details. It just depends how you talk about it. That does seem like the theme of the day in Washington. But what do they say about simple solutions to complex problems? Yeah. Trump has compared those stakes in companies to sovereign wealth funds. Yeah, that's reasonable. A lot of Gulf states have. I actually wanted to ask you about this. You cover the Gulf deeply. You've got events in the Gulf. The United States, I would say, is in some kind of free speech crisis that is modeled a lot after the control that Gulf states have over their media and what people are not allowed to say.

1:06:02The Kushner family is all wrapped up into that. How do you think about all of the things you talked about at Independence when you have that money in your organization, when you have those folks on your various boards at events, when you have journalists on the ground in those places? Yeah, so we do. We cover Saudi and the Emirates in particular a lot and pretty aggressively. We hire the great reporters from Bloomberg and the Journal and places like that in the region. We don't have any investment money from the Gulf and from any sovereigns. I'm not sure that's what you meant, but just to be clear about that. Well, they're on your board.

1:06:33They're on these advisors. Yeah, there are some executives from that part of the world on advisory boards. But, yeah, I think we cover them independently, you know, the same as the FT and the Journal and others do in that region, which in the Times, and it is like if you talk to reporters who work in the region, it's very, very hard and complicated. And you do – and you just have to – and there are local laws that you have to be careful about. I think we were the only ones to write about a very interesting story, the way in which the Emirates, I believe, were preventing photojournalists from distributing images of the – and that's just like – that's just the law.

1:07:04Like if your photographer goes and takes a picture of a drone that hit a building, they will arrest them. And so I think all – every news organization that operates in that region, that operates in China, you just have to be really, really careful and thoughtful about it. But you can't let it compromise the reporting. Do you feel like it compromises the reporting here in the United States? No. No, and I think that global news organizations actually – and I think if you think about the New York Times, which has, you know, reporters in Tehran. I mean, this isn't – and I think a lot of global news organizations have thought really hard about – I think there are stories that you write – that you have your correspondent in Washington write that you wouldn't have somebody on the ground in Tehran, right?

1:07:42And, you know, obviously we think a lot about the safety of our reporters. But it's a complicated question. I ask that question because I see what the Trump administration does to journalists here, right? Yeah, I wouldn't – I actually – it's funny because I think that I wouldn't – I think that like we obviously are in this, as you said, kind of a free speech crisis here in all sorts of ways. I don't think it's like a monarchy that doesn't have the First Amendment. Like I think we're a long way from that. And to me, the closer parallel to the Gulf is the kind of personalist rule. The – you know, people talk a lot about corruption.

1:08:13But I think when you think about these relationships, often it's just – it's a totally different style of doing business where you're helping your friends and family. But that's just – it's like a totally different like modality that obviously in the American tradition is incredibly corrupt. But you go to other parts of the world and that's just the nature of business. And I think that's – parts of the Trump administration just sort of operate that way. Yeah. And I think the Trump family in particular like sees that as a model. That was the comparison I was making. You can see them enriching themselves, particularly in that part of the world. I do think that like elements of the style of doing business is more like other parts of the world.

1:08:43Yeah, I think this – I mean obviously a lot of the speech stuff here is terrible. But it is – it's really not like – I mean just as somebody who operates – it's not like being in a country without the First Amendment. Yeah, fair enough.

AI tools inside the newsroom

1:08:54Lastly, I just want to talk about AI in your newsroom for one second. We've talked a lot about AI in the industry. You make a lot of stuff. The pull, especially when you go make a bunch of video, is to fire ever more content into these algorithms. We haven't really talked about it. Maybe the only journalistic ethics crisis I've never brought to you is how should we use AI? Because I know that you're such a purist. So I'm like – it's funny. I go back and forth on like how high impact it will be. But right now I'm like all the way forth on this. Like I am – we just – a colleague of mine just built this great internal tool that is too boring to explain but is going to totally change all of our lives internally.

1:09:27And I'm like now a huge believer in the SaaSpocalypse. Yeah. Like it's all going away. You're done. You canceled your Trello contract and you're done. I mean it's – so I think some of these internal tooling is amazing.

1:09:40We also – we produced this report out of Semifor World Economy where we – there were three – we had – it was a five-day event with three simultaneous stages, 300 interviews. And I then on Saturday morning texted the team and was like, hey, I know you're all tired but could everybody write a little like what I learned at Semifor World Economy? And everyone's like, ugh. And then Reid Albergati who, you know, our great tech editor was like, yeah, give me a couple hours and dropped all the transcripts into – actually I'm not sure if it was Codex or Cowork. But – and then – and then produced something that was a kind of – it was here are the most commonly made statements.

1:10:13Here are some disagreements. Here are some – and then we spent a week kind of hammering through that and actually wound up creating a lot more work for humans. But because the notion of like what's the takeaway from these 300 conversations? Like that's just my – that's a job for AI basically. Like it's a very hard thing because no one was in all of them. They were simultaneous. And that was a great product that we then released and are going to – and will continue to sort of build on. So I obviously am very bullish about AI. But fundamentally like the best parts of reporting are gathering new information that isn't on the internet and then communicating it with people.

1:10:46Everything in between is production. Yeah. And is very vulnerable to AI. Those things I think are pretty invulnerable – are pretty defensible. That's a good argument. I'm going to come around to it. I promise. I'm going to come around to it. This very much was a conversation exactly like the conversation we have over beers all the time. Okay. I have an AI question for you. There's a tool that allows you on a podcast if you've screwed something up, if you've mispronounced somebody's name, just to drop it in with your own voice so you don't have to go back into the studio and rerecord that sentence. Is that okay or not? This is an argument we're having internally.

1:11:18It depends on exactly how misleading you think you're going to be. No, just like you mispronounced my name in the intro and your producer is like, hey, can you come back into the studio? Like it's Saturday morning. So if I mispronounced your name to you – On air. On air. No, in your intro. In my intro. So no, because then that's just an edit. I would just pick it up. No, I know. But you have to like go into the studio and rerecord that. But you're like on a boat doing whatever it is you do. And your producer can just take your voice and redo it. I think that's fine. I honestly think that's fine. I think that's fine too. But it's – the deception comes is if I mispronounce your name to you here and then you leave and then I make it better.

1:11:55Yeah. If I've done something misleading. If I'm just picking up audio that you would have never heard by myself and we're just going to do an edit, we're editing that anyway. Okay, good. I feel the same way. To me, the line always comes down to who is being deceived. And if like you're literally going to deceive the guest and you're going to create a moment that never happened, like probably you're way over the line. Yeah, although honestly, that's a standard practice in television to – they'll recut the questions. Yeah. So, yeah. I've heard this. Although now they're all getting in trouble and they have to publish the full transcripts.

1:12:25Trump administration is suing them. Ben, this was great. Like I said, this is very much like many of the conversations we've had. I hope the audience can feel about it. This was great. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. I love the show. Thank you for having me on.

1:12:39I'd like to thank Ben Smith for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read every email. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Boxing Unit Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our supervising producer is Greg Ott.

1:13:11Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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