Can The News Industry Survive The AI Era? — With Ben Smith, Nayeema Raza, and Joe Marchese

24:56And, and the reason why you say they would blow through is because we haven't had any, there's been no courts and legislation that has done anything about that for the past, I don't know, decade, 20 years, maybe. And, and so I think that this is a different time. And like the opportunity is huge, like for this to actually be good for copyright law and for trademark law and for personal image rights. And maybe this does that. But they used a different actress. Like how do they end up on the receiving end of a lawsuit and losing? Well, let's see, what they claim is that they use a different or they have said is that they use a different actress even predating.

25:32So imagine they created some kind of beta or trial version and then just went to market with something like that, that presumably was attracted to them because it sounded like Scarlett Johansson. Now, legally, Scarlett Johansson can still sue. I'm not on team copyright theft, by the way. I'm just like looking at the facts and asking. No, I'm just asking. I'm just asking questions here, people. I know. You are. You are. But Scarlett Johansson still can sue under the publicity, right? Under whatever it is, copyright publicity. Well, the her tweet was pretty ill-advised. Exactly. And it doesn't look good.

26:03But I think you said the answer in the first, which is they've lost in a court of public opinion. And consumers are going to care. I think Ben has made this point. AI is closer to the culture industries than most technologies have been. And the way in which we've seen people win against them are either single big brands like Scarlett Johansson, you know, threatening a lawsuit, but also really using her own voice, her own power, to kind of shift the spotlight of the conversation, the regulators, et cetera, to pay attention to this issue. And the other side is in the strikes that we've seen, WGA and particularly the SAG strike around AI, it requires massive organization and negotiation, which is probably easier done right now and easier conceived right now given the technology is nascent and there's one or two or three big players in the space versus when it becomes, if it becomes, Alex, the next wave of the internet.

27:00at. Is there a way here where everybody wins? I mean, the New York Times has built like this. I'm curious if anybody has some thoughts about like what's going on there, but they've built this big AI unit that's being headed by Zach Seward, who's a very well experienced industry insider who knows what he's doing around tech. He has a full team there. They're trying to harness AI for good. Like, is there a way the news industry wins here, which is a question we don't really ask often, but I'm curious what you all think. I mean, there's a world where the New York Times wins, I think that they're the ones who have benefited from the sort of centralization of these internet businesses.

27:36And they're the Google of original news in a way. And so they're in this dominant position, which they can use to become more dominant. Yes, definitely. Also, in other ways, a very talk short AI. They produce a lot of words. They have a huge body of text. The companies really need them. like an AI that was missing the New York Times would be lame and would be worse than the one that had it and they kind of know that and the Times is going to hold them up for huge amounts of money I mean I think the question of like you know I mean I think some of this stuff is sort of a little orthogonal to the news business like a lot of news is your local community weekly which was getting killed in the social media and the sort of Google era and will now get killed by this but needs a different model I think AI is sort of closing the door on some of these ideas about just like building massively, rapidly scaled news businesses that we came up with 10 years ago and that we all kind of worked inside.

28:41And that sort of the kind of divorce with social media and the shifts in search had already kind of put to an end. But AI just means, I mean, assuming these AI platforms are sort of the next wave of platforms, very hard to see. I mean, I think in some ways it's going to help. It's going to entrench the advantages of big incumbents. I mean, the other people it shuts out, and Max Tani had a great story on this the other day, is partisan media. Like nobody's calling up the Daily Wire for a licensing deal. Nobody called up HuffPost, actually. Nobody called up Breitbart. And they're all grumbly about it.

29:16But what this means is if you go looking for, when you went looking for news on Facebook, you often got really, really insane stuff. Google, somewhat less. But when you go looking for news in Gemini, and it's just going to tell you the earth is round and Biden is president and stuff. You're not going to, like a lot of these people who thrive by saying the most extreme and exotic stuff will find places to do it. It looks like X will be increasingly that because it's so engagement-centric, but it's a smaller world. Does anybody think that the fact that we had news feeds, we had all this other delivery, and then email newsletters, like, come on, the boom of email as a delivery mechanism.

29:53And it was because the publisher controlled that connection to the reader, and the reader could know that that came from the person who published it, and it wasn't being interfered with anyway. And email is, what, 30 years old at this point? And it's still the preferred. So, like, what will that be for AI? Yeah, but email newsletters have also picked up, particularly in a time where there's been more news disengagement, right? Emails are coming to you, you're not going to them to some extent. You sign up for them, but then they continue to come to you. I do think that there is a - So did my Times paper on my doorstep, actually.

30:27Oh, I delivered them, but you know, same, same. I do think that there is something to that. There's a nostalgia about the news. People are a little nostalgic about how they get their news. They're a little distrustful. The platforms, the social media companies themselves are, you know, Meta would like to see less news on its platforms, which in fact is a good thing for a competitive advantage, arguably for open AI, et cetera. I do think what, you know, it will be curious what Elon does here because with X, I mean, the real value of Twitter is the breaking news. When the earthquake happened, there was nowhere to go but Twitter, right?

31:05Like no institution. I was on Twitter mid-earthquake being like, oh, shit, this is definitely an earthquake. Yeah. This is a great Twitter moment, right? As irrelevant as you think Twitter is, in that moment, that's the only way you're going to find the answer. So that combination of kind of breaking news and the tonality, the conversation, the zeitgeist that currently Twitter has, no other social media company has it right now. But you go there for hundreds of thousands of voices telling you what's happening in real time rather than one synthesized voice pulling it all together, right? Authority is lost.

31:40Yeah, exactly. It's homogenous and it's all mushed together and people's brains don't work that way. We need to tell ourselves stories. We need to trust where it's coming from. We need to get single person narratives. And that's what Twitter really provides. This is beautifully setting up like a question for the group that we talk about on the Friday show every now and again, which is what's going to be, what would be a healthier environment for news? Like news mediated through the screaming, you know, emotion-based social media feeds or news mediated by AI that is more even keel, but wrong fairly often.

32:16Or not fairly often, but wrong every now and again because it hallucinates. So would you rather your news be like super polarizing and insane but correct or sort of soothing and wrong? I mean, I think that's why you've got to read Semaphore where we are soothing and correct.

32:33That's amazing.

32:37The thing is, we don't get to decide. I mean, the thing with all this stuff is we don't get to decide. I think consumers are obviously really, really sick of hyperpolarizing, screamy, manipulative news, and you see it in the cable ratings, and you see it in Facebook getting out of the news business, and you see it in Twitter's sort of decline in marginalization. And not that there won't always be a market for that, right? There always has been, always will be. And maybe the pendulum will swing really hard back that way at some point, and there'll be another sort of populist wave. But right now, people are obviously retreating from that and looking for something different.

33:11That's sort of the business that we're in right now is trying to give a kind of more nuanced view with the kind of space for disagreement. I think a lot of podcasting right now, like the reason it's popular also, is because there's this kind of like non-hysterical, leaned back, open conversation. And again, that's not going to be universal, but I do think it's just sort of obviously where people are now. I think I agree with Ben on that. And I also think there's a wrong answer is with skepticism, because you have to bring in the consumer, is better than a diversity of opinion without any skepticism about your aunt or your boyfriend's opinion.

33:48So I think that the fact that people are going to look at this technology with some skepticism, even when it's serving a single answer, and then ideally go double-click, and again, that's where the value of these citations comes to be and where some of these news organizations might find value in discovery and citations, that could be a more productive world. But again, I think the most soothing is for them to go to semaphore with its very soothing kind of manila background. Can I give a third option to that, Alex, which is one I really want to see, which is just people know they've seen the same thing, whether it's right or wrong, right, or polarized or not polarized.

34:26I can't talk to somebody else if I don't know if we've all seen the same thing. And I do think that the misassumption right now is that, oh, I'll want personalized news, but then how do I talk to Alex about what happened today? And how do I talk to Nima? So what I would take is, the reason why we talk about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey and or the weather is because it's the only thing that's guaranteed that we've all experienced on any given day. And so the idea for news being like, everyone jokes about the Walter Cronkite days. Yes, there were problems with those news days. There were tons of top-down issues.

34:58But everyone saw the same thing, and it was like, okay, at least we can discuss that. So is there an offer in the making for, at least I know we've seen the same thing? I don't know. Yeah, that's the value of the front page. It's one of the pieces of information it gives you is what everybody else saw. Yes, right. Yeah, and then I do think you're impersonating, because in a way, I mean, another word for AI in a way is in this space is personalization. And it will be interesting to see how much of that people actually want. Okay, I need to go to break. Why don't we go to break and come back and talk a little bit more about mixed signals and pick up this idea about whether hyper-partisan media can survive.

35:34And is it going to be BuzzFeed when Vivek Ramaswamy runs the publication? All right. Why don't we do that when we come back right after this? Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now, imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee. Every swipe at the store or gas pump earns you instant rewards deposited straight to your account. Plus, sign up now for a$200 Bitcoin bonus to kickstart your rewards.

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36:49You're used to hearing my voice on the world bringing you interviews from around the globe. And you hear me reporting environment and climate news. I'm Carolyn Beeler. And I'm Marco Werman. We're now with you hosting The World Together. More global journalism with a fresh new sound. Listen to The World on your local public radio station and wherever you find your podcasts.

37:17and we're back here on big technology podcast what a great group we have here today we have naima raza she's the co-host of mixed signals ben smith is also here he's the editor-in-chief of semaphore also the co-host of mixed signals which is now live first episode was friday you can find it in your podcast app of choice and joe marchese is here he's a partner at human ventures Ben, let's just talk quickly about the Vivek news. So Vivek Ramoswamy seems like he's pulling an Elon Musk on BuzzFeed. He's acquired a high single-digit percentage of shares and is talking about the way the company should be run.

37:52What do you think is happening there? I mean, I think that much like his presidential campaign, he has sort of found a formula for getting a lot of attention and no votes. Ultimately, this is a controlled company. There's no formal way for him to exercise the power of those shares because Jonah Peretti, the CEO, still controls most of the voting shares. At the same time, his ideas aren't. That letter reads pretty well the first time you read it, and then you read harder, and you're like, wait, this is a pretty cursory reading. His core solution to media is to pivot to video, which is obviously something nobody has tried or thought of before.

38:33And he complains, and somebody went and Googled like complaints about BuzzFeed's news. And so he has like the world, there was an expose of the World Wildlife Foundation partnering with local militias in Africa who were murdering people. And so he's like, well, they were too mean to the World Wildlife Foundation, which by the way, his people, conservatives, totally were very into that story, which was true. And the organization expressed great sorrow, but he didn't click the link. It was a bunch of stuff like that. My conclusion here is that the only solution is for him to hire me to come back and be the editor-in-chief of Right Wing Buzzfeed and set things right.

39:15I know where all the anti-roke bodies are buried. Oh my God, please don't publish my drafts, Ben. Yeah, that's where they are. They're in your drafts. All those places where you would be like, I want to take down Elon Musk. He's so terrible because he's so anti-woke. And then I would go in and, you know, make sure everything was fair. Exactly. Because that's how New Zunes works. Thanks for doing that. Yeah, hopefully they don't get those Google Docs. Those millennial journalists trying to take out upstanding reactionaries. So the podcast is interesting. I mean, we do need, there is room for a podcast about media.

39:51And Ben, you like in the announcement. I'm going to put that on like the label. There is room dot, dot, dot for dot, dot, dot, a podcast. Alex, can't do it. What happened to the good ads in the first half of this episode? We actually discussed that. Oh, my God. Wow. You can hear more discussion about Ben. This is the part where we just roast you, Alex. Sorry. I'm just setting you up to talk about what you're trying to do in your podcast. No, no, please do. Thanks. Naima, take it away. You're the nice one. Well, no, I was going to say we have a conversation. We get a little bit deeper into Ben's portfolio and resume for his BuzzFeed job lusting in the episode that you can hear on Friday.

40:28Friday's episode, we talked about it at great length and something spicy there actually to check out. But there is room for it. I think that people, it goes back to brand. It goes back to people just looking at this news environment. And we're seeing simultaneously people think this is the most important election of all time. I'm just giving a thumbs up on Google. But simultaneously, people think this is the most important election of all time, and they are not tuned in. So it's like two-thirds of people think that it's an extremely high-stakes, you know, democratic moment, and one-third of people are paying regular attention to the news.

41:04So what's happening here? What's the fatigue? What's the distrust? And that's where, you know, we're building this new show in this environment. I'm so excited because Ben has had not one but two podcasts, I believe, before. right big big huge hits yeah that's why you don't know about them yeah i produced one myself back in city hall in 2006 there was a very faint beep buzzing in the background that i was never able to figure out so i just left it in but i interviewed elliot spitzer and rahm emmanuel people like that you know ben i did come up to you once in the buzzfeed uh newsroom and say i have an idea for a video podcast and uh you're like everybody wants a podcast these days and now we both have them.

41:49I know, and I gave people a hard time about podcasts, and I'm sure everyone I've ever told I wasn't that into podcasts is going to come out of the woodwork and mock me now, but I should say that now all I do is listen to podcasts. Third time's a charm, Ben, on mixed signals. Before I was setting up just this idea that Ben, you said that the media is a huge story, it's really a story of politics, technology, and culture, and then we have less media reporting now than we did previously and it should be a growing beat. I wonder why you think that is. It seems to me like a lot of media reporting sort of became like critiques of whether some publications were going to like call things lies and which ones would not.

42:33And that's sort of what it, it sort of became almost, I don't want to say partisan, but like it became small. Yeah. Well, I think we're in a moment of like peak media, like chatter and criticism, but with very, very little reporting. And we're easy to report on. Like reporters just leak so much, you wouldn't believe it. Like they're the easiest people to cover. They know the rules. They know how to play the game. And there is this really huge gap between this broad sense in all sorts of directions that the media is some kind of conspiracy with like wheels within wheels and the reasons you see things you see are because of something, you know, involving the Jews.

43:12and then the fact that you can then go and find out why things happen in media and it's not that hard and you can ask people. And it often is like some kind of bumbling conspiracy, usually a conspiracy to make money and a not very effective conspiracy to make money. But like things are happening for reasons which you can find out. And they're often not as on the nose as the reasons people imagine, but they're often really interesting. And I think like there was a story we did last week about Alito flying the flag upside down, which the Washington Post figured out and then didn't cover. And there was just enormous speculation, rightly, about what the hell were they doing.

43:50But it was not, and then, you know, we were the first ones just to call up the guy who made the decision and say, why'd you do that? And the answer was like, well, the Supreme Court reporter, who's sort of an institutionalist, wasn't that comfortable with the story. And, you know, like it was sort of very specific things, not a broad conspiracy. Although you can then say, well, that reflects the kind of, you know, change social moment. But in any case, it's a good story, the media. Recommend covering it. You know, I've always thought that the most interesting thing about media is that there's this unmonetizable portion of media, right?

44:23Like, I wasn't there. I wasn't there at the moment that Elon decided to buy Twitter now X for$44 billion. But I could tell you, with absolute certainty, Twitter at the time was worth more than$44 billion. It was just not monetizable for more than$44 billion, rise and fall of nations, you know, Arab Spring, propaganda, Russian disarray, I mean, elections, like the, the unmonetizable portion of media is where the power is. And like the gap between what is monetizable and what is valuable in culture is, is massive. And it, what makes media like, like out punch everything dollar for dollar, which is a question of like how you get the public interested in it.

45:04I mean, is there a business that can be found to sort of make money off this stuff if it's that influential? I guess that's been the question forever. Off of news? Off of, yeah, the non-monetizable news that Joe is talking about. I guess there's like this brand safety push, but I think, aren't you guys doing it in some way with events, like bringing people in? Yeah, I mean, I think, again, it keeps changing, I think. And right now, I think the people who are most successful, there's a lot of niche media that's very successful. I think there's better coverage. There's a company called Industry Dive, in fact, a really interesting company that provides really good coverage of a bunch of basically unglamorous industries that have never been covered that well in history.

45:45If you want to know what's happening in the waste management industry, which lots of people do, they do a great job. And I think there's analogies to that. Like Insomifor certainly is trying to cover a series of kind of verticals in a very deep way that appeal to the people who sit on top of them and who are your sources and your readers and also the people who are making decisions. And if you can reach them, there's an ad market that's not consumer, essentially, advertising. But you can still do news at a very high level that appeals to a lot of people. Because the sort of nature of news is that if you are breaking news that's interesting to the president of the United States, like a lot of other people want to know too.

46:31And so I think there's a generation of companies of which, you know, Axios, Politico is probably the first that have in different ways found that model. And I think there are elements of that in what we're doing. I think the question of like real general mass consumer news, like in a way what CNN is trying to do, very tricky right now. And it's so fragmented. And I think on the demand side, people don't necessarily want all their news from journalists. They want to get their news from, you know, Shannick McMahon or Heather Cox Richardson, right? And newsmakers would rather give their interviews often to these individuals as well, which, yeah, which is a real challenge, I think, for kind of mainstream journalism.

47:12I think it's the metric word, Ben, advertising. And the problem is like, you're right. B2B advertising is very different. Like, you know, if the president reads your newsletter or executives read it, like I know Alex has this with big technology, how do you monetize the fact that like there's 10 important people listening? Are you willing to pay a$500 ,000 CPM? Because the market has become liquid on this and Facebook, Google, Amazon, like everyone has convinced the world if you can't measure it, don't buy it. Right. So like all this immeasurable stuff is just out there in ether. Now, I tend to think that means there's massive inefficiencies in the market and we should be going trying to find those and buying them.

47:50But it's pretty hard to do at scale. And again, and again, because selling sponsorships is like running on a treadmill, whereas selling media is like being on a bike, like the bike keeps gliding and the treadmill, as soon as you stop running, you're going off the back of it. And I've spent a lot of time in the advertising side of the world. And I think it's, I think it might be the largest market inefficiency we have right now in the world. Okay, I want to ask one conspiracy question since, you know, there's talk about media conspiracies in your promo and we can sort of end on this. Do you think that on average, the media will have a rooting interest in favor of Joe Biden in the 2024 election?

48:29And how do you see that playing out in terms of influencing the election and the coverage that we're going to see over the next few months? I don't think there's any such thing as the media. That's why I said on average. There are outlets that have a rooting interest in both candidates, more openly expressed than ever. I mean, I do think there's this, I mean, and often when people say the media, they literally just mean the New York Times, which is how I take you to have meant that, basically. And like maybe sort of smaller subsidiary outlets like the Washington Post. The media on average. So add up all the news coverage, take the average.

49:02That's kind of like my perspective on this. Yeah, I think the average has stopped being relevant because consumption is so split. Like the average is a thing no one consumes, sort of sitting halfway between Fox News and MSNBC. I mean, in fact, that was where CNN was trying to live. I mean I do think that the kind of establishment media is like wrestling with the fact that it had the sort of years of arguments that whether if you really said that Donald Trump was a bad guy that that was the moral and ethical thing to do and kind of eventually came around to the point like yes we should say that Donald Trump is a bad guy in all our stories and then found that nobody cared at all when they did that and even the people who I think are sort of their reader base often found it kind of annoying And so they're now, and I think this is sort of a challenging timing for Joe Biden, the places like CNN and the New York Times are sort of in the middle of these internal culture wars that are about pulling away from a sort of more partisan stance and away from sort of more left-wing cultural politics.

50:02And that's happening just like simultaneous with the presidential campaign, just slightly by coincidence. And I do think that if you're in the White House, it's like, huh, like maybe you could have like postponed your purge of the partisans for like four more months. But right now the priorities inside the times are very much about reestablishing their independence from among other things, the Democratic Party. The show is Mixed Signals. You can find it on your podcast app of choice. This was a super fun conversation. Thanks for coming on, Joe, Ben and Naima. Hopefully we can do it again soon.

50:32I'm looking forward to listening to your show. Thank you, Alex. Joe, We look forward to talking more about our AI project. Let's do it. You think Joe's just Mr. Deep Pockets now. Alex, do you have any tips on working with Ben? I mean, Ben's the man, and he's got a great intuition. So wherever his intuition's taking you, just run with it. Alex had the worst hiring process in the history. It was so terrible. Have we talked about this enough, or should I bring it up again? No, we can talk about it again. I met Alex, and he was like, I really wanted to hire him. He was on my list of really good reporters.

51:03but also I had like scrambled his name with somebody else's. And he was like in the hiring process. And I called him out of the blue and was like, hey, do you speak Russian? I needed a Russian speaker at that moment. And he was like, what? Right around the Boston bombing town. No. And I just hung up on him. And then I didn't get the job. And they didn't call back for like years. It was terrible. Chaotic, Ben. I mean, yeah, I think about a year and a half later, BuzzFeed ended up hiring me. Yes. And you spoke Russian. And Ben brought everybody around. I was like, oh, maybe I should have. You learned Russian in the meantime.

51:36I know, spasiba. But Brent brought everybody around in the newsroom. It wasn't even my first day. It was like, come and see everybody. And he's like, hey, listen to this story about Alex speaking Russian. But I will say, it took three times to try to get in. But man, five amazing years within BuzzFeed and really taught me how to be a reporter. So thank you for hiring me. Maybe Vivek is going to bring both of you back, guys. Maybe you're going to have a reunion. I am so ready to publish those drafts. Yeah. Yes. He needs some right by the influencers. New movies is the thing he ordered. Exactly.

52:11All right. Good seeing you, everybody. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.