Inside the NYT - and Everywhere Else - with Semafor's Max Tani

21:55And so I like I, you know, have a little bit of an ego. And so I enjoyed when people when I would write something or put something out there and it would immediately be something that people were were talking about. And that wasn't happening. And I was surprised because this is something I was writing about the president of the United States. I thought people would be more interested. I thought my reporting was pretty good. But Ben approached me, and he was coming off a real hot streak as a media columnist for the Times. And I thought, you know, there is never going to be another opportunity, or there will be very few other opportunities.

22:30I'll have to get to see what a media company looks like being built from the ground up. You know this from being a very early employee at Business Insider. I was actually there during first employee. Yeah, you're you were I thought you were number three. You were the first hire. OK, you were the first hire. Well, I remember this because I remember I was one of my first weeks at Business Insider. My first full paid job was was right around the time of the sale to Axel Springer, which the news of. And I remember thinking, who is this guy and how does he know what's going on at the company that I work for?

23:03That's a job you can have to report on the media on other media companies. So anyway, I remember that experience being there during the sale and thinking, you know, if I ever have the opportunity to have equity in a media company that I think is going places, I want to take it. And so that was one part. And the other part was, you know, Ben's great. If you want to write about media, who better to do it with than Ben?

23:25Peter Kafka:And so Ben Smith continues to write about media. You guys write this column together. It seems to me that you are doing more and more of it over time. But how do you guys talk about dividing up the work and sort of what's your remit versus what's a Mac story versus a Ben story? How do you guys figure that out? I think, you know, Ben is one of the I didn't come on here to it would be much more interesting podcast if I came on here to kind of trash Ben. But unfortunately, working with working with him on media is is it's like the world's easiest job, world's easiest journalism job, because I never have the problem of having to explain to my editor why something is important.

24:02Ben gets it, right? If I've got something that's good, Ben understands. And yeah, I mean, you're definitely right. Since he is running a publication, he does less of the actual writing and reporting work, though more than I was kind of expecting. I figured. I was shocked when he told me he was going to continue his media.

24:22Peter Kafka:I'm like, aren't you running a global newsroom for two or three college educated English speakers? Exactly. And, you know, the other thing, too, is it is it can be a little weird sometimes, you know, if a if the editor in chief of a publication is writing a story or, you know, a reported story that's critical of a of a competitor. I think he really tries to steer clear of those types of stories. So those things kind of tend to be off limits. That's that tends to be something that I have no sort of squeamishness when it comes to that. But yeah, I mean, as far as our division of responsibilities go, I do write and report most of the newsletter.

24:58Ben gets some tips that he sometimes sends me, you know, that he sends my way. Sometimes I get things that I send his way because, you know, for whatever reason, I want to conceal a source or, you know, something like that or, you know, throw a curveball. But we work really collaboratively. The only real problem with our partnership is that we're both we're both the same level of disorganized, which is a problem, I think. I think you generally want to have one person who's the organizational person and the other person who's the kind of wild card. Well, at least Ben's not running a big media organization.

25:28Yeah, exactly.

25:29Peter Kafka:Right, right. Exactly. There's lots of ways I think about your work, but one of them is Max is the guy who tweets about layoffs or other org chart stuff. Yeah. which I guess is a good thing, right? Because I know that you do that and it looks like those tweets have purchased. People consume them. Even in Twitter's sort of weird state it is now. Yes. But how do you think about sort of, but those stories you generally don't write, right? It's more 20 % layoffs, business insider, here's the memo. So how do you decide what's a tweet versus what goes in your Sunday newsletter And then sometimes you write a story that isn't on a Sunday newsletter that just goes on the site.

26:13Peter Kafka:How do you think about, is this a tweet or is it a story? You know, it's a weird moment in media. I feel like I work, yeah, coming up at Business Insider, I feel like pretty much the idea was at any time we have a piece of news, we're going to write something about it. Just go on the page. Yes, exactly. Yeah, you got to put it up. And I kind of always operated from that mindset. And I kind of agree with that sensibility. Like if you have something that that's news, you should really have a reason not to publish, publish it. Otherwise, you know, do the story. I kind of I think that's one of the great things about that was one of the great things about kind of that era of BI.

26:55so but but that's really but things have really changed people's consumption habits have changed you know if i write a story about media layoffs digital media layoffs that used to do really well when i was at bi around the time when i started writing some of those stories i remember you know writing a story about layoffs at mike.com and like that doing like

27:16Peter Kafka:you know 100 000 page views or something like that because a few people like mike.com all people like watching the mic.com people get laid off. Yes, there are a lot of Drudge Report readers who enjoy layoffs at left-leaning digital media outlets. I think one of my best performing stories was about Disney writing off the value of its investment in Vice, which didn't mean they were bankrupt, but everyone just loved that fact that they could shit on Vice. Yeah, exactly. Yes, liberal media, bad. Vice spoiled millennials, bad. Yeah, so there's not really that much. there for i mean sadly there's just not that much interest in those types of stories anymore one because web traffic is disappearing and the other uh you know being that there have been so many layoffs and cuts at digital media companies that you really have to have a reason to tell people why this is news it's increasingly not news uh as sad as that sounds so you know i have a But it's interesting.

28:20Yeah, I definitely it's a it's a bread and butter kind of thing for me. I I luckily over the years, I've gotten to know a lot of people who work at a lot of media outlets. And so when things happen that are newsworthy, unfortunately, in a bad way, a lot of times people share that.

28:36Peter Kafka:You never think that that, well, if this is if this is useful enough to a thousand people on Twitter to retweet it, shouldn't it also go on some of it? And where I'm trying to go with this is Summit4 is a free website that pushes out most of its stuff through newsletters. You guys have a gazillion newsletters. My sense of the business is the bulk of the money you're generating is from your events. And I'm wondering, you know, if Summit4 was set up differently in terms of its economic infrastructure, whether there'd be more incentive for you to publish something on the site. If we had a paywall, for sure, I think I'd probably publish everything on the site.

29:16I think I would basically try to do everything I could to incentivize people to come hit that paywall.

29:22Peter Kafka:And you guys have talked about subscriptions since you launched. Yeah. Still don't exist, but one day maybe they will. I'm sure, you know, I mean, that's a lever I feel like Ben and Justin could pull. And I'm, you know, I think that under the right circumstances, I'm sure they would. But I think, you know, you're right. What right now, I think a lot of what our business result revolves around and, you know, I'm on the editorial side, I'm not on the business side. But as a media reporter, I do pay closer attention to this than the normal, the average employee, I think, at Semaphore. you know the RR events sponsored events and the kind of convening that's so popular now is something that Justin does really well and the business side does really well if right now I think my tweets about layoffs or my tidbits of news that are right on the borderline should this be a story should this not oftentimes it's advert it's kind of almost advertising for the brand advertising for the Sunday media newsletter or the podcast which is where and for you and for me Yeah, and for my own brand, 100%.

30:20But it's a tough call. I mean, sometimes I write the stories. If I think it'll hold, I'll write it most of the time. And it's good, I'll write it. Like if I didn't break the 20 % BI news, but that's significant. I would have written that story. That's a huge cut, right? At 5 % somewhere, I don't really know. But if it'll hold for the newsletter, I'll do it. So it's always a complicated little dance. I like to write stuff still. I just, I found increasingly, as you know, with having a podcast, And having, you know, having the newsletter, there's just I'm finding myself pulled in a lot of different doing events moderation.

30:53I find that I have less time to write those. You're too big for this little shit is what you're saying. I got it. I don't ever want to. I never want to cede any type of ground, though. I think that that's like I I hate the idea of getting scooped on anything, even if I'm just going to put out a tweet or a blue sky post about it. I still I still it still kills me when I get beat by Ben Mullen, who is, you know, excellent or by Oliver or by Sarah or Dylan or, you know, anybody else, you know. We need more people covering media. Yeah, right.

31:23Peter Kafka:What is what is a story you particularly proud of over your last three years of Semaphore? You know, I feel really good about the way that we've approached covering media at Semaphore broadly. I think that Ben and I both kind of together, maybe we've mutually influenced each other in this way. You know, we're both really depressed by the types of stories that we're talking about here, the kind of cuts, doom and gloom, everything is bad. And we've really been interested in paying attention to the ways in which media is changing and some of the kind of things that are working, the kind of success stories.

32:02So we've really tried to think, OK, while this era, this chapter of digital media seems to have come to a bit of a close, what is growing? What's working? How is the way that people are getting information? How is that changing? and doing new and weird things. So I feel really good about the ways in which we've been really ahead of the curve on that story, right? You know, we wrote a story in June or July, 2023, saying that this was going to be the fragmentation election. This was going to be the election about podcasts and YouTube and introducing people to a whole bunch of characters. I'm glad you brought it up

32:38Peter Kafka:because that was the story I was. Oh, thank you. That was, that's the story that I feel most proud of. And so let's, let's be, I interrupted you. So let's sit on that, because I think on the one hand, it's it's an idea that sort of everyone gets now and probably even when you wrote it. But you did a really nice job of crystallizing it. So sum it up for us. Yeah, I wrote at the time I had noticed and I talked to talking to a lot of the campaigns, the Republican primary campaigns and using some of my sourcing from the Biden world as he was gearing up for reelection. I started to talk to people and ask them, ask the campaigns, the various different campaigns about how they were approaching this election differently, knowing that the media environment had changed and media consumption habits had changed so much, right?

33:28Like people were not necessarily reading articles on the social web anymore, that Facebook traffic had already collapsed by that point. And so how are they going to reach people? I think at the time, the media stories that were being written were all the same ones that get written every election cycle, which is who's going to be hosting the debates? And how many times is this person going on Fox News? And that stuff is all important, and I cover it, and some of those details are in the story. But I just thought about it from my own perspective as a media consumer. I was like, you know, I don't watch the evening news broadcasts.

34:02podcasts. I watch cable news on big nights like some people, but otherwise I, you know, I tune in very sporadically. What I listen to are podcasts and I read newsletters. I'm a high information consumer, but I know that a lot of people are watching and consuming things on YouTube. I was starting to see some of, you know, I was starting to pay more attention to YouTube as not just a here's the fun cat video or music video thing, but like this is a real way that people are getting their news and information. And so I talked to all these different campaigns that were also thinking about this as well.

34:33And we're aware of these problems. And we're starting to try out new things, flooding the zone in the kind of new fragmented media ecosystem, doing all these weird niche Navy SEAL podcasts, doing Christian, you know, popular Christian media podcasts, talking to what we'd later call, you know, Maha influencers, but kind of these granola right wing, We didn't like covid vaccine, you know, type of folks who'd gained some credibility on Instagram or TikTok. And so I kind of put that into a story. I put some real reporting behind it. And, you know, my term, my coin, the way that I coined it didn't didn't stick.

35:12People just called it the podcast election, which makes more sense. But I think that the idea was was correct.

35:18Peter Kafka:And since then and after the election, this got sort of pushed into, oh, it was the podcast election. And which, again, was what you were talking about. But I think people sort of missed a nuance, right, because they're focused on, oh, who will be the less Joe Rogan? And Joe Rogan is the new New York Times or he's the new NBC News. And maybe Call Her Daddy is the new MS. And by fixating on a couple people, people are missing the point, which is what you're saying, which is that you need to go everywhere if you can, if you're capable of it. I think one problem for a lot of politicians is they're not capable of doing it.

35:54Peter Kafka:And that's why like Zoran Mandani feels like a unicorn. You can go to all these places and there aren't many people who can do it. Yeah. But it's super savvy. And this applies obviously not just to politics, but to everything. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there was a New York Magazine article that came out pretty recently about the Hollywood PR ecosystem and how the fragmented media landscape had really had changed the PR promotion cycle. Right. And which is why you had Timothee Chalamet going on Theo Vaughn and also doing college football game day. Right. Exactly. Football actually, you know, that that aside, I think that probably would have been something that you might do in the in the old media ecosystem as well.

36:39Peter Kafka:The idea that it was it was a funny article because it was it was they were the publicists who are great were sort of complaining that their job was more difficult. They got to work again. Yeah. I mean, they had to work to get them on Leno or, you know, Kimmel in the past. But now you have to go to 20 different places, 30 different. And also, you don't know which one's going to hit. Yeah, exactly. Right. And it does seem like this is a right. This is a real change in the PR and promotional cycles for anything. And that's politics, entertainment. It's interesting to see the ways in which business PR is also kind of trying that in their own in kind of their own way.

37:18You see like you see this with some in some tech PR. I'm proud of that. That story, because I do think that it it was a little bit ahead of the curve. And you're right. One of the things that kind of annoys me, one of my pet peeves, this Joe Rogan of the left thing, we've tried to recreate the hierarchy of importance that we applied to old legacy media, right? Like, okay, because this late night show is the most watched, it's the most important because this evening news program is most watched, it's the most important or whatever. And like that's not like Joe Rogan gets a lot of listeners by far a lot more than many other podcasters.

37:58But but you're right that people are missing the point to just think about it as like the left needs Joe Rogan. You know, people's attention is truly fragmented. The podcast you listen to, the newsletters that you read are likely different than the ones that if, you know, my mom reads any newsletters, it's probably very different.

38:17Peter Kafka:And also that most people weren't consuming any of it with any intention. And so they're going to washing over them, washing over. And you don't need to follow Joe Rogan to see a clip of him floating through your reels feed. Right. And that's that's the real trick. Right. Is how do you find those folks? Right. The people who are, you know, I think the New Yorker had a great article calling it like after the election, talking about like people's like, I don't know if it was like ambient attention or and that that was the way that a lot of people were consuming media. Right. And consuming news ambiently.

38:48It was coming to them in their feeds in between a cooking TikTok and, you know, a dancing, a dance video or a clip of, you know, a highlight reel of NBA Dunks by Anthony Edwards or something like that.

38:59Peter Kafka:Yeah. And again, it applies to all media, right? But these are why you hear people who, you know, creating stuff for Netflix, complaining that people are doing their laundry while they're while they're watching their show. Yeah. And but that's that's what's going on. And this brings me back to another one of the things that kind of bothers me that you talked about at the at the top of the show, which is the like obsession among a certain set with the New York to the wording of New York Times headlines and whether, you know, if the Times had just got been a little bit harder, more aggressive and critical of Donald Trump in their rhetoric, that that would have made a difference.

39:27And I just I think that that is that really that's misunderstanding the ways in which most people, the especially particularly like swing voters and just most people in general.

39:39Peter Kafka:I mean, I know that it's not intentional, but it almost seems like an intentional misunderstanding of how this works. Right. Because there's plenty of polls and data that show that basically if you consume The New York Times on any regularity or any news, any traditional news organization that's not Fox News, basically, you voted for Joe Biden. A hundred percent. You were more likely to vote for Joe Biden. Yes. If you probably afterwards. Right. Like evening news viewers were more were the most. So the headline doesn't matter. The fact that you are a active news consumer of what we consider mainstream news is what matters.

40:12Yes, exactly. And you're right. People who said they consumed more news were much more likely to vote for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. And so that's the big challenge for that's a big challenge going forward for Democrats. And it's, you know, in some ways, it's a challenge for media organizations as well. Right. Like the fact that people want to consume information in an ambient way, it's hard to build a business around that.

40:38Peter Kafka:We'll be right back. But first, a word from a sponsor.

40:44Peter Kafka:This is advertiser content from IBM. Cold take. When it comes to quantum computing, if you need a million qubits to calculate anything, it sounds like you need a quantum computer the size of a football field. So why are we even trying? My name is Olivia Lanes. I am the global lead for content and education at IBM Quantum. So you will not need a quantum computer the size of a football field. The quantum chip is really, you know, the size of a stamp. So the chip itself is never going to be the size of a football field. What could be a very large footprint is all of the infrastructure that goes around cooling it, housing the chip, and controlling it.

41:30Peter Kafka:IBM has really been, I think, the biggest pioneer in terms of making this technology accessible. IBM has deployed, at this point, over 90 quantum computers worldwide. So if we talk about scaling, I will just say we have a plan. We have what it takes engineering and science-wise to make these computers work and to build them up to the scale that we know they will be useful. If you would like to learn more, you can do so at IBM.com slash quantum. Finance leaders know this. Growth is expensive and spend flexibility matters. With the American Express corporate program, you can manage spending and payments in ways that help protect your working capital.

42:18Peter Kafka:Learn more at americanexpress.com slash corporate. Terms apply.

42:25Are you a pet owner?

42:27Peter Kafka:Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over$1 ,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats. According to consumeradvocate.org, you get paid back up to 90 % of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. and Canada with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com slash save.

43:09Peter Kafka:And we're back. You were around for the first Trump administration, wrote about media then. What lessons do you think the media, news media learned from Trump 1.0 that they're putting into, that are appropriately putting into place now? And which ones did they sort of not get or they've overlearned that doesn't work in 2.0? It's really interesting. It's an interesting question. I'm not I think that what we saw in the campaign was there was the irony of the Democrats and the kind of very online pro Biden supporters who are critical of The New York Times. It's like I think that the Times, CNN, you know, some of these other places, the default mode was much more critical of Trump.

43:59And, you know, they weren't squeam at the mainstream media. Legacy media wasn't squeamish about calling him a liar instead of referring to his, you know, lies as his falsehoods or whatever thing that we were debating in 2016. But I think that the biggest lesson that media learned and maybe this is maybe this is something that that those, you know, critics, anti-Trump critics will will, you know, say maybe proves their point is I think the lesson that legacy media took away from Trump's victory. Part two is it didn't matter how many damning true negative stories were written about Trump. The a large so much of part of the country after 10 years of these negative stories about Trump's personal conduct, about his decision making processes, about the people who work around him, you know, about any of these types of things about like literal, you know, about the fact that he was literally charged with a crime.

44:56right uh he a large portion of the population just truly doesn't care about any of those stories uh and that those stories may be good for uh juicing subscriptions or might be decent at you know podcasts downloads or whatnot uh but it actually was not they're not changing that many people's minds uh and i i think you kind of see it in some of the you do sense it in some of the coverage like there's just less there are fewer stories that are uh written with the idea that this might end donald trump you know like i don't think any i think during the first trump i think during trump one people legitimately thought that certainly like a one media story might be the one that brought down trump or changed people's minds on trump i don't think

45:42Peter Kafka:anybody believes that anymore um yes and it was funny that but but you by the way you don't cover if you are a good newspaper, how old am I? If you're a good media organization, you're not, you're publishing the stories that are important and true. And you hope that people read them as well. What the time, it's your, it's your global media summit. I think it was in February. The Trust and News Summit in DC. The Trust and News. I don't love that title. You guys. I'm open to it being different. But I, but just, that's adjusted. That's very much adjusted. thing that uh you had the times editor there he said it was it was the peak number of byline was it bylines or individual stories out of dc on a given stories i think it was it was in it was more than a hundred right it was an yeah it was an insane number i can't remember what it was exactly yeah so he's not being undercovered no if no i mean the reality is that people a number of his supporters people are a number of people who voted for him either didn't see these stories because of what we're talking about, because of, you know, the ways in which consumption of news and information has changed, or they didn't care, right?

46:53Or they liked it, right? Or they saw some of the stuff and they liked it.

46:57Peter Kafka:Let's end this on an up note, on a green shoot. What are you most excited about either as a story or as something you want to do professionally? You've moved into podcasting. You're conferencing now. Yeah. You got a TV show on you? I don't think so. I actually really, I do feel, I have always been uncomfortable doing TV. I like these types of, I really like podcasts. And you see the reason why a lot of CEOs or leaders, whatever, are scared of doing television, but they like podcasts because you can sprawl out like we've kind of done here. I can take a few minutes to warm up and then kind of find my footing.

47:33I've always been nervous doing television and I've always felt like I've always walked away from TV hits feeling like, well, there was a lot more stuff I wanted to say. And so I have never felt I never felt any sort of desire to to do television, even when I was like, oh, I want to be a journalist. I want to be somebody who people pay attention to. So I'm really I really like the direction that that media is taking because I like long form YouTube type of stuff. I like podcasts like this one. So I think for me, the thing that I'm most excited about and interested in right now is the thing that you've talked about a lot on the show, which is YouTube.

48:13And I'm really curious about YouTube's capacity to star make and introduce news personalities to the world. It's so interesting to me. In my years of doing these television hits that I don't like, and most of the time I don't do primetime ones or whatever, but occasionally I've done some pretty big ones. I've been on at times that people actually watch. Nobody has ever texted. I've gotten a text one time from someone being like, Hey, nice job. I saw you on television. Every time I do the Sam Stein show on the Bulwark, people like my mom's friends will text her about it. Are they watching it? My dad says that he like was watches scrolling his feet.

48:57He's a you know, he's yeah, he was just scrolling his feet. And he was like, that looks like Max. And it literally was me on on Bulwark. And I yeah, I think that there are a lot of people who are just actually watching this stuff on YouTube.

49:10Peter Kafka:And this idea that YouTube is primarily for very young people. And that's why Mr. Beast is the biggest star on YouTube. And it's most important for 14 year old boys. still true yeah but it is now getting more and more mainstream and also youtube's 20 years old so people have been consuming it forever 100 and they haven't changed they've the interface looks exactly the same if you know how to use youtube once you know how to use it uh you know every single time but i think that you know it's also been a good it's been the only thing besides you know ben coming on this show or uh you know a few other kind of uh having other podcasters on our show, it's been the only thing that introduces new people to our podcast.

49:53And we actually see that with our good episodes, people tend to be watching them. So it excites me with the decline of Facebook and these other things that are referring, that are introducing people to news and information kind of content and like substantive good stuff. YouTube seems to be maybe filling.

50:11Peter Kafka:So I'm reading that you're yet another person has come in here and told me that I have to make a video podcast. I mean, you're set up for it, kind of. I mean, you're this could be right there. Well, we are in a tele... Yeah, we got it right here. Yeah, we're set here. All right. So I guess look for my new YouTube show coming very soon. Not that soon. I would watch it. Okay. Thanks, Max. Max Taney, you can see him. You can hear him. You can read him at all the places. Thank you for coming. Sorry. Thanks for having me. Sorry your invitation was so delayed. That's okay. Better late than never. Thanks, Max.

50:41Peter Kafka:Thanks to Max for coming into the studio to have a real life human conversation one-on-one in person. That's the best. Not that we don't love our video conversations either. Thanks to Charlotte Silver for producing and editing this show. Thanks to our sponsors for bringing it to you for free. Thanks to you guys for writing and reading and texting. We'll see you soon.

51:04Peter Kafka:The world of business is constantly evolving. And Comcast Business keeps you totally in step. With secure AI-backed networking in more than 100 countries. They're powering over 90 % of the Fortune 500. and millions of small businesses. That's a lot of muscle. And behind it all, thousands of experts answering your call at 2 a.m. like it's 2 p.m. One partner powering how business gets done for companies around the globe. When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast Business. Go to comcastbusiness.com slash enterprise to learn more.

51:43Peter Kafka:Support for the show comes from Atio. Everyone's talking about how AI is changing how we work. But one thing isn't changing. The win. The moment the hard work pays off. That's the moment Atio is built for. It's the agentic CRM that runs the work behind every win. With revenue agents and automations that build pipeline, advance deals, and grow accounts around the clock, you'll get all the context and velocity you need to raise the ceiling on what's possible. Start with Attio today and just focus on the win from here. Go to attio.com slash vox and get 15 % off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash vox.