Digital Media Buzzkill on the Horizon? With Ben Smith

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1:05Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

1:38Anyways, let's get to it.

1:47What killed BuzzFeed News? Is social media on the decline? Could this all have been prevented? And what about the old establishment media? The media landscape is constantly changing, and someone who has been across it is my guest today, Ben Smith.

2:10So joining us now on Open Book, Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semaphore, but he's also a former media columnist for the New York Times and founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. but he's now out with a bestselling book, Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. So Ben, you've had quite an illustrious career. If you were on Wall Street, you would have been a partner in one of these big firms. You've done a lot of big jobs, Ben, in media. I made some poor choices in my life, I guess. Well, no, I'm not saying that. You're at the top of your game, but I'm impressed with the things that you've done and the way you think about the media.

2:48So let's just go right there. When you talk Talk about going viral or traffic. I'm an old guy, so that was like clicks and page views back in the day. But it's a little different now, right? It's a little bit of TikTok virality, Instagram virality, something catches favor or a meme on Twitter and it goes in an explosive zone. Tell us about what traffic means to you. What did it mean and what does it mean today? Yeah, I mean, I think we're in this moment of real kind of weird change in really digital media entirely. I think it's not totally clear what comes next. You know, we're at sort of the end point of what were the huge drivers of traffic.

3:31Facebook, first of all, but Twitter was, you know, the driver of political kind of attention and conversation. And it's not like those things will turn off the lights tomorrow, but they were the centrally cultural relevant forces for a decade and they're not anymore. And then they're fading. And what I mean, actually, you know, I was at the New York Times as the media columnist and I left BuzzFeed in 2020, got to the Times and was just sort of like, what just happened? Like, what did we all just live through? And the book was my attempt to kind of go back to the origin story of this moment where we all became obsessed with traffic and where people, particularly in the worlds I'm most familiar with, which are media and politics, sort of shifted toward this, yeah, this kind of new kind of connection to people on the Internet.

4:12So some some people would accuse the media of going for the eyeballs and potentially slanting and creating more bias than the media that you and I grew up with, sort of that Columbia School of Journalism objectivity standard. Where do you think things really are? Because I don't want the tribal angle. I want the reality angle. So I think, I mean, everybody has always liked to complain about the media. And I bet if I talked to you in 2004, you wouldn't have said, wow, the media is perfect. I love how they all went to the Columbia School of Journalism. And to me, honestly, this book is more kind of a history.

4:47And the way I think about it is more history than kind of diagnosis. I mean, I think, in fact, if you go back to the beginnings of this moment of thinking of this new generation of digital media, what you had were readers who hated what they were getting, right? You had a choice of a couple of newspapers, a couple of television networks that conservatives felt like totally didn't represent them, that lots of people felt accurately had totally blown coverage of the Iraq war, the most important story of their generation, and who weren't on the internet, which is where we were all actually talking to each other by then.

5:16And so there was this, it wasn't like it came out of nowhere. There was this like popular interest in these new outsider voices that challenged this mainstream consensus. And they, you know, and we, I was part of that, like happily, you know, had also had these new tools of measuring what people were interested in. And of course, journalists had always had the impulse to pander to their audience and to tell people what they want to hear. But suddenly, you could really see it, like you could know what people wanted to hear. And that was a big change. And in some cases, a very kind of, you know, that led some people down a bad path.

5:46I don't want to give away the book. The title of the book is Traffic, Genius Rivalry and the Delusion and the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. But there's some fascinating vignettes in the book, and I'd like you to tease people with it, if you don't mind. Let's go right back to Gawker and Nick Denton and the party that you opened the book with. Some people don't even know what Gawker is, Ben. So tell us a little bit about what Gawker is, set the scene for us, and tell us the significance of that vignette? Yeah. I mean, you know, in that early moment in 2003, say different people are looking at this, suddenly you can kind of like see who's coming to your website and why and think about what can you give them to make them come back more and measure it.

6:26And one of the people, the pioneers of the space, a guy named Nick Denton, a former British journalist at the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times, who, you know, when he looked at American media and sort of American culture, he just saw lots of hypocrisy of people who wrote these kind of polite wooden sounding stories in the New York Times and then went to a bar and trashed the people that they were writing about. And I think his view was like, well, you should just, you should be writing what you actually think. Like journalism should be meaner and more, you know, more honest and say what it says.

6:55And there were parts of this that honestly, to me, are still feel really right. Like to me actually, an emblematic one, he started a, he kind of accidentally started a feminist blog called Jezebel. And the first thing they did was offer a$10 ,000 bounty for an unretouched photo of a celebrity in a fashion magazine. And sure enough, like somebody stole a picture from Redbook of Faith Hill, where she still had freckles and smile lines, which had gotten erased in the publication. And like, and they published it, and it was kind of a sensation. And like, that was something that was probably good to get rid of in media in some way, not just obviously in women's magazines, but broadly, this kind of photoshopping of reality.

7:28But there was also kind of a cruelty to it, a sense of like, well, look, if people just want pornography, we'll just show them pornography, and that's fine. And like, a sort of eagerness, almost like a belief in playing to people's worst instincts. And Gawker, which began as kind of a media gossip blog, you know, written by bright young women in New York who were fun writers and very plugged into the moment. And it was this very outsidery voice, you know, gradually became more powerful, more important, more insidery, but kept that cruelty sometimes. And I think kind of became known for what started to feel like bullying.

8:01And at its worst was publishing sex tapes without people's consent. You see, it's fascinating. And after reading the book, I want to test a theory on you, get your reaction to it. So the media really was the first big movement in decentralization. Once the Internet exploded, you had the arrival of Drudge. You were you yourself were at Politico. You then went over to BuzzFeed, become one of the founders there. And all of a sudden, you didn't need the printing press. You didn't need the papers dropped off and that whole distribution mechanism. You had this sort of viral decentralized distribution mechanism for your property, if you will, your intellectual property.

8:41I guess some cruelty came with that, though, didn't there or did there not? And if there did, what was that from? Is that a lack of editor in chief saying, whoa, that's too nasty or not objective enough? Or what do you think it was? Yeah, I mean, I think your basic read that there were, you know, people talk about gatekeepers in media. but like you owned a printing press or you owned a broad or you had access to a broadcast tower. And most people didn't. And if you didn't have those things, like that was a gate. It was a real gate. Like gatekeeper, it wasn't kind of a sort of metaphorical, there are gatekeepers in society thing.

9:13It was like, well, if you don't have access to a printing press or a broadcast tower, you can't send your message widely. And that really changed. And there were these new people. Nick Denton was one of them. Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed was another, who had ideas about what people would want in this new space. And for Denton, it was this kind of rawness and unreserved exposure, which often was cruel. You know, Peretti, who I worked for at BuzzFeed, had this totally different point of view that in some ways was accurate, in other ways, totally diluted, which was that he was the first to really see the social internet coming, the Facebooks and the Twitters, in the sense that the main way that your content will be distributed is somebody will share it with a friend, somebody will share it on a social platform.

9:51And you've got to be thinking, what will people share? And his initial theory was people will share things that make them look good to their friends. They'll share appeals for earthquake relief. They'll share cute memes and cat pictures and funny jokes. They'll share like kind of thoughtful articles. They'll share new news. That's what he hired me to get. But they would certainly not go on these platforms and scream about politics because like who wants to be that person who wants to look to their friends like some maniac yelling about divisive politics all the time. I mean, that obviously turned out to be a massive mistake.

10:19And that was all people wanted to use these platforms for. Yeah, no, listen, I mean, I find the whole thing fascinating. Obviously, you know, I'm a media aficionado. You know, I'm now a media participant. I've spent a lot of time consuming the media. I spend some time getting attacked by the media. It's all good. I'm a big proponent of free speech. And so people can write whatever they want. And people are upset with me right now because I see no problem with CNN bringing on Donald Trump. I don't like Donald Trump. I certainly don't want him to be president. But let me tell you, he's the leading Republican figure.

10:51And he's a congenital liar, but he's going to be part of the mix in 2024. And we're a free speech society. So we have to sort of live with these things. I want to ask you about mythology, if you don't mind. If I say Arianna Huffington, we see sort of a left-wing rival to Matthew Drudge and the Drudge Report. But if I say Andrew Breitbart, because of his death, I think it means different things to different people. You knew Andrew personally. I had a relationship with him as well. I don't see him the way he is lionized today, but I'm just curious what your reaction is. Has he been mythologized in any way?

11:27Who was Andrew Breitbart for the young people that may not know him or know him personally? He was, I mean, I think maybe it's in some ways more interesting to start with the myth, which is I think he's now seen as the father of contemporary conservative media. He had kind of an appetite for confrontation and a belief that politics starts in culture and in fights over, you know, kind of divisive cultural subjects, which may sound a little familiar to people. And people who can, and you know, when he died, I think it was in 2012, I believe, you know, the people around him included Steve Bannon, who took over Breitbart, pulled it into this very kind of divisive and political support, full on support for Donald Trump, included Ben Shapiro, who went into this direction that maybe was more about fighting the culture wars and producing something that connected with young people and young conservatives.

12:15But lots of people came out of his orbit, all of whom kind of fight, I think, in some ways, try to claim his legacy and say what it was. I mean, he was this very complicated, difficult guy who had this strange experience. He was in Hollywood and kind of a misfit in Hollywood because he was a conservative and got really addicted to this early Internet conversation on these message boards where this guy named Matt Drudge was sending around an email of updates of anti-Clinton theories and stuff. And he was obsessed with Drudge and Drudge, who was in many ways like a real breakthrough in the sort of tension between this wide open digital media and this sort of closed off traditional media.

12:50And he broke out when he heard that Newsweek was working on this story about Monica Lewinsky. And as Newsweek is deliberating about publishing it, Drudge just publishes it. And pretty soon after that, Andrew goes to work for him kind of as this anonymous minion. Like he's getting paid kind of irregularly, like whenever Drudge feels like sending him a check. You know, he has all this power of, you know, having access for like six hours a day to the most important political platform in the country. But nobody knows who he is except for like occasional journalists like me who cotton on to it and started sending him links to our stories.

13:18And there was this moment in, I said probably, when was the Janet Jackson Super Bowl? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Somebody told me they were at a party with him, you know, and like, and he's there like programming the national conversation. on this crazy thing that just happened. The language he's using on the Drudge Report is immediately on television, but no one at this party knows who the hell he is. And he tried to get out from Drudge's shadow in various ways. He co-founded Huffington Post with Ariana, which was meant to be a left-wing Drudge Report. He then founded Breitbart.com, which at first was trying to sort of siphon traffic and money off of the Drudge Report.

13:55It was sort of a side hustle that Drudge granted him. And then eventually launched a set of blogs, which were modeled on Gawker, on Nick Denton's Gawker, both in their structure and in that their big scoop was, you know, a picture of Anthony Weiner's genitals, which was a very Gawker-y thing to do. Yeah. Well, I remember that well. And I got the date wrong. I said 2007 is a sign of old age, Ben. It was the 2004 January Super Bowl. She was with Justin Timberlake. And obviously, she had her famous wardrobe malfunction. So as crazy as that sounds, almost 20 years ago now, which seems like it was yesterday.

14:30But I had met Andrew at a David Koch conference. Now, the Kochs have also been mythologized, but back then, and just so everybody's clear, who paid tribute to Andrew Breitbart at his funeral would have included the likes of Mitt Romney, who is now a supposed rhino, but back then was sort of in the bell curve of conservatism. Of course, the Kochs now have been demonized, but I would have thought of them in 2009, 10 and 11 as more in the bell curve of conservatism. And so here's the optimal question for you. Has the media contributed to spinning things out or were things spinning out of control anyway?

15:11Or was the segmentation and the decentralization that you describe in your book creating the political environment or vice versa, or how are they harmonious with each other? Yes. Is that the right answer to that question? Maybe, maybe yes. Yeah. So, you think the media had something to do with it, right? Of course. And I think, I mean, you of all people, I think, kind of understand the extent to which these lines that people imagine between there's this thing called politics, there's this thing called technology, there's something called business, there's something else called the media. Like, those are fake lines.

15:45That's not how power works. And in fact, these things flow into each other very naturally. And the same trends run through all of them. And I think that's really what, when you sort of step back and look at the story of the sort of period that I wrote about, you know, these deep changes in, particularly in digital media, but also in society, this collapse in trust in institutions that isn't just media institutions, rise in kind of individual voices. And, you know, in the institutions that are being replaced by individuals include the media, they include the Republican Party, where Donald Trump is more important than the party.

16:17And all these trends sort of run together, and I think are really amplified in that kind of 2015 to 2017 period, in particular, by decisions made technically at the social platforms, Facebook in particular, that they're seeing this rise in what they see as engagement. And from their perspective, you know, they want you're spending four minutes on their site, they think that they can get you to spend four minutes and 30 seconds a day, if they make some tweaks, like they're not thinking we want to elect some kind of politician or other. But what they do is provide this very rich platform, you know, for something that is very well suited to right wing populism, to this kind of confrontational, provocative stuff where like, if whether I like it, or I hate it, I'm like, I want to write a comment and say, fuck you, or say, this is great.

16:56And the system then sees, wow, this is this guy is really engaged. Let's show him more like that. And I think, you know, I think there were a lot of forces in society that in real things, people were angry about driving it to and cable news is, you know, part of this system, too. It's not like there's some one factor, but certainly this all played out on social media. And actually one of the big ironies, like I was, cause you know, I spent a lot of time in the book covering these new digital sites, notably the Huffington Post that had sprung up to help Democrats and that were part of, that were progressive and that saw the internet as like, obviously is for young people and Democrats and progressives.

17:28And the election of Barack Obama is very naturally the culmination of the new media. I think that's how people saw it in the aughts. And in 2011, Obama went to visit Facebook and he kind of went without saying like, Oh, Facebook's a democratic institution. It's where college kids are. It's like visiting a campus. And I think that was just this huge misunderstanding of what digital media was going to do. And in fact, the sort of politician who used it best, the movement that used it best was Trump. Well, let me say this. And I want to, again, test you. I mean, I think because you have such insight into this and you're so real and honest about it.

17:58Are we at a point in time, I don't know, maybe 30, 40, it could even be 50 years ago, David Habelsam wrote the book, The Powers That Be. There's just this great book about centralized media. I think he had Henry Luce in the book and Bill Paley. And there was centralized media. And there was, frankly, some coordination with the American politicians. As an example of, you know, Franklin Roosevelt, they never showed him in the wheelchair. Sort of that was OK. Jack Kennedy had his share of adulterous affairs. They sort of left that in a, quote unquote, lockbox somewhere. That era obviously is gone never to come back.

18:35But I guess what I'm wondering is the era of our national unity also gone, because when you had the centralized media and that was a centralized light beam into everybody's home, there was more of a unifying message. You know, we sometimes say to each other, wow, we can't even debate anymore because I'm getting my facts from Fox News. You may be getting your facts from MSNBC or vice versa. And so now we don't even have the same facts when we come to the debate stage. Am I right about this? Am I wrong about this? Is there a cure for this? Or what is the outcome? And how do you think it affects our national unity and our current tribalism?

19:10Um, that's a good question. I mean, I do think that the, you know, that era that's gone that, that, you know, that people remember more fondly than honestly, they experienced it. Lots of people, including like conservatives and people who cared about civil rights and lots of others felt like totally shut out by that sort of shared fact zone. And those shared facts weren't always facts. But I do think that era is over. But I think the era we all just lived through is over two, where you have this unbelievably divisive landscape all playing out on Facebook and on Twitter and on one platform. And we're headed into something more splintered, but maybe a little less divisive and shouty too.

19:49I think podcasts like this are part of it. People are finding voices they connect with and trust and looking for help synthesizing all the chaos out there, rather than wanting to immerse themselves and swim in the chaos. I mean, I started this new think Semaphore and that's how we're thinking about it a lot. I was just going to say that I think Semaphore represents that because let's go there for a second. What does Semaphore represent? I find the writing in Semaphore, you guys seem to be first to the news, give you a lot of credit on scooping, but I think you're also laying it out there fairly objectively.

20:20Am I getting it wrong or are you coming at it from a slant that I'm not totally getting? And I think I'm pretty good at reading the slant. Yeah. I mean, I hope, yes. I mean, it's Semaphore. I mean, I think our goal, I mean, I don't think anybody buys that that like we can create a new class of news robots who just tell you to tell you the facts as they are with no perspective. Right. So I think what we're trying to do is say, you know, we're reporters who know what we're talking about. And we can get you know, we can break news. We can tell you things you didn't know. And we'll also tell you what we think about that, what we think it means that like we think Scaramucci totally screwed this thing up.

20:52But also we want to recognize like we could be wrong about that. We're not going to be wrong about the facts. I mean, enough people have written that about me. I don't think you guys need to. And, you know, if somebody else thinks you did a fabulous job, we're going to include, we're going to go out of our way to find somebody who disagrees with us and include their voice too. And, and, you know, if there's perspectives from other countries, from other angles, we're going to try to sort of pull all that stuff together. Because I think part of the experience of reading the news now is thinking like, what, like, what isn't this publication telling me?

21:21Like, well, this all seems too simple. Like, what's the alternate point of view? And then you read something in the New York Times, and you go out and Google the same story to like read it a few other places and try to triangulate it. what's going on. And I think our sort of perspective is we want to help you do that rather than try to feed you a kind of simpler story or simpler perspective. I think it's very, very fair. I want to go to the subtitle of this book, Genius, Rivalry, and the Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. So let's, I want to go to delusion first, if you don't mind.

21:50Okay. And then we'll go to rivalry and genius, but let's focus on delusion. Who are the most deluded? I mean, I think that the people, you know, Jonah Peretti, Nick Denton, me, like everybody who thought that we could kind of ride this tiger and both that we could exercise some level of control over it, but also that the people running these big platforms, Mark Zuckerberg in particular, would ultimately want to align them with professional journalism and professional entertainment, that it was going to be in their interest to like the way the cable operators, you know, create an environment where CNN and ESPN and MTV could thrive, that these new social platforms would ultimately need to create an environment where journalism could thrive, among other things.