Ben Smith on the Bust of the Digital Media Age

Deconstructed

The Intercept

News

4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

The media world over the last few week has been rocked by major disruptions: Fox ousts Tucker Carlson, CNN fires Don Lemon, BuzzFeed News is shutting down, Twitter has become a less reliable resource, and Vice Media shutters its flagship program “Vice News Tonight.” Over the last two decades, the media landscape has transformed with the advent of social media, and signs of another evolution are surfacing. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor, to talk about his new book "Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.” They discuss the role social media played in transforming media and politics over the last 15 years, and how one of the most viral moments in history alarmed Facebook.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Ryan Grimm, host of Deconstructed, and before we get started with today's show,
0:04.0	I wanted to make a quick request. And it's actually relevant to the subject of today's podcast,
0:08.3	which is an interview with former New York Times journalist and media entrepreneur Ben Smith,
0:12.2	who was formerly a colleague of mine back at Politico when it launched. Then he was a competitor of
0:16.2	mine when he was running Buzzfeed News, and I was the DC Bureau Chief of the Huffington Post.
0:20.3	He's now the co-founder of the News Outlet Sema4. He's going to join us to talk about his new book
0:24.7	on the evolution of the news industry in the era of social media. That's also something I've
0:29.0	spent a lot of time thinking about, because I'm not only interested in creating a sustainable model
0:32.9	for funding journalism, but how it's funded matters too, because that ultimately drives what it
0:38.1	produces. And I want a model that pushes a news outlet to produce hard-hitting journalism that
0:42.8	readers and listeners conclude they can't get anywhere else, and so they'll part with some of
0:46.8	their harder and money not to buy it or pay for it, but to support its mission. Now this podcast,
0:51.8	as I'm sure you know, is a production of the Intercept, which was founded back in 2013 with a huge
0:56.1	gift from the co-founder of eBay, Pierre O'Midiar. That got us off the ground and established us as
1:01.1	a force to be reckoned with in the world of journalism, but it was never meant to be a perpetual
1:04.8	project of O'Midiar. We're now in the middle of a multi-year transition away from reliance on a big
1:09.8	donor and toward reliance on listeners and readers, and you as a listener to deconstruct it can play
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