Welcome back to the re-education.

Today's show examines the rise and fall of the new media.

My guest is Ben Smith, co-founder of Semaphore,

and the author of a new history and memoir of his time founding BuzzFeed News.

A company once valued at $5.7 billion might be headed for bankruptcy.

That's according to various reports.

ICE media reportedly approaching that cliff edge, while the change of finding a buyer remains on the table.

Now, its potential downfall underscores the tough environment facing digital media companies

as they struggle to cut spending during economic uncertainty.

Well, it's a grim time for the hot young media companies of the 2010s.

In just the last few months, we've seen the shuddering of Gawker 2.0 and BuzzFeed News.

Vice is on its last legs, and Huff, which has survived, has lost the glamour

and buzz it had when it launched in 2005. The disruptors of the old media have been disrupted.

As a working journalist who lived through this period, it still doesn't quite seem real.

I came up through the old media. I worked for the relaunched New York Sun, a paper where I am now a columnist, which was the last news outlet to actually launch itself as an actual newspaper. I worked for the legendary wire service UPI in the Washington Times. Eventually, I was hired by Newsweek, after it was acquired by The Daily Beast, one of the new media brands that has survived.

And then I wrote a syndicated column for Bloomberg.

So in this period, it seemed that newspapers and magazines were the hoarse and buggy of journalism.

Why would you wait to publish today's news tomorrow, let alone next week?

Twitter sat the pace.

Scoops were measured in minutes, and nothing,

it seemed, was too small or niche. The new journalists were younger and faster. The old career

arc where you work your way up from local news to the state house to Washington was over.

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