Episode 462: Ben Smith

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2021

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ben Smith is the media columnist for The New York Times. He was the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. ”I do think there's some kind of personality flaw deep in there of wanting to like, you know, find stuff out and tell people.... I'm not sure that's a totally sane or healthy personality trait, but it is definitely, for me, a personality trait…. I think that in political reporting, certainly, there's a kind of reporter who thinks that their job is basically to pull the masks off of these monsters. And I generally tend to think all these people—with some exceptions—are weird and complicated and often doing really awful things. But they aren't necessarily irredeemable or impossible to understand…. They're interesting.” Show notes: @benyt Smith on Longform Smith on Longform Podcast Smith's New York Times archive Smith's BuzzFeed News archive 04:00 "Goldman Sachs, Ozy Media and a $40 Million Conference Call Gone Wrong" (New York Times • Sept 2021) 11:00 "At Axel Springer, Politico’s New Owner, Allegations of Sex, Lies and a Secret Payment" (New York Times • Oct 2021) 11:00 "Powerful German Newspaper Ousts Editor After Times Report on Workplace Behavior" (New York Times • Oct 2021) 15:00 "Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists" (BuzzFeed News • Nov 2014) 15:00 "Starting Trouble With Times Media Columnist Ben Smith" (New York Magazine • Sept 2020) 15:00 "Chaos Theory: A Unified Theory of Muppet Types" (Dahlia Lithwick • Slate • Jun 2012) 21:00 "Postcard From Peru: Why the Morality Plays Inside The Times Won’t Stop" (New York Times • Feb 2021) 21:00 "An Arrest in Canada Casts a Shadow on a New York Times Star" (New York Times • Oct 2020) 22:00 "What’s Really Happening At The New York Times" (BuzzFeed • Nov 2019) 23:00 "Why the Success of The New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism" (New York Times • Mar 2020) 23:00 "Exclusive: New York Times Editor Dean Baquet Has Been Running the Gray Lady from L.A." (Kali Hays • Los Angeles Magazine • July 2021) 24:00 "Why Hasn’t the New York Times Made Ben Smith Sell His BuzzFeed Options Yet?" (Justin Peters • Slate • Oct 2021) 27:00 David Carr's New York Times archive 33:00 "Muslims Barred from Picture at Obama Event" (Politico • Jun 2008) 36:00 "Ghostwriting" (Alex Sujong Laughlin • Study Hall • Oct 2021) 38:00 "These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties to Russia" (Ken Bensigner, Miriam Elder, Mark Schoofs • BuzzFeed News • Jan 2017) 40:00 Platformer (Casey Newton) 40:00 Garbage Day (Ryan Broderick) 40:00 Ask Polly (Heather Havrilesky) 40:00 Ask Molly (Heather Havrilesky) 41:00 70 Over 70 (Max Linsky • Pineapple Street Studios) 41:00 "What’s the Key to a Good Life? Ask the People Who’ve Lived Long Enough to Know." (Margaret Sullivan • The Washington Post • May 2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?
0:06.1	What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?
0:12.6	What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?
0:21.7	This month on the Vergecast, we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.
0:30.0	All this month on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcasts.
0:40.4	Hello, welcome to the Longhorn Podcast. I'm Max Linske. I'm here with my co-hosts, Aaron Lammer,
0:45.0	and Evan Ratliffe, gentlemen. Hello. Hello. Hey, hey, hey. Max, what is happening on this week's show?
0:52.0	This week on the show Ben Smith, he is the media equation columnist at the New York Times.
0:58.3	And he's broken some big stories recently. Aaron, I know that you in particular have been paying attention to Ben's work.
1:05.5	I am an Aussie news enthusiast. It's the story that just keeps giving to me and he gave birth to it.
1:16.0	And I'm very interested in this interview, which I did not know was happening until this very moment.
1:20.7	The downfall of Aussie is one of the biggest and certainly most like viral media stories of the last several years.
1:27.1	And then last week, Ben wrote about the German tabloid build and its editor.
1:33.7	In both cases, the columns had huge impact on the people he was writing about their lives, their businesses, their jobs changed very,
1:42.6	very drastically, very, very quickly once Ben decided to write about them.
1:47.2	The other thing I think is worth noting is that we've had Ben on the show before,
1:51.6	but unlike almost all of the repeat guests that we've had on, his job has drastically changed since the last time I talked to him.
1:58.2	When I talked to him last, he was the editor and chief of Buzzfeed news.
2:02.4	And now he's a columnist at the New York Times.
2:05.4	So he was like running a newsroom, piloting this rocket ship.
2:09.4	And now, as you'll hear, he's just like tripping over computer cords in his house, making phone calls, change teams.
2:15.2	He changed teams. He changed teams, but really it was just,
	...

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