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Today I’m talking to Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor.
Everywhere you go, people say they don’t trust the media — and yet they’ve never consumed more of it. Audiences have moved on from legacy names in favor of Substacks and podcasts and TikTok news influencers that seem to be everywhere in our feeds.
Why would anyone want to start a new global news organization in the middle of all that, when even once-storied brands like CBS News can’t seem to figure it out?
Well, that’s what Ben did four years ago. He’s the guy who ran BuzzFeed News at the height of the Facebook traffic boom, and even wrote a book about it, called Traffic, which he discussed with me on Decoder back in 2023.
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Around that same time, he cofounded Semafor, which launched in 2022 with a stated goal of reaching 200 million college-educated readers.
You’re going to hear Ben say that since then, Semafor has evolved into what he calls an anti-scale company. It still doesn’t have a website paywall, but it makes about half its money in the convening business — that’s what media types have taken to calling events lately.
And Semafor throws some big events. It actually has a new one called Silicon Valley & The World, which will feature some of the biggest names in tech and AI. That’s part of the events business: hosting the subjects you cover on your big event stage.
So I wanted to know how that all works, and what it feels like to navigate the ethical conflicts that seem to be everywhere in media right now. In particular, I wanted to dig into how Semafor’s newsroom is approaching AI, the ethics and optics of putting people you cover on your conference advisory boards, and whether independence is still something an audience is willing to pay for.
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