Factually! with Adam Conover - Does the Success of the New York Times Threaten Local Journalism? with Ben Smith

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

The Grey Lady is the success story of the digital media age, but is it coming at the expense of other publications around the country? Veteran of online media, founding Editor-in-Chief of BuzzFeed News and now New York Times media columnist Ben Smith joins Adam this week to discuss the shockwaves that have rocked the media industry, and future prospects for the local journalism we desperately need. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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You know, if you're like me, you've been reading the news a lot more lately. I mean, I was already reading it, but right now it definitely seems like a matter of life and death. Instead of just reading it to figure out what happened in Chile or China today, I'm reading it to figure out when will I be able to go back outside. I'm reading it to figure out when will I be able to go back outside? And also, you know, are my elected leaders doing what they need to be doing to help our fellow citizens in this time of need? It's really, really fraught stuff. We need journalists out there right now reporting the news for us more than ever.

But if you've been reading the news this century, you've probably also seen the stories about how the news industry is dying. Journalists are getting fired, papers are closing, and now everyone gets their news from Facebook comments and Twitter eggs. The fourth estate is in peril. And look, the employment numbers tell the sad story. The number of journalism jobs at newspapers dropped by almost half between 2008 and 2018. Like, imagine having less than half the delivery workers we had in 2008, or less than half the waiters, or teachers, or really any other occupation. That would be bad, right? I mean, it would be catastrophic for that industry as it has been for one of the most vital industries we have, journalism. But there has been at least one positive story in the midst of all this decline.

The success of the Gray Lady, the paper of record, the holy goddamn New York Times. The New York Times, the mustiest, dustiest legacy media institution of all, has somehow managed to enter the digital age stronger than ever. See, late last decade, with advertising revenue in a terminal decline, just like it has been for every newspaper in the country, the Times realized it needed to shift gears and get people to, you know, pay for its product again. It had been giving away the news online for free for years, but it realized that had to change. So in 2011, it took the then pretty dicey step of setting up a paywall after online users accessed a certain number of articles. The

Times did this even though online news readers had learned to expect online news to be free over the past 15 years. Well, suffice it to say, most observers were pretty skeptical of this plan. I mean, look, if you go back a decade, media bigwigs thought the New York Times could die at any moment. An article from The Atlantic in 2009 mused, what if the New York Times goes out of business like this May? It's certainly plausible. And certainly nobody thought the Times could convince newsreaders to pay for the news again after they had been getting it for free for over a decade. But the Times has proved the naysayers wrong. In fact, it's kicked ass. And now it has 3.5 million paying digital only subscribers.

They have a top podcast called The Daily, a top gaming app with its crosswords. I mean, like, think about that. The New York Times is actually a player in gaming now and a major cooking app. And turbocharged by the election of Donald Trump and a continued focus on improved online experience. Its subscriber numbers have continued to shoot up. In 2019, it passed $800 million in digital revenue for the first time. The New York Times is winning the newspaper war, and it's winning by becoming a multimedia outlet that resembles a newspaper less and less. But it's also a stunning turnaround from a publication

that once seemed about to die. So from one angle, this is a success story, right? It's good that we have The Times as an online news behemoth. It's better than nothing, better than not having the journalism at all. But The Times is not just a big fish swimming through a thriving news ecosystem. It's a whale shark sucking the remaining life around a journalism industry that every year seems more like a dead bleached reef. I hope that metaphor is stark enough for you, because while the Times soldiers on successfully, local newspapers are still on the path to annihilation as they have been for decades. And the hot new online media properties that were supposed to compete with the Times haven't. A decade ago, there was this explosion of online outlets looking to take on the big

news players, right? We had Vice, BuzzFeed News, even the websites formerly known as Gawker, the Gawker media blogs. They built brands, they built audiences, they built newsrooms. They seemed like the future of journalism to us, right? Until reality came crashing down around them. None of those outlets are doing as well as once was thought they would. So the Times has in some ways succeeded at the expense of every other outlet in media. Many of the leading journalists from local newspapers and that wave of online journalism have jumped ship to more stable publications like the New York Times. The New York Times now looks from a different angle, less like a heroic bastion of

journalism and more like a monopolistic platform that's able to use its superior market power to muscle out any potential threat. I mean, heck, like any good tech platform, they're even making acquisitions now, like buying up the blog, the Wirecutter, right? They're absorbing publications into themselves like a giant news amoeba. Well, to talk about this contradiction, our guest today is a veteran of online media, a former reporter from Politico and the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. But now he is the New York Times' media columnist. So he has seen the world of journalism from every angle. He is the best positioned person to give us a view onto what the media landscape and what the future of journalism truly is. To discuss this, please

welcome Ben Smith. Ben, thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me on. So I was talking in the intro about how, you know, the New York Times has sort of defied what we saw as a law of gravity for traditional journalism for a long time, that everyone was saying, oh, you know, legacy media is dying. All the new upstarts on the Internet are going to beat it. And in many ways, you know, I've seen in my life the success of The Times as a success story. And you wrote a column about how in some ways that's come at the expense of smaller outlets, smaller papers or other. It's come at the expense of those new upstarts or at the very least has picked up the pieces. And you are someone who has made that jump yourself from BuzzFeed News to The New York Times. Yeah. I mean, how do you see that transition?

You know, it's funny. You say, like, the times defied the law of gravity. And I think that's sort of true because there's this other kind of economic law at play these days, which is that in almost every industry, you see this kind of winner-take-all trend, where there's space for one or two or three players to really, really dominate. And, you know, that means that they get more revenue, they get better. And pretty soon there aren't 10 online shopping sites, there's Amazon. There aren't 10 search sites, there's Google. And maybe there's room for Etsy and maybe there's room for Bing in some way, but there's just not a lot. And I think what you're seeing in pretty much the national news business is that where you used to have a number of players, now there's the Times, step down, there's the Wall Street Journal

and the Washington Post, and step down and there's nobody. I mean, other players have found niches, you know, BuzzFeed has certainly won in lanes, but not ones that are about to scale up to compete directly with the Times. Yeah, I mean, here in, it's interesting here in LA, the LA Times has had a bit of a turnaround the last couple of years. They were sort of at death's door. They got bought by a quote, good billionaire, or at least that's how people put it by, you know, from the firm that was sort of killing them, a billionaire swooped in and said, hey, I'd like to rescue my local paper. I live in LA, et cetera. And they've been, I think, trying to almost duplicate the New York Times' model and become, you know, nationalized in that way. But even that has been

sort of surprisingly hard despite a bit of success. Yeah, I mean, the L.A. Times is a great example of a paper where, right, where, you know, 20 years ago, you would have said that it was one of the big national American papers. And now I think its path to success is in being a great California paper, you know, can it, that there are national stories, global stories that a California outlet could kind of own. But they're not competing with the New York Times and the White House. They're not competing on the sort of central national political story every day, although they have great reporters doing great work. And they're also really struggling to get scale with subscriptions. I think you have maybe a half dozen local newspapers owned by, as you say, either good billionaires or, honestly, families who could have been billionaires had they gotten out

of the newspaper business and instead have chosen to be moderately wealthy like the Salzburgers or less than that, like Frank Blethen in Seattle in order to keep this business alive. And who are giving their papers breathing room to get through that transition. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Boston Globe, there are a couple others. And I think the jury is kind of out

whether they're going to be able to make it around that bend. I think the question of do they keep printing newspapers or do they get out of the print business, scale down to basically a smaller company with less revenue and fewer employees, but a higher percentage of journalists is a question too. But to scope out a bit, again, just talking about this legacy media versus upstart digital dichotomy, like again, you, you know, I first became aware of your excellent work at Buzzfeed news.

There was a period where it seemed as though outlets like Buzzfeed or like vice to take another example, we're going to, you know, dominate the news and media business in the same way that, you know, Hey, Facebook and Google replaced the the same way that, you know, hey, Facebook and Google replaced the yellow pages and whatever else you want to say, right? Like they created this new sector, this brand new market that gave them so many new opportunities. They basically struck a new kind of oil no one else had ever heard of before and became these dominant monopoly powers. And I remember the feeling that, hey, the same thing was happening in media, that Vice and BuzzFeed were the future of media.

And here you now find yourself at The New York Times, the oldest of the old legacy media institutions. How do you think about that transition? Has that been a surprise to you? Yeah. And I mean, honestly, there's something a little frustrating about it, right? Like we definitely thought that we were kind of fighting to replace in some ways to replace the old thing with something better. And the reality in media has been more modeled and different. And that is in large part because the oil that Google and Facebook struck was basically the oil of the media industry. It wasn't the oil of the Yellow Pages, right? It was the advertising business. And they wiped out the advertising business

for essentially every other player, which a wide range of other participants in that market. And Google and Facebook just dominate the advertising market. And basically, if you're advertising-supported media, a couple of years ago, your ad revenue stopped growing. And you could either stop growing or you could find other sources of revenue. But it was but that that was really where digital media in general, I think, in some ways wasn't able to fulfill its full promise because you had Google and Facebook just swallowing the entire the entire ad business that had supported much of both entertainment and news media. Is that really the whole story for you? That like that is what happened in digital media primarily?

It's that. I mean, a lot of really good things happen. Like BuzzFeed is a $300 million plus business, right? Oh, absolutely. You know, Vox, Vice, a number of these companies built real businesses. But to scale up to 10 times what they are now, like maybe we imagined we would, would have required a growing ad business. And the only growing ad business belongs to Facebook and Google, and increasingly to Amazon, actually. This is part of, you know, we had the business

professor Scott Galloway on the show a few months ago, who calls for breaking up big tech. And he talks about that as being a way to oxygenate the market and create new opportunities because Facebook and Google are killing new companies in the crib. And this seems like a real clear example of that. I hadn't thought of it as applied to media. But yeah, when they're taking up all of the advertising oxygen, there's there's none left for all the new media outlets. You know, this idea that we all had in 1999 that like, hey, anyone could start a media organization very easily and quickly and then the best would win and we'd constantly have those new voices coming in.

Turns out all of that was just eaten by those two big companies. Yeah, all of it on the advertising side. I mean, it's a somewhat more complicated picture. There are two sort of positive stories in there. One is that Google and Facebook are increasingly realizing that they actually, this news that they have not been paying for and have been taking advantage of for free

while raiding their revenues is actually a big part of what makes their platforms work. And if they don't pay for it, it's going to go away. And Google News is part of what makes Google sticky. And why? When you Google something, these news results come up on top. They're doing that because they want their website to be good. And they're doing it essentially by ripping off publishers.

Same in many ways is true of Facebook. If that stuff ceases to exist, or if it's all behind a paywall, as it increasingly is, it kind of breaks those websites, right? Like, you don't want to be on Google and have every link go to a paywall. And if you're Google, you don't want that. If you're Facebook, you don't want that. Facebook, I think, realized that quicker and has, you know, is spending, I don't know, I think $100 million a year now licensing news content. It's not, doesn't replace the advertising business it took away. But it is a recognition that in some sense they are the distributors and if they want good content to distribute, they've got to pay for it. And then the other thing is

there is this new subscription model where so far it's really been niche things like the Information, this quite good tech business publication that are able to build smallish, high quality newsrooms that serve a really clear audience on a clear topic. I mean, a lot of like individual journalists are doing that on Substack. And that's, in many ways, like pretty inspiring and encouraging. It's also really, really small. All of those businesses are small. Yes. Well, let's talk about subscription for a little bit and the way that subscriptions have changed in media. I mean,

again, I remember when the New York Times started paywalling and said they were going to digital subscriptions, there was a lot of laughter about it, right? This will never work. And now it's a successful business. I mean, and it's a model that other newspapers are using. But I think one of the things your column made clear to me is that there is maybe a limited amount of subscription energy that the audience has, right? Like, people will only, you know, myself personally, I currently subscribe to three newspapers, but even I go, oh, that's kind of too many. I should probably drop the post because I don't really need that. But it does make me wonder how many people say, as the L.A. Times is fighting for their life,

how many people in Los Angeles say, well, I'll subscribe to the New York Times and not the L.A. Times and how much an effect that has had on sort of hastening the demise of the local news business. I mean, I think that there's no doubt that basically, right, if you live in L.A. and you want to know what's happening in the world, but maybe you don't care that much, but you don't care with like a burning passion about LA City Hall. You obviously subscribe to the New York Times, not the LA Times. You know, in fact, I mean, I started the first like New York City, City Hall blog back in the day in 2003. And the reality is nobody ever cared about what was happening in City Hall. On a great day I would get like 3,000 or 4,000 readers.

But the thing is, these City Hall reporters were paying attention and the politicians knew they were paying attention and the whole functioning of government in some ways, and the honest function of government depended on the idea that somebody was paying attention. Even if there was not a mass audience

for it. And when the newspapers moved online, they could see very, very clearly that there was not a mass audience for local coverage and they were shooting for mass audiences. And that's part of where there's this vital function that the LA Times City Hall Bureau serves, just of keeping government honest, even if most days most people aren't reading the story about the new ordinance that the city council passed. And that's a tricky thing to replace, because in a way, it's like a watchdog function, not even really a media function. You like never read that story about the city council. Yeah, I was I was gonna say those three to 4000 readers are most of them are probably other people working in city council or city hall. And they're all talking about what is being reported there.

I mean, I've gotten myself more aware of Los Angeles city politics in the last year or so. And yeah, when an article comes out about something like I read it and I tweet at the city council person in question and they pay attention to that. And you see these little sort of mini brouhahas spark up where you see them respond to an article that, you know, one reporter wrote that probably got 5,000 hits because they sort of see that as exposing something that they need to correct. Uh-oh, I'd better change my ways because the paper's on my back. No, the basic kind of cycle of life in cities with good media is that politicians are obsessed with the media. The media totally drives their agenda.

They react to the media, you know, sort of highlights problems, politicians solve them. And, you know, sometimes that means highlights fake problems that are a creation of a hysterical media, right? Like it's not always a good thing, but like the way in New York it's always worked is that the urban agenda is kind of driven by the media. And in that absence, these politicians like don't even really know what to do. I mean, it's like such a central part of kind of like life in the city. It's like a utility, like water and power. I mean, that's a big part of the case for something, the one sort of bright spot right now in the news landscape, which is nonprofit news, which is sort of, I mean, we in New York were able to persuade, you know,

a number of like local rich people who care about the city, basically. Like, hey, like this is like a really important utility. If you think your main issue is education or your main issue is, you know, poverty, like a big part of solving those issues is having local news reporters who are exposing, you know, lead, like a big part of solving those issues is having local news reporters who are exposing, you know, lead paint and public housing. And nobody's going to pay for that if you

aren't. And there's been success in that nationally or? Yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting. I mean, it depends on in part on having, I mean, in New York City, you have a lot of rich people, right? But you've got to have local civic people who care and have some resources to put into it. You've seen that happen all over, right? I mean, Texas Tribune is probably the first place that really nailed this model. But CalMatters in California does a great job at this. Berkeley side and Berkeley is a smaller version. And there's a lot happening in Chicago. This publication that I was involved in called The City in New York is doing a great job. And I think it's a really, I do think it's a really good model for sort of local accountability journalism that is ultimately like what fuels urban policy. And I think like, you know, like right now, like, Jesus Christ, is the federal government not good at anything, right? If there's anything in this crisis we're feeling, it's just that the federal government cannot functionally respond to this crisis. And Congress has not really been able to pass an economic package that anybody understands or seems to be working. And I think one of the things that you'll see in polling right now is that nobody trusts the federal government to do anything. But people are like surprisingly optimistic about local

government. James Fallows has a piece on this in The Atlantic just now. And like, I think there's all this energy around local government, local policymaking that, you know, including around the coronavirus crisis, where people are looking to governors, most of all, and that like, there needs to, you know, who's, who's covering them. Yeah. I mean, that's the problem is that you, you know, some of the cities you highlighted are, you know, New York, California, Texas, those are the wealthier cities I've been to as a standup comic, toured around and, you know, stayed in a hotel that had a free copy of, I want to say Nashville. Let's just say it's Nashville. And they had a, hey, you can grab a copy of the paper.

And I was like, oh, this is just not a newspaper. The thing that they were handing out. Nashville's a great example of like- But it's a big city. If your readers want to look, yeah, totally. If your readers want to look at like some really disturbing mistakes in news in the last couple of weeks,

the Gannett owns, I i think a number of papers in tennessee and they all published a front page editorial in in or in mid-march i think it was you have to look at the date that basically said the government is doing a really good job and we appreciate how they're not freaking out about the coronavirus which just turned out to be wrong right and? And it was all the papers speaking in one voice because they're all owned by the same chain. And she's essentially cheerleading a governor who, in retrospect, was way behind. It really, I don't know, just like a troubling situation. It is partly rich states. It's also partly like where you have really inspired

editors who've gotten there, who have managed to, or entrepreneurs who just like are passionate about it. You know, Mississippi Today is a good example of a publication doing this in a poor state. And do you have optimism that, you know, non-profit news is a scalable model that can, because so many places have become i've heard the phrase news deserts uh yeah that uh i'm sure a lot of folks listening to this show live in a place where you know the number of working journalists has like declined precipitously and it's uh you know there's there's nothing replacing them currently is is nonprofit news something that can help every part of the country?

I mean, I don't want to be too optimistic, right? Like, as you said, like, I mean, we're not, we're not, there's no path back to the scale of local journalism that you had 20 years ago with big metro newspapers. I mean, except maybe somebody takes a hammer to Google and Facebook and a lot of money falls out. That would be great. I mean, that's, but failing some really dramatic regulatory action. Yeah. That would be great. I think writing non-profit news is one of the things that's happening. I think often really driven by great journalists who just want to do the work. I think you also have a bunch of other things happening. Public radio actually is doing a lot more journalism than it used to,

or reporting than it used to. It really used to be aggregating other people's reporting, and as that has gone away, you've seen public radio stations get more on the internet and do reportings. To some read local TV, often like local TV stations, Facebook pages are the biggest source of news in a lot of communities. Wow. Yeah. And then you have like little local, essentially local blogs that have turned into small newsrooms. That's Berkeley side, that's Brooklyner, that's some of the Chicago outlets, you know, that are starting to raise money from their audiences, but like, it's so small. It's all so tiny. And I think it's so fragile, you know, in this in a moment when nobody's got any money.

It's gone from, you know, again, the oldest of old legacy media outlets to like one of the largest global media brands in a way. Yeah, I mean, I think the Times, the Times made this incredibly risky bet in 2000 and maybe nine. if you talk to A.G. Salzberger, the publisher, my boss about it, you know, essentially to like sell the furniture and start throwing like fixtures into the furnace to keep the newsroom intact. At a moment when the Washington Post cut very deeply into its journalism and the LA Times really vanished as a national paper. And so, and what happened really when Trump, it really was the Trumps, you know, and then what happened when, particularly when Trump came along as this national story, you had this huge audience for the Times was the last man standing. It was so obviously the best, you know, the most deeply resourced newsroom in the country. And as people got obsessed with the news, the Times subscription operation was there for them and it really bounced back incredibly dramatically.

And these things happen fast, right? In the tech world, in this sort of newbie world, you go from being a weird little startup to being a dominant monopolist overnight, which always freaks me out when you talk to these. And when you talk to tech guys who are 28 and are suddenly running these giant global companies and being asked to make these kind of moral decisions

about governance, they're always like, gosh, why are you asking me about free speech? I was in my mom's basement three years ago, in my WeWork with a mere million dollars three years ago. And there's a little of that at the Times, that like they still feel, and I think AG still feels like, wait a second, like we were selling the furniture last week

and now you're treating us like we're a monopolist? What the hell? And so there's this kind of real vertigo around the speed of the Times' rise, but they are taking full advantage of it. You know, they're buying podcast companies because the Daily has given them this huge space in the podcast market.

They see a path to being the HBO of podcasts. That's sort of what they're looking for. There's also a real global competition to be essentially kind of a second read globally. What The Economist is, what the FT is, I think The Times is very aggressively trying to get into that market everywhere in the world. The second read, is that what you said? Yeah, like you're a smart Australian who reads the Sydney Morning Herald, but wants a global paper. You know, the Times is competing with the FT, with the Guardian, with The Economist to be that

in Australia. I think, you know, I think, yeah, I think it's trying to create this huge global company and has very huge ambitions. Well, so let's talk about the monopoly part of it, because, you know, the the great thing about the New York Times story is how good the journalism is, right? That like it's it's still the best newsroom in America in terms of how many journalists it has, but also the, you know, the quality of the reporting. I mean, people have their, I'm not going to argue, you know, if someone, you know, wants to bring their specific issue to bear about, ah, this story wasn't handled the way I want. Sure. But I think pound for pound, it's a, I'm glad it exists. Right. But the problem with the

monopoly is, well, what happens if the monopoly changes, right? What happens if the, you know, business priorities shift and 10 years from now we're looking at a paper with a less high quality of journalism that still dominates our media ecosystem in the same way? I mean, do you have concerns about the paper's dominance as a monopoly simply for that reason? the paper's dominance as a monopoly simply for that reason? Yeah, I guess. I mean, I think there are lots of reasons that the sort of dominance of one voice in journalism is unhealthy, right? It's also all the whatever built-in assumptions and point of view any publication has. You just get huge stories totally wrong, right? And you want other voices challenging it. I mean, you know, the Times doesn't have monopoly on the share of voice. It's more like a monopoly, like it's more about the industry itself. I mean, the great thing about social media is that, you know, you just can't, it used to be like the way you would write a newspaper article is you'd like the first paragraph is who, what, when, where, why, and then you'd like kind of summarize the story. And then you have something called the

nut graph where you just like asserted some bullshit that you'd basically made up. Like, well, these two data points prove this vast trend about the world. And you really can't get away with that anymore. Somebody on Twitter will just be like, you're an idiot and tag your editor. And that's great. I think there is a sort of Times journalist, we all have to operate in a very transparent world where we interact. We're reporters anywhere, just have to fight with people on Twitter all day. You can't get away with total nonsense in the way that used to be utterly routine in newspaper journalism.

Whereas the great tradition of magazine journalism is just that you kind of make stuff up, whole cloth. And I think in general, it's just harder to get away with like the nonsense that is now remembered as the golden age of journalism. to me, if every newspaper reader in the country who wants to read this type of paper is only reading the exact same paper, that is, you know, the real argument against monopoly is that that's too much power for a private business to have, right? That it's too much power consolidation in one source, no matter how good the steward is, right? No matter how pure the intentions of the Salzburgers are, no matter how good the crossword puzzle is, that that's a degree of power that we don't want to rest in one set of hands or one small group set of hands. And to the extent that journalism is like an essential public utility, that does

seem problematic as much as it's been good that the New York Times hasn't fallen into the ashes and in fact has risen from it. It's a better world than one where it died along with, you know, the LA Times. But yeah, I mean, that is a concern I have. Yeah, that's a reasonable concern. Well, I want to ask you more about digital media, but we got to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Ben Smith.

I don't know anything. I don't know anything. more Ben Smith. Okay, we're back with Ben Smith. So look, again, you're famous for your work at BuzzFeed News, which is a newsroom I believe you built, correct? Yeah, that's right. which is a newsroom I believe you built, correct? Yeah, that's right. And I know it's... Maybe a strong word, but I'll take it. Sure. Infamous. Whatever.

Notorious. And BuzzFeed News is like a... I mean, it's a great newsroom at a digital outlet. Do you... But again, you know, we're... It seems like we're past the peak of that seeming like the future of news, of seeming like BuzzFeed and Vice were going to be, you know, the ultimate path forward. What do you see as the future of, you know, these all digital upstart outlets? Do you think we'll see more of them in the future?

Do you think they've reached their peak? I mean, I think the coronavirus crisis changes everything. I think if you'd asked me before, I would have said that BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, you know, have these real traction as generational voices and, you know, are telling a different kind of story in the native language of the internet, fast, funny, in a way that the Times doesn't quite have the muscles to do, and have a huge audience for that, and that editorially it's totally working and not going anywhere. I think that's still basically true. There's this big generational difference in how these places tell stories that you can see in the numbers that they get are really working.

I do think that all three of the companies I mentioned rely heavily on advertising. And right now, the broader trends were tough, but they had kind of figured it out. But the coronavirus just tosses, I think just for every company in America, it's really unclear what the next steps are. And it goes for The Times too. Times revenue is 30 or 40% advertising. Coronavirus just tosses, like, I think just for every company in America, it's really unclear what the next steps are. Yeah.

And it goes for the Times, too. Times revenue is 30 or 40 percent advertising. Did it change your perspective on that part of the business at all when you joined the Times? Was there any sort of revelation about, oh, here's something I didn't get about the business I was in until you made that switch and saw what it was like on the other side? You know, I'm still just like getting used to having a normal boss. So what was so weird about your boss before? Oh, Jonah, many things. But I wasn't getting it.

But, you know, I was running the newsroom. And now I'm, you know, I was actually on the phone with my editor the other day. And my son was like, it's so weird that you're my daughter. I actually said, it's so weird that you have a boss. I was like, hmm. Because before you didn't, you were the boss? There are great editors at BuzzFeed who would edit me and fight with me about my own copy,

but it's different to have a great editor who is really your boss. I'm getting used to the idea. I mean, what do you see as being the path forward for the news over the next five years? Like what trends are you seeing? You've already talked about nonprofit news. with partisanship, with the kind of Donald Trump show that is matched only with the obsessive reading about Donald Trump and the kind of riveting quality of the Donald Trump show.

And I don't really know where that reaches its breaking point, right? I mean, is there a lane for somebody to come in and say, you know what, like everything, Donald Trump and this era have just tainted everything. Like it or hate it, and there's space for something new. I kind of like feel that intuitively, but I don't really know the business case for it. I also think like the, you know,

the one thing about the internet and about, and that I think the coronavirus crisis really brings home is just how global it is. You know, like, like one of the great things about the internet is, is the extent to which you can really identify with people in totally different places in this really immediate way. And I think at Buzzfeed, we thought a lot about telling stories in a way that, you know, it could be a story about a date rape in Mumbai where part of what happened happened on Tinder. And that's a story that people in New York can really read and relate to because you're using the same kind of digital tools,

even if it was also a very Indian story. Great, great story by Nishita Jha that I'm thinking of. And I think, you know, one of the, this Washington Post foreign correspondent, Emily Ruhala, tweeted the other day that she felt like part of the failure in the corona, you know, part of the broad failure in coronavirus was like a failure to see the Chinese victims of it and people early on, to sort of identify with, see the humanity in people in other countries, which was, you know, I think, I actually think that is true. And if Americans had totally identified with the people in Wuhan, we would have freaked out earlier and more effectively. That said, I also think probably we did identify with them more than we would have five or 10 years ago, these kind of you know chinese social media around this doctor you know yes what was then translated and went everywhere and was really easy to relate to these doctors and nurses being told to shut up

by their government um you know became folk heroes globally not just in in china and i think there's a really interesting globalization of media that in some ways, there are a lot of obstacles to it. A lot of national governments don't want it. Yeah. But there is a kind of globalization of the internet conversation that's really interesting. And you see, you know, TikTok is obviously this like incredible example of it, where these memes are kind of flowing freely from country to country.

It's interesting, though, because sometimes it still feels like there's a certain parochialism to even our largest media organizations. Like I read, I can't remember where I read this piece, but it really influenced me a lot. It was about why, you know, American media always portrays people in China as being frustrated with their authoritarian government as like this being the moment that they're going to fight back. And that's because that's the American reporters bias on events in China, that there's only a couple dozen American reporters in China. They all sort of have the same kind of feeling. And, you know, the the like it's very hard for us to get our to get media that accurately reflects like what is going on in the media zeitgeist in China.

You know, we have that's a very effective. Totally. You sort of get your your perspective reflected back to you, basically. I think that's always a huge I'm not I's different reporters in China who say different things, but that is the very old criticism of American media. There's a really famous... I think it was a whole issue of the New Republic in the 20s was devoted to the New York Times' coverage of the Russian Revolution and showing how at every turn the Times was talking about how the whites were on the brink of defeating the Reds.

And of course, the Reds, you know, and totally, totally missed what was happening, which was that the Bolsheviks were going to win. Yeah. Because that wasn't what their readers wanted to hear. So that's, I mean, that is an old, old challenge. But I think there are new tools, though, for like telling these global stories. Right. I mean, I think like obviously the Trump story isn't really an American story, right? You've got Trumpy figures all over the world.

The corona, you know, I think there's this assumption right now, like, America is handling this worse than every other country, and our leaders are, like, uniquely clownish and incompetent. Not totally clear that's true. Like, what's going on in Italy and Spain? Like, you know, like, I think, and I do think that, like, there's a generation that has grown up on the internet without this sort of attachment to national borders. And there's

space for media that is more attuned to that. I mean, if you ask me what's new and interesting, I'm not, I don't really have a publication in mind, but that feels like a space. Yeah. Is there a, is there a publication that seems like at birth international? Because so many of the ones you've mentioned, New York Times, Guardian, Economist, I still see as, oh, that's an American publication. That's a British magazine, et cetera. But one that's like internationally native? No. I mean, no.

I mean, BuzzFeed is probably as close as you get. But I think no. The other thing is nobody wants something that isn't from anywhere and has no point of view. Right. Like you sort of like you got to be written for somebody. So it's complicated. What about the prospects for, you know, one of the saddest things for me in media has been the the demise, the slow demise of the former Gawker publications. just because I enjoy reading them, right? Because of how sort of voicey and weird and personal they were that, you know, the ones that still exist.

I still read Kotaku every day, which is their video game blog, because it feels like, you know, the best of, you know, mid-2000s blog writing in a lot of ways, but in that I know the people who are writing it. It feels personal. A lot of it's like, here's what I played this weekend,

but it's got news rolled in. It was this particular sort of media product that, you know, hasn't been reproduced, at least in a way that's very clear to me. And that sort of niche, obviously we don't need to recap the story of what happened, right, to those particular publications. But do you still see a space for that type of writing? I mean, I guess I think if you want to find incredibly witty, insidery, occasionally really

brutal, real-time commentary, Twitter is very hard to compete with. I think Twitter destroyed the blogs because it is in some ways a more efficient way to do all those things. So I think that's really the answer. There are a lot of other reasons for Gawker's demise. But the other thing is that it really got absorbed into mainstream media culture in this profound way. One of the really brilliant Gawker editors. And I think in a way the guy who sort of invented what I think of as the voice of the internet, this sort of email, it was just sort of the voice of an email to your friend is Corey Sika, who now, who's now runs the New York Times style section. I think one of the weird things about the Times right now is that it absorbed a huge

chunk of the internet. I'm there, Corey's there, Kara Swisher is there, all these people who were running publications five, ten years ago, now work for the New York Times in this sort of weird, uneasy place where we all have slightly different views about what media ought to be and have been fighting each other for 10 or 15 years,

and now we're all in the same place, like running a little, like I'm only running my column, but Corey's running the style section. James Bennett, who ran The Atlantic, is running opinion. And you can kind of, you know, Dodie Stewart, who's another great golfer media person,

is the deputy Metro editor. And you sometimes see stuff in Metro that is so, like, kind of fresh and plain English. And, you know, you're like, oh, man, like that DNA is so clearly there. And I think you sort of, because the Times has swallowed so much of journalism, you see a lot of these fights now playing out inside the Times in a way that as like a sort of semi-outsider, semi-insider now is really interesting to watch.

Yeah. And how do you feel about that transition though? Because again, like, so Corey's work, who, yeah, I've read for years and all the various blogs that he uh founded and you know spearheaded and created this style to see what is kind of like you know a beautiful field of wildflowers right all sprouting up uh all come and be put inside the greenhouse of the New York Times does that bum you out ever or does that feel like a natural transition to you no it kind of sometimes it's just sort of feel like the Death Star just pulled us all in. It's tractor beams. That said, it's a really interesting moment at the Times.

There is a sense of letting a lot of flowers bloom in a way that, I don't know if it's long-term sustainable for the institution. I think at some point you'll probably see the pendulum back and have a moment when the publisher or the editor is like, all right, here are the rules, here are the lines, stay inside them. I think there's a natural swing of a pendulum inside institutions. And I think right now the Times is benefiting a lot from this broadening of what it can be. But then at some point you have to be like, wait a second, we're not everything to everybody.

This is our identity. We're going to narrow it back down we're not there yet at the Times that'll be the day before my last day but I think that's a very natural thing but if you read the Times obsessively or even closely you really will see these competing voices kind of trying to figure out what New

York Times voice is. And I think the publisher, A.G. Salzberg, or the editor, Dean McKay, are unusually relaxed about that. And I think because it's working right now. And there's a lot of, you know, and I think they're trying to understand, like, what are the core values within which you can express in a lot of different styles? I don't know. My own point of view is that at some point you probably have to decide. Do you, are there any? I hope they'll pick my version, but you know. Because you're literally, you see yourself as being in a struggle with your colleagues over the direction of paper? No, not at all. I'm just like blogging away here, you know, and like have an incredible, brilliant editor who's making my writing a lot better and pushing me, but not, but you know, they've been letting me sort of wander into Metro stories,

which I came up as a New York political reporter and got to do a column about Andrew Cuomo and one is Bill de Blasio that are both, I think, plausibly disguised as media columns, but ultimately like it's, there's a blurring of lines that people seem comfortable with. Yeah. But when you're looking at the whole industry, right, in terms of how these shifts in the rise of Facebook and Google, the dominance of the Times have affected, you know, the health of media in America, are there structural changes that you want to see in order to improve that health? And I know there are when I look at my business, the entertainment industry, right? That's why I love Scott Galloway's argument about breaking up big tech. Do you

similarly want an intervention? I mean, I'm not a policy guy or an advocate. And I also really love a lot of tech. Like, I love Twitter, you know. And there's a lot about social media, particularly right now in this crisis, that I think is incredibly powerful. And I think they're doing a decent job reining in misinformation. So I'm not like a, I don't think I'm on, but I do think right.

I mean, if you want a real flowering of a massive scale of local media again, the only thing you can do is go after Google and Facebook's advertising businesses and find a way to split them up and spread them around again. But I do think the problem is, Facebook has built a better mousetrap around advertising than a local newspaper is going to do,

and it serves the advertiser well. It's just not totally clear to me how you do that. There are people, I think Matt Stoller is one of the big boys at Antitrust who has a lot of specific thoughts about how you could do that. So I think that's not, I don't think, outside the realm of possibility. Failing that, I think it's more like a lot of little interventions.

It's about people paying for the news that they care about also. Yeah. Last question I have for you. I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't ask it because, you know, people, you know, I have to come across people who have bones to pick with the times, right? Who say, hey, my candidate was covered unfairly or, you know, here was an issue that we, that the times, you know, represented oddly over a course of many months, et cetera. How do you think about those sort of, you know, institutional when people raise those sort of, you know, concerns about the institution's coverage? When you're the person on the inside, you know, the individual reporters. Right. You understand how the sausage is made and how.

So what are those sort of complaints look like to you? Do you give them? I mean, again, so just just to be clear, like I went to the office for two weeks and then they shut it down. So I don't I don't know who started there. But I mean, I bet I've known these people for a long time. And and I think, you know, I was at Politico before a lot of the Politico team now really dominates the New York Times politics coverage. You know, I think it's complicated, honestly. Like, I think that what Times reporters mostly think about all day, what Maggie Haberman thinks about all day, is getting new information that is accurate and publishing it. Not about, does this help Donald Trump or hurt Donald Trump? Not about, is this headline exactly balanced correctly.

They're thinking about reporting. And I think what Dean McKay thinks about all day is reporting. And that's not the lens through which a lot of it is interpreted. I think, I mean, one thing is that, you know, a lot of social media, people mostly just read the headline. And I think there is this, like, did you even read the story? That is the wrong reflex. Like, no, actually, a lot of people just read the headline. Headlines are really important.

Maybe more important than the stories. The tweet is really important. People aren't overreacting when they get mad about that stuff. At the same time, to me, the thing that embodies the debate is the should you cover the briefing live? Like, for instance, the Seattle NPR affiliate decided to stop taking Trump's briefing live, which seems like a reasonable thing to do to me. Like, you know, he's spewing misinformation and, you know, and it's, you know, maybe not the most relevant news thing and you can process it and pull out the Fauci stuff later. That said, I don't know how many listeners to the Seattle NPR affiliate are kind of like brainwashed Trump supporters, right? And the people having this debate and the people,

how many New York Times readers are swayed in favor of Donald Trump by a headline that is maybe a little ambiguous? It feels like a media that is really like, whose readers are mostly, you know, some of them think Trump is Satan. Some of them just think he's the worst president ever. Are like, is arguing kind of with itself. Where a huge part of the country is totally detached from that media. And Fox News is like not having this argument or whether to take the briefing. Like it feels like a lot of these conversations, people are taking out their frustration.

I don't know. I feel like we're almost giving the Times too much credit. Like, it wasn't Times readers who elected Donald Trump. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little bit, maybe there's an element where, is it just, you know, this is the audience that's paying attention, so they're the ones that have the complaints? Like, I'm sure there's plenty of Fox News viewers

who are dyed-in-the-wool, you know, talk radio listeners and conservatives who are like, oh, Fox News is being soft on this, right? There are a lot of Fox News viewers who thinks that Fox is too liberal. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean, yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, they have internal research that shows that. It's probably part of why they are so nervous

about things like OANN and, you know, these kind of fringy right-wing things. It's an interesting question, though, when you say that, you know, Maggie Haberman and that sort of reporter is just concerned with the reporting, because on the one hand, I, you know, I sympathize with that. I'm like, yeah, exactly as they should be. And, you know, that enough in itself is a difficult job.

How do you balance that, though, with, you know, having a view of what the totality of the reporting is doing, right? Because no, no form of information gathering is like neutral, right? It's value neutral, it's not expressing some sort of point of view. And that strikes me as a difficult thing to do. It is a really difficult thing. And I'm, I mean, I'm, I kind of came, you know, I kind of grew up in New York City Hall, sitting across from Maggie covering, you know, local politics. And the kinds of reporters who are good at getting information, which I'd put myself in this group, like, you can't do it well if you're thinking too much about what impact will revealing this information have. You have to be a little bit, you know, you have to blind yourself a little to the impact of reporting. Because I think, you know, if you write a story thinking, what will the political consequences of this be?

The temptation is to lie. The temptation is to leave things out. The temptation is to put your thumb on the scale. And of course, as you said, there's no way around that. You wind up subconsciously doing things and framing and stuff like that. But I think the most dishonest reporting often comes from people who are thinking really hard about who will this help, who will this hurt. And by the way, it's really unpredictable. Like when we published the dossier at BuzzFeed, we didn't think for one second, I mean, we didn't think for one second about what are the political ramifications of this. It just was not, it's just

not part of the consideration when you do that kind of reporting. I mean, you can think the decision was wrong or right, but it certainly wasn't. And I think right now there have been moments when it seemed like doing that was this huge blow to Donald Trump. There have been moments when it seemed like doing that was a huge gift to Donald Trump. I think historians will have to decide.

But like good reporters, the job is to find out information and publish it. It is not to spend a lot of time wringing your hands over more than that. I hear that, but if I can just bring in an example from my own experience, I'm very involved in homelessness service providing in Los Angeles.

I work with a few groups out here and it's just, it's my pet issue, right? And I have concerns with like the LA Times is coverage of homelessness in California. And I have concerns with like the L.A. Times is coverage of homelessness in California. And I've spoken to some reporters and said, hey, I think there's a point of view that's being missed. Right. And they've said largely what you said, which is, hey, well, no, we're reporting the facts. And, you know, I mean, let us know if we're missing something. But, you know, this is very straightforward reporting. And in my view, well, the totality of the

reporting usually prioritizes the needs of housed Angelenos over the folks who are dying on the street. Right. And is written from that point of view rather than the point of view of, you know, when folks are on the street, it's extremely difficult to even access services, much less get into housing. And, you know, that that point of view is being missed, right? And so I get the point that you're making, but what, you know, how do we rectify when, you know, how do we reconcile the idea that, you know, maybe there is a valid point of view

that's being missed? Yeah, no, I mean, I think, you know, it's not really an abstract question. Like I just gave you essentially the sophisticated version of go fuck yourself that every reporter who doesn't want to be questioned gives somebody who's questioning them. And the reality is it's case by case.

You should be getting the story right and people don't always. And the question of whose perspective is represented, can you tell the stories from multiple perspectives, things like that are really important. And I think it's like, it's it really does then come down to the details, like it's hard to argue about in the abstract, right? Right. It's just really fascinating to me. Because I also the go fuck yourself answer, I get it, right? Like, I, it makes sense to me, I can imagine myself giving the same answer if I were in the position of the reporter, right?

Saying, hey, here's what I have to do every day. But the question of how we reconcile the scoped out view of what point of view is being represented with the scoped in version of how do we report it every single day, I don't know how to answer that question. Yeah, and I think what's it's really, I mean, I think there's this question with Metro, with city reporting that I think the Times and others have wrestled with, where the Times, for instance, I think rightly a couple years ago, essentially was like, you know, we're not going to cover every meeting

of the New York City Transit Authority Board. We're going to write, every six months, we're going to write an unbelievably detailed, rich, thorough takeout of what the hell happened to the subways. And that is going to really move the needle and set policy and change everybody's mind. And millions of people will read that where nobody was reading the updates on the transit board meeting. That said, if nobody's covering the transit board meeting, crazy stuff's going to happen at the transit board meeting, right? And this nonprofit, and those

incremental stories about it are a little insidery, lack the scope that you're talking about wanting, and are written by beat reporters who are just writing each step, step, step, step, step, and assuming you've read every other story and most people haven't. The big scoped out thing is meatier and I do think often can reflect a less insider perspective, a perspective that isn't just the point of view of the institution

or of power, but can kind of miss the function of that kind of beat reporting. And so, I mean, I don't know, great newspapers have, you know, it'd be nice to have the resources to do both, but even the Times doesn't really. You know, it's hard to imagine anybody will. I think there are rooms for different kinds of publications

doing different things. I mean, what's happening in New York City right now, which is really unusual, is that you have this giant, this paper with 1,700 reporters putting hundreds and hundreds of reporters into the local store, which is coronavirus. And you're seeing what, like, in a way, what an old-school metro operation with just huge resources can do. That's, of course, not going to be true when this moves to other cities. To bring us home here, we've talked a

lot about how important journalism is, how important their work is, how important our media ecosystem is. But, you know, the news consumer is like half of this equation, right? The person actually reading the news. Yeah. Is there ever, do you ever find yourself wishing that media consumers understood or took in the news any differently? And do you have any message for folks at home who want to be more, I don't know, responsible or engaged consumers for what they could do a little differently?

Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, gosh, that's a really great question. I should have a good answer too. I mean, I guess I'm of the view that we should demystify this stuff. Reporting isn't really like a profession with skills. Like anybody, I'm talking to people all day. Some of them

are telling me things and saying, you can quote me, and some are telling me things and saying, but you have to keep my name secret. And I'm trying to check those things out, and I'm writing them down. There's nothing in there that isn't like a normal smart person can't just figure out and replicate. And I think that there's no

mystery to it. And I think there's this sort of television instinct and kind of some old school print instinct to make it seem like journalists are this kind of priestly class with special knowledge and access. And I think the degree to which that's not true and we should get away from that. And I think readers ought to be able to feel like they can just like challenge and ask journalist questions but also

we're not doing anything weird, we don't have weird motives there's not really like, nothing happening behind the curtain here yeah they're just people yeah and operating at best pretty transparently, like when you can, it's like here are the documents it was based on. Here's the segment I'm writing about, you know.

Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show to talk to us about it, Ben. I'm sure you got plenty on your plate in this crazy time. It's deadline day. But yes, thanks for having me on. No problem. Thanks for being here. All right. Well, I want to thank Ben Smith one more time for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.

I have been Adam Conover. I want to thank our producer, Dana Wickens, our engineers, Brett Morrison, Ryan Connor, our superstar researcher, Sam Roudman, Andrew WK for our theme song. Hey, you can find me online at AdamConover.net or at Adam Conover wherever you like on social media. And hey, see you next time on Factually. Thanks so much for listening. That was a HeadGum Podcast.