This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com Ben is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Semafor, a global news company. He was an old-school blogger at Politico and others, the first editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and the media columnist for the NYT. His new book is Tra

Ben Smith is the co-founder of Semafor, and the author of a brand new book called, ‘Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, And Delusion In The Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral.’ In this conversation, we talk about the state of the media, what is going right, what is going wrong, what he learned from working at BuzzFeed, Politico, Ne

In the early 2000s, a significant media-business mistake emerged: the belief that website traffic is a commodity like oil, which would generate increased revenue as advertising improved. However, unlike other commodities, traffic lacked scarcity. The internet made traffic virtually infinite, posing challenges for new m

It’s our first four-way pod, featuring BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, Gawker founder Nick Denton, and Semafor founder (and former editor-in-chief of the recently shuttered BuzzFeed News) Ben Smith, who wrote a book about them both. Peter Kafka talks to all of them in conjunction with Smith’s new book “Traffic: Genius,

Ben Smith is the former and founding editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, the founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, and the author of a new book called Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, which is about the rise and fall of the social platform age in media, through the lens of

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Ben Smith, media columnist for the New York Times and former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. Ben spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the gatekeepers who hold the powe