Maybe I should have waited a week to interview Ben Smith. It was Friday, April 14, when I drove out to Smith’s place in Brooklyn, where he lives in a neighborhood that feels like you’re in some leafy suburb, full of picturesque Victorian homes. I’d schlepped out there to gab with Smith about his new book, Traffic, out now from Penguin Press, in which his former boss Jonah Peretti lands at the center of the narrative. (Nick Denton too, but more on that later.)
In the book, a postmortem of the mid-aughts digital-media revolution, we follow Peretti from his origins as a Huffington Post cofounder famous for a viral 2001 stunt-email to Nike, to his rise at BuzzFeed as one of the towering CEOs of the digital age. BuzzFeed is where Smith worked as Peretti’s editor in chief for eight years. Together, they built BuzzFeed News from the ground up and transformed it into a Pulitzer Prize–winning brand that became a talent farm for legacy institutions like The New York Times, which, case in point, hired Smith as its media columnist in 2020.
So we were sitting on Smith’s porch talking about BuzzFeed, and of course neither of us knew that, in another six days, BuzzFeed News would be a goner, the latest in a series of grim cost-cutting measures at Peretti’s 17-year-old company, which is struggling with macroeconomic pressures, the shifting content-distribution landscape, and the ongoing fallout from a disastrous IPO. Still, one of my inquiries turned out to be prescient.
A few weeks earlier, I’d gotten an email from Jill Abramson, the former Times executive editor who’d made BuzzFeed a major character in her own book several years back. Before heading off to Brooklyn, I texted Abramson and asked if I could read Smith her email and get his response. She said sure:
Is it because we are all charmed by Peretti, that the scandalous swindle that was his long-awaited IPO hasn’t been truly investigated? Key questions: How much dough did he make on the deal? How much did Ben Smith make on his stock? One viral Nike chain of emails many years ago has turned into an epic mess. Was Peretti’s ‘genius’ a complete chimera all along?
“I mean, if she’s saying the stock is at a dollar,” said Smith, “that’s exactly true.” He picked up his phone to double-check. “96 cents.” He also declined to quantify the return on his BuzzFeed equity: “I do not share the millennial compulsion to disclose your personal income.”
And the part about whether Peretti simply had us fooled this whole time?
“No, Jonah actually is a genius,” Smith countered. “Like, I think he saw around the corner, and saw social media, and saw these changes coming, but overestimated the degree to which he could kind of channel them, or control them. I always felt like I was working with somebody who could kind of see the future a bit. But he’d also never run a news organization. And so, often he would be able to say, ‘Hey, here’s what the world’s gonna be like in five years,’ which is an incredible insight. And I’d be like, ‘Okay, what do we do right now?’ He’d be like, ‘I don’t know, we gotta figure it out.’ But he really could see around corners.”
The following week, as Peretti’s announcement circulated far and wide, Smith would end up elaborating on these thoughts in a BuzzFeed News requiem published by his new digital media organization, Semafor, cofounded last year with ex-Bloomberg honcho Justin Smith.
“The end of BuzzFeed News,” Smith wrote, “signals a vast shift in digital media that those of us who live inside it are feeling intensely right now, the end of one era and the beginning of another. Peretti had built BuzzFeed into a traffic juggernaut by being among the first to see the rising social web. But BuzzFeed never found a new path when that trend turned against us—when consumers found their Facebook feeds toxic, not delightful; when platforms decided news was poison; and when Facebook, Twitter, and the rest simply stopped distributing links to websites…. Those of us lucky enough to be building from scratch in this new moment have to realize that the old way of thinking about news—based in text on the World Wide Web and distributed primarily on social media—has passed. But the demand to understand what’s happening in the world hasn’t gone away.”
Back on Smith’s porch, I picked his brain on other topics that have lately bewitched the media commentariat. AI in newsrooms?
“These things are language tools and we should use them to the degree that they’re valuable. I’ve found ChatGPT is really good at copyediting, and I don’t really see a problem with asking it to find typos. We’re not using it to write articles or anything like that. To me the most interesting use cases are in video, where lots of kinds of animation are very, very technical and very, very expensive, and there’s no way a newsroom of our size, or probably yours, could produce an animated mini documentary that costs a hundred thousand dollars.”
Joe Pompeo
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