I met him in Turin during the presentation of his new book, Traffic. After an engaging conversation with a former editor of a major Italian newspaper — who was also waiting in line to have a copy signed. I introduced myself to Mr. Smith. I told him that Semafor, the most innovative news site in recent years, had been a major source of inspiration for the creation of Mediatrends. This sparked an immediate discussion about the concept of post-social information, and with great enthusiasm, I asked him for an interview.
Ben Smith, born in 1976 and based in Brooklyn, is the founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, a global news company that has secured $34 million in investments. Previously, he covered media and journalism for The New York Times and served as editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.
Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral chronicles the remarkable evolution of journalism, audiences, and the ways we consume news on our smartphones over the past two decades. The book weaves together the stories of key pioneers in American digital journalism, revealing how their innovations — often unwittingly — helped shape the way we interact with information today.
(Carlo Castorina – CC): Can you summarize the contents of your book “Traffic” and tell us what objectives you aimed to achieve with its publication?
(Ben Smith – BS): When I left BuzzFeed and got to the New York Times in 2020, I had the feeling that an era was ending — the first utopian, explosive era of digital media. I wanted to stop to understand what had happened, and how we got here. So the book was an opportunity to go back before my own arrival on the scene, and then to trace what we understood and what we got wrong — particularly about the intersection of technology, media, and politics.
CC: Speaking of traffic, Google and OpenAI are revolutionizing search engines, raising many concerns among publishers. What do you think?
BS: The era of publishers’ reliance on search seems clearly to be ensign, and there will be huge fights over who benefits from the journalism these platforms rely on. Everyone involved needs to build a sustainable business model for great journalism.
CC: Deal or no deal? Media companies are taking divergent paths on AI. Semafor has recently launched Signals, a global multi-source breaking news feed born from the partnership with Microsoft and Open AI. How does it work?
BS: Consumers find the news disorienting and hard to trust right now — in part because they understand that every publication and every journalist brings a particular perspective. Signals is an effort to address that need by identifying the shared facts, and then bringing in information from different perspectives and around the world — and the research tools from Microsoft and OpenAI have allowed us to search more widely across languages for those perspectives than would have been possible.
CC: What motivated you to leave the New York Times to launch Semafor? How do you see Semafor in ten years?
BS: I had a front-row seat to all the changes in media when I was at the times, and the opportunity to start something new was too hard to resist — especially with a great partner in Justin Smith, a really visionary CEO, and a moment of really dramatic change and need from news consumers.
CC: How happy are you with your China and Global Business Initiative? Do you think a year on there has been progress in better understanding the dynamics of the relationship? And do you think there’s space to explore other geopolitical stories that way…for example in Russia?
BS: The U.S. China relationship is one of the biggest stories in the world and we want to keep covering it. But it’s also incredibly challenging to do journalism there – much less in Russia! In Russia, we’ve been relying on reporting from incredibly brave journalists in exile at our partner Meduza and other outlets for a fair-minded glimpse at what’s happening in that society and on that side of the war. Despite the social platforms moving away from the news business, it seems that online publications, especially in Europe, still depend on them. Will we ever reach a post-social information era? How real is this “back to the future for a diminished digital news business”?
We will always use many different channels, but the era of relying totally on giant social platforms is over. They are powerful tools for finding information and for marketing your own journalism, but no longer the center of the ecosystem.
CC: You often talk about a fragmented new media landscape. What differences do you see between US digital media and European digital media?
BS: The biggest difference, which fascinates me, is the relative strength of local journalism in Europe versus its collapse in the U.S.
CC: What fate awaits TikTok in the United States? Frank McCourt plans to buy and rebuild TikTok as “a new and better version of the internet where individuals are respected and they own and control their identity and their data.” Is it possible?
BS: I think it is unlikely. I don’t know if ByteDance will sell. And if they do, they’ll sell to the highest bidder — probably a giant American company or an extremely well-capitalized private group that seeks to exploit their giant network and advertising business.
CC: From Mastodon to Bluesky, many have tried to take the place of the former Twitter. How long will X last? And can Threads really weaken X?
BS: X is weaker than it was, and less relevant, but has beaten off these early challenges I think.
CC: What effect could Donald Trump’s victory have on the media and their industry?
BS: I think the biggest effect may be in his promises to shift the law and the norms in the U.S. against the media, who operate with enormous freedom at the moment.
CC: What advice would you give to a startup founder who wants to launch a new online magazine?
BS: Keep your costs low, and be serious about the business.
CC: What will be the most important skills for journalism in the future?
BS: Getting scoops.
CC: Who will be the next Ben Smith of the New York Times?
BS: Maybe you!
