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What year is it? Consider these facts...͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌ 
 
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April 24, 2023
semafor

Media

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Ben Smith
Ben Smith

Welcome to Semafor Media, where we break the news behind the news.

It’s been a very strange week for me. I was starting to promote my new book, “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral,” when the “delusion” part of the subtitle manifested itself in the shutdown of BuzzFeed News, where I’d been the founding editor from 2012 to 2018.

Tonight, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from the book, detailing what will go down in history as one of the dumbest business decisions of the digital media age, Jonah Peretti’s decision in 2014 to turn down a $650 million offer from Disney. Bob Iger was furious, his deputies were flummoxed.

Reporting out that chapter reminded me why I’d been among those pushing Jonah to say “no.” We felt we had so much more to build. And I’m proud of the work BuzzFeed News did over the next decade, which I think was probably only possible in a scrappy, independent newsroom. But I’ll understand if nobody wants me in the room on future M&A negotiations. (And if you’re hiring, there are dozens of great BuzzFeed News journalists out there looking for work — hit me up if you want recommendations.)

Max writes today on what’s next: A digital landscape at least temporarily looks a lot like 2007. You are, obviously, in on the email resurgence. But did you know that Washington insiders are again reading Mark Halperin, and that The Drudge Report has regained a bit of swagger?

ALSO: Bloomberg reprimands reporters over questionable sourcing, private information for NBC reporters is exposed, and a potential merger between two nonprofit news orgs.

Box Score
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Los Angeles: Jeff Shell, the CEO of NBCUniversal, is the latest in an incredible string of Hollywood men to lose their jobs over an “inappropriate relationship.” You’ve got to think Cesar Conde, of NBC News, is among those in line for the job: He’s presided over an incredibly low-drama operation as ABC/CNN/FOX go up in flames of various temperatures. And the NBC decision to hedge on streaming, and bet on ad-supported, television-style video on demand, rather than yet another subscription only service, looks awful smart right now.

Silicon Valley: If Twitter’s meltdown was a TV show, it wouldn’t get renewed. So boring, so confusing, so many characters. The fight over blue checks is stupid, the elevation of Russian and Chinese propaganda is grim. As its one time king would say, Sad!

Berlin: The shoes keep dropping on Axel Springer CEO Matthias Dopfner, including a rough leak to Die Zeit and a roman a clef by his former close friend Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre. Good thing he owns the company! — FT

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Max Tani

It’s back to the future for a diminished digital news business

THE NEWS

What year is it? Consider the following:

  • The Drudge Report is the biggest political website in the country.
  • Jonah Peretti, a digital media entrepreneur, is focused on building the homepage traffic of HuffPost.
  • A class of independent writers including Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan are sharing quick daily posts synthesizing information on politics, media, and technology.
  • Washington’s elite are reading Mark Halperin’s DC tipsheet, according to two sources. Several prominent White House reporters are fans, as is the editor-in-chief of Politico, a regular reader.
  • New media startups are increasingly finding readers are interested in news directly to their inboxes with scoops and analysis.
  • Old news giants, led by the New York Times, are profitably selling exclusive content, from news to crossword puzzles, in a bundle to their paying subscribers.

MAX’S VIEW

Homepage traffic, blogging, niche email newsletters. They were some of the foundational concepts of digital media in the early 2000s. And as the digital news media business turns again, they’re increasingly the ones media organizations are turning to.

For the last decade, social media websites like Facebook and Twitter were the virtual front pages of the internet, delivering a mix of viral news and whatever articles and videos social algorithms thought you wanted. Digital publications popped up to take advantage of the eyeballs, and money followed, hoping the cat listicle website or the Brooklyn guide for do’s and don’ts could really be this generation’s New York Times or MTV.

But Facebook’s sharp turn away from news and the mercy-killing of “blue check” Twitter, along with BuzzFeed News’s shutdown, cuts at Insider (the first official mass layoffs in the company’s history), and Vice’s increasing desperation for a sale are another indication that the social web that defined the 2010s is over for news consumers.

And the new era, strangely, resembles an earlier one, suggesting that “the 2010s were a detour, not the new path forward,” as Slate editor-in-chief Hillary Frey put it last week.

Just as streaming services start to look a lot like television, news too has turned back to the future. Across the board, many news publishers have noticed that readers aren’t finding their articles on Facebook or Twitter. They’re coming straight to them, loading up the webpages on their phones or desktop.

The case of HuffPost — left for dead by Verizon, and now BuzzFeed’s lone surviving news operation — is instructive. Peretti told remaining staff that he was encouraged by the traffic to the homepage of HuffPost, one of the original link aggregators and blogs. Slimmed down by cuts, the liberal site is once again profitable on the back of dedicated homepage readership and advertisers’ willingness to support some of its safer content, which includes lifestyle and identity coverage.

“We are going to concentrate our news efforts in HuffPost,” Peretti told remaining BuzzFeed staffers on Friday. “HuffPost is a brand that is profitable with a highly engaged, loyal audience that’s less dependent on social platforms. And as we see the challenges of Facebook and Twitter, the HuffPost homepage will be increasingly valuable to people trying to figure out what’s going on in the world and make sense of the world.”

HuffPost isn’t alone. Fox News executives may not be pleased with the $787 million they’ll be forking over to Dominion Voting Systems in last week’s settlement. But they can take some solace in the fact that the outlet’s website, always one of the most trafficked in the US, has experienced a serious bump in traffic in recent months, particularly to the site’s homepage. According to Similarweb stats shared with Semafor by Howard Polskin, president of TheRighting, more than 70% of the site’s visitors last month came directly to the Fox News homepage, with a small chunk from search, and a tiny trickle from social media.

For digital media OGs like Josh Marshall, today’s media landscape looks awfully familiar.

The site Marshall founded, Talking Points Memo, was one of the earliest political blogs, and cultivated a small but dedicated following in the 2000s with reporting and analysis. But during the social boom, TPM was dwarfed by giants like BuzzFeed and Vice, which gobbled up the small amount of advertising revenue there was for digital publishers. TPM survived the tumult by remaining lean, building an early subscription business by cultivating a medium-sized audience of liberal readers, and refusing to chase scale (Marshall described this to me as “a bit of being smart and a bit of being lucky and a lot of being unwilling to give up the control that I needed to to get the resources to scale in a serious way”).

The TPM founder said that in some ways, he has been encouraged by the death of the social web, which drove publishers to chase virality at all costs and sometimes made the relationships between readers and publishers an afterthought.

“It’s again made scale not the be all and end all and has made a dedicated relationship between a site and its audience the best hope of survival,” he said. “To me those are all good trends and they generally play to our strengths.”

KNOW MORE

There’s no point spinning this as a good news story. Most of what’s happening right now is journalists losing jobs. And while the new moment may present a bargain-shopping opportunity for investors looking to buy into media, they aren’t rushing to do so.

Over the last year, Group Black, the media collective looking to increase Black representation and ownership of media, has looked under the hood at places like Vice, Vox, and Bustle Digital Group. But the company has not materially increased its offer earlier this year for Vice, and two people familiar told Semafor that the group has essentially backed out of buying BDG. Speaking at Semafor’s Media Summit earlier this month, co-founder Bonin Bough said that he hoped one of the deals could get done, but added that he wasn’t in any rush to buy a media company if prices for the organizations continued to fall.

The other active shopper is former CNN chief Jeff Zucker, who now oversees a $1 billion fund from Redbird and Emirati fund IMI to invest in media, sports, and entertainment. Zucker, according to two people with knowledge, has toyed with the idea of investing in this generation of digital media startups.

In recent months, he has had conversations with the congress-focused media startup Punchbowl. Puck reported that detail, though it did not mention that he also chatted informally with Puck. Three people with knowledge of Zucker’s thinking stressed that these were preliminary, mostly casual chats”, and that the former CNN chief has his eyes set on bigger deals (It is also worth somewhat awkwardly noting that in the course of my reporting, I was told by two people that Zucker also expressed some interest in investing in Semafor — though I didn’t get any information from anyone here). His name has also been in the mix as a potential buyer for Vice, though people close to the former CNN chief have dismissed that idea.

Beyond any bearishness among investors and media companies, part of the hesitation could be that it’s difficult to see around the corner to what the next evolution in digital media could be.

“I’m less certain what we’re going back to,” Marshall said. “Is home page traffic coming back? Are people not going to use Twitter or some Twitter clone to serve them their news? It’s clear we’re moving in those directions or the trends of the last decade are kind of broken. But those are now really ingrained habits and I don’t think they’re going to go away quick. I’d love it if they would. But I’m skeptical.”

Tina Brown, who oversaw the rocky first years of Barry Diller’s digital media tabloid the Daily Beast, told me she recognized the parallels between the media landscape of the 2000s and today’s retro version. She wouldn’t mind if the news media continued to regress to an even earlier era.

“Maybe as we continue to journey ever backwards, next stop is the revival of print,” she said.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

As the text internet shrinks, for many consumers outside the elite-news bubble, the replacements are obvious: Podcasts and, most of all, short video.

Ask Semafor’s Head of Video Joe Posner: “Even for those of us old enough to have bookmarked Drudge Report or Huffington Post at one point, the front page of the internet is and has still mostly been algorithmically curated – by social media and video apps. These innovations led to the influencer & creator economy that has decidedly won the new media war – so it’s no surprise that writers or like-minded start-ups have joined in on that model. 

The new system’s failings – particularly those around news and political information – won’t make pretending we can go back any more likely. Those who have embraced new spaces are defining it for the millions of curious minds who will never know the name ‘Drudge’ or ‘Huffington.’”

NOTABLE

  • It’s not just news media where what’s old is new again. Streaming companies ran up against the limits of subscriptions in recent years. Now, executives at those companies believe the future may be free or discounted TV and movie programming interspersed with advertising breaks — just this week, Netflix announced on an earnings call that it was seeing stronger revenue from its advertising tier subscription than expected. Sound familiar?
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One Good Text

Chris Hayes is the host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC.

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Intel

WINKLERIZED: John Micklethwait sent out a tersely worded note to Bloomberg News staff this week acknowledging that recent coverage included “a number of uncharacteristic lapses in our standards.” The editor-in-chief of the financial news organization dinged a reporter for citing their father-in-law as a source, and cautioned the publication’s journalists against using the newsroom’s voice to “intentionally benefit someone we know.”

“The problem seems to be that some journalists are not treating our standards as platform agnostic, as if a quick video about an interesting new luxury trend does not need to be as honestly reported as a Terminal-focused piece about investment banking,” he said. “This is both stupid - all our journalism is available in the Terminal - and wrong. The same journalistic standards apply on every single Bloomberg platform. Period.”

DATA BREACH: NBC News reporters are furious after sensitive employee information including addresses and social security numbers were released in a recent data breach.

The data was exposed in the hack of Brightline, a mental healthcare service provider. NBC told staff in an email on April 11 that the data included social security number, first and last name, date of birth, gender, employer, email addresses, and other personal information.

The hack touched on a sore spot between the company and its unionized employees, who alerted Semafor to the hack. The union noted that in contract bargaining sessions over the past several years, NBC has balked at the union’s request to subsidize the web-scrubbing service DeleteMe for reporters, some of whom are the subject of online harassment because of their journalism. But two days before sharing the news of the data breach with employees, NBC reversed course, offering to partially subsidize DeleteMe accounts.

Tate James, an NBC video editor and the union’s chair, called the move  “too little too late.”

REVEAL-ING: Liberal publication Mother Jones and Reveal discussed a potential merger in recent months, according to one person familiar. Mother Jones did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

MEA CULPA: Last week, we incorrectly identified the capital of Delaware. It’s Dover.

—Max

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— Ben

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