![]() ![]() “I’m sure we screwed up all the time,” he reflected, “but we were pretty conscious of the boundaries of news, which is a real sacrifice when it comes to traffic and that Breitbart didn’t burden itself with, for instance.” Smith has said he would publish the document again. The dossier was discredited, allowing Trump to justifiably attack it as fake news. Smith’s biggest call as BuzzFeed News editor was his decision in 2017 to publish the “Steele dossier”, a collection of unsubstantiated allegations against Trump. In February Kahn pushed back authoritatively after a number of New York Times contributors signed a letter that sought to shame their colleagues over reporting on issues of sex and gender.ĭidn’t some of these “lunatics” come from BuzzFeed? Smith defended the news division he ran: “Buzzfeed News was often criticised from the left for not adopting an activist framework.” When Smith visited Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman and chief strategist to Donald Trump, in Trump Tower after the 2016 US presidential election, he points out, Bannon was puzzled that BuzzFeed hadn’t “gone all in for Bernie Sanders, as that was obviously the logical direction of the pull of social”. The company, Joe Kahn, its executive editor, is “now reinstituting a clear sense of itself”. “A lot of those people are gone,” Smith thinks. And suddenly you’ve hired a bunch of lunatics who disagree with you and each other, and you are trying to run an institution that way. The title had “absorbed all of these people and ideas from a bunch of different institutions,” Smith said, “who had actually come up as critics of the New York Times, who didn’t really agree with its way of journalism, and also didn’t agree with each other. ![]() ![]() That summer social justice movements took hold across American newsrooms, boardrooms, classrooms – nowhere more so than at the New York Times. It started in 2020, thinking, ‘What was that?’” Traffic, he said, was an attempt “to report out this whole era we just lived through. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.At Semafor, which this week raised $19m, he is an owner. At the Times, Smith was only an employee. In America’s highly developed media market, top journalists now expect to own equity in the sites through which they publish. In doing so, he has sought to ride the latest shift in journalism: the proliferation of private media. Yet Smith soon left the Times, setting up Semafor, a new digital media play. Smith broke big stories at the Times, exposing the news and entertainment website Ozy as a scam whose traffic was chimerical, and alleging errors and omissions in the reporting of Ronan Farrow (who at the time was being heralded as America’s foremost investigative journalist he said he stood by his reporting). ![]() In 2020, as BuzzFeed struggled, he joined the New York Times as its media columnist. In 2011 he was the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, the site which helped reinvent, for good or ill, the way news was covered in the 2010s. There have been three major trends in the past decade of media and Ben Smith, 46, has been a part of them all. ![]()
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