Digest 07/18/2022

Semafor says its audience is the college-educated English-speakers of the world. But is this investor-driven publication just an agile version of its older legacy media siblings?

MEDIA VETERANS GO TO COLLEGE

Media workers love a spectacle, especially when it’s one of our own. Almost two weeks ago, Semafor, a new publication founded by former New York Times columnist Ben Smith and former Bloomberg Media chief executive Justin Smith (obligatory disclaimer here that they’re not related), held a pre-launch event with the Knight Foundation, called “Signal & Noise: Polarization & Trust in the News.” But behind the institutional tomfoolery, the event was nothing more than a publicity stunt, albeit a successful one, meant to lure readers to a “new” publication that lets them feel like educated elites while pandering to media’s worst false balance narratives. 

The problem with the event wasn’t so much that there was yet another panel on objectivity in journalism, nor that Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz was featured as the opening guest, speaking about how reporters are also influencers — the Smiths have been forthright in their decision to feature star reporters to attract subscribers. Rather, the somewhat bizarre inclusion of racist, sexist, and multi-ist (except “journalist”) Tucker Carlson in the program revealed how willing the Smiths are to curate media bread and circuses for the privileged class.

Predictably, Carlson’s appearance received criticism. Why should Carlson, who, as Ben Smith emphasized throughout the interview, has an hour-long program every weeknight to talk about his views (and lie), receive even more space to air his xenophobic beliefs? By not overtly labeling Carlson as a liar and legitimizing his platform, Smith “undermined what might have been a good, tough interview,” Gawker’s Tarpley Hitt wrote in her review of the event.

Media-literate viewers could assume Carlson was added to the event to garner publicity for the publication’s launch (which worked). “I spent the last couple years covering media and thought it would be useful to interview key figures in media and ask them tough questions,” Ben Smith told Study Hall via email. When asked what he was looking to get out of including Carlson on his lineup, Smith replied, “I don’t totally understand the question,” adding, “that’s what reporters do.”  

When the Smiths’ Semafor project was announced in January (back then, it was codenamed “Project Coda”), Justin Smith told The Wall Street Journal his plan was “to launch a premium news business that serves unbiased journalism to a global audience.” At the time, Ben Smith said in an interview with his then-employer The New York Times, in a rather spiraling response, that the project would target the “200 million people who are college educated, who read in English, but who no one is really treating like an audience, but who talk to each other and talk to us.”  According to the Times, Smith didn’t want stories “falling into familiar partisan tropes.” 

But it sounds like Semafor is trying to be a “centrist” publication — something similar to Axios, the early days of Vox, and what The New York Times and The Washington Post pretend they are. To many journalists and media critics, it feels like the Smiths are already resorting to bothsidesism, as they exemplified by inviting both Lorenz and Carlson — who frequently mocks Lorenz and female journalists like her on his FOX show — to appear in the same lineup. 

At the core of these decisions to push the center of critical dialogue toward the right, organizations like the Knight Foundation, the event’s sponsor, have a strong financial hold over the journalism industry, with many journalists and newsrooms depending on its funding. An investigation published by The Objective last year made that abundantly clear when it outlined the organization’s connections to far-right extremists and questioned if the foundation’s investments were at odds with journalistic practices.

But, perhaps what is most telling is Justin Smith’s stated goal to provide so-called “unbiased journalism” to a global audience — one many other publications have pursued for a while. The Guardian and The New York Times both made semi-recent pushes to expand coverage in Oceania, The New Yorker beefed up its non-coastal US and European presence, and Bloomberg announced a UK-dedicated publication in May. As an expat living in a non-anglophone country, I hear the faint ringing of “the elites” in my head. 

While they aren’t explicitly aiming to reach the super-wealthy, the Smiths’ ultimate goal of obtaining readers from all over the globe requires targeting those who have money, especially when looking beyond the major English-language markets, where those who read in English are either expats or the privileged class. Media is a business, and if one is to target a large market, then media companies will have to consider how coverage will run. Businesses with goals similar to Semafor‘s can’t risk alienating right-wingers. But their decision to mask this courtship with terms like “educated” and “unbiased” deserves scrutiny.

Graydon Carter, former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief who is now a semi-retired Canadian expat living in the south of France, founded the Air Mail newsletter in 2019 and targeted the same sorts of wealthy readers — and these readers are wealthy, because they’re both college-educated and shelling out for boutique news service subscriptions. Though Carter was going for more of the jetset crowd, the Smiths are going a bit more general, targeting the supposed 200 million potential readers who exist in this bracket. When asked about what kind of gap Semafor would supposedly fill, Ben Smith told Study Hall that he admired publications like the Financial Times and The Economist, but clarified that Semafor would reach beyond “the one to three million business class travelers” those publications hold as their audience.

According to Smith, by Semafor’s launch on October 15, there will be offices in New York, Washington DC, and London (there are currently job openings for a business and technology editor ideally based in New York, a Washington editor, and a daily newsletter writer in London). Smith added that staff — numbering 50 to 60 in total, including around 30 journalists — would be stationed around the world. The back-end staff openings, including engineers and a product designer, are all listed as remote. Freelancers will be used “as appropriate.”

These operations don’t sound like much for a project with such grand ambitions, but considering they’ve only raised $25 million, there isn’t room for much more. Assuming they’re paying $200,000 to each staff member (which, in addition to equity, would be the bare minimum to lure away experienced and well-known talent), that’s around $10 million in labor expenses for the first year alone, while relying heavily on advertising revenue for the first six to 18 months.

Basically none of what Semafor has slowly teased out these last few months amounts to much. In early March, Axios reported that “two people who were asked to invest said the Smiths’ plan is too vague to throw money at right now” and that the two Smiths frequently tossed around terms like “disruption” and “elite audiences” during their pitches. But leaning into the bothsidesism of a typical, centrist media company that seeks to reach a wealthy global audience isn’t exactly revolutionary. So far, the most disruptive thing the Smiths have done is to name the publication a word usable in dozens of languages, though the number of people who would know what “semaphore” is in English is likely slim. 

COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Katherine Schwab joins Forbes as senior editor focused on tech.  

— Gothamist cofounder Jen Chueng departs from the local news site and New York Public Radio. 

— Bonnie Wertheim leaves The New York Times’ Styles desk to become deputy editor at The Wall Street Journal’s newly established Style News desk. 

EVERYTHING ELSE

— A music journalist calls out Stereogum after the music blog published her video without permission or credit. 

— Washington Post columnist Erik Wemple tears into The Wall Street Journal’s article, “An Abortion Story Too Good to Confirm,” which claimed that the rape of a 10-year-old girl in Ohio was just a “fanciful” story.

— NPR announces it will form a Disinformation Reporting team.  

— Elon Musk attempts to slow Twitter’s expedited legal case against him after backing out of their $44 million deal, reports The Verge.