There was some splashy media news on Tuesday.
Ben Smith, the media columnist for The New York Times, announced he is leaving the Times and teaming up with Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith to start a global news organization.
Puck’s Dylan Byers called it the media version of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving joining forces on the Brooklyn Nets, or Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck getting back together.
Details are still sketchy — such as the name, what they will cover, how they will cover it, where the money is coming from and who will work there. But there was plenty of buzz about it on Tuesday considering the big names involved. Especially Ben Smith, who was personally recruited by Times executive editor Dean Baquet in 2020 to take over the Media Equation column made famous by the late David Carr and then, later, Jim Rutenberg.
Smith, who was editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News for eight years prior to moving over to the Times, made quite the impact as the Times’ media columnist. As someone who reads a ton of media writers, I found Smith to be highly relevant, always engaging and a weekly must-read. Quite honestly, I thought he was the most interesting media writer there is.
His columns, based on well-connected sources and good old-fashioned reporting, were consistently impactful. Prime examples are drama at Ozy Media and Axel Springer, and controversy at the Times.
“What makes Ben special is that he is a commentator who also deeply reports,” Baquet said in a statement. “That’s a pretty rare combination in media writing today.”
Byers reports this partnership between the two Smiths has been nearly two years in the making. It’s not known exactly when Smith will leave the Times. When he does, he will be the editor of this new venture, while Justin Smith will run the business side.
Now we wait to see exactly what kind of news outlet this will be. Ben Smith told the Times’ David Gelles that the goal is to be a news-breaking outlet that will try new ways of storytelling.
Smith provided plenty of fodder for media observers on Tuesday with a quote that many couldn’t quite figure out.
“There are 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,” Smith said. “That’s who we see as our audience.”
It’s unclear how that would be different from so many other media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, national news networks and so on. So I reached out to Smith for more clarity.
In an email, Smith told me, “It might have been useful to put the word ‘global’ into that sentence! What I mean is that there’s a global audience that is served largely by national media that is often taking stories through the lenses of social media and polarized national politics, and that there's a ton of dissatisfaction all over the world, and a lot of space to innovate.”
Smith also had plenty of other interesting takes on this new venture. He told Byers, “The era of social media journalism is basically coming to an end, and there’s a question of what’s next. The relationship of individual journalists to their audience is also changing, and I think (this new publication) will reflect that.”
Smith told The Washington Post’s Elahe Izadi something similar: “Social media has bled back into newsgathering and assigning in a way that I feel like readers aren’t being treated with respect, and their intelligence isn’t being respected.”
And he told Gelles at the Times: “The pressures of social media and polarization have a lot of news organizations talking down to their audience.”
Justin Smith told Byers that the number of journalists who might be hired could be in the hundreds, but added, “the sequencing is going to be intelligently thought through. We’re not going to fall into the pitfalls that some less-sophisticated publishers have fallen into.”
So this is certainly ambitious, and it will be fascinating to see how it turns out, especially because the Smiths are leaving really good jobs.
Recode’s Peter Kafka wrote, “My translation: Both Ben Smith and Justin Smith are incredibly ambitious — ambitious enough that holding down two of the top gigs in media wasn’t enough for them. By creating their own thing — funded with other people’s money — they’ll be owners, not just employees.”
For more, The New Yorker’s Clare Malone had a Q&A with Smith.
One more thought …
There’s a lot of interesting stuff about this Smith & Smith venture, but the most interesting is Ben Smith suggesting it would focus on, as the Times’ David Gelles put it, “elevating the profiles of individual journalists.”
That sounds a bit like what The Atlantic is doing with their recent launch of a slew of new newsletters, featuring journalists such as David French, Molly Jong-Fast and Charlie Warzel.
Another big move
