It’s about ethics in journalism, with Ben Smith
The Verge Nilay Patel
Ben Smith says Semafor ditched the traffic chase and built around events instead. It’s a bet that journalism can still make money without chasing virality.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Nilay Patel — read the original for the full story.
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Ben Smith has spent years on the losing side of digital media’s biggest bets, so his pitch for Semafor comes with some scar tissue. The company launched in 2022 with a goal of reaching 200 million college-educated readers. Now Smith calls it an anti-scale business. No paywall. No obsession with traffic. Instead, roughly half the money comes from what the industry politely calls convening, which usually means events.
That shift is the point. Smith says Semafor is built on quality journalism, strong reporters, and a business that can actually pay for itself. He’s blunt about what came before: the old Facebook-era dream of huge audiences and tiny payouts was a trap, and the platform game pushed media companies toward scale for its own sake. Semafor, by contrast, is aiming at political leaders, business leaders, nonprofit leaders, and other decision-makers, reaching them in person, by email, on the web, and in video.
Video matters in his telling because it can still pull large audiences, but it can also drag publishers toward the cheapest kind of attention: outrage, polarisation, and easy virality. Smith says Semafor is trying to resist that. He’s not pretending distribution doesn’t matter. He’s saying the audience matters more, and that a focused audience is a better business than a giant one that barely pays.
The tension gets sharper when events are part of the model. Semafor is putting on a new Silicon Valley & The World conference, with some of the biggest names in tech and AI. That means the people being covered can end up on the stage, in the room, and close to the revenue stream. Smith treats that as a practical problem rather than a moral revelation, which is probably the most media-executive answer possible.
He also sounds unusually calm about it. That may be the real story here. A lot of media leaders are still talking like the next platform breakout is just around the corner. Smith sounds like someone who has stopped waiting for the old miracle and started charging for the room instead.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The industry keeps pretending scale is a virtue when it’s usually just expensive vanity. Semafor’s move is less romantic, and probably healthier: fewer fantasies, more receipts, and a lot less worship of the feed. The awkward bit is that once journalism starts selling access in rooms full of the people it covers, the ethics get very real very fast.
Read more about this at: The Verge
