Interview

It’s about ethics in journalism, Ben Smith and Nilay Patel | Decoder

Our guest today is Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor. Ben ran BuzzFeed News at the height of the Facebook traffic boom, and even wrote a book about it, called Traffic, which he discussed with me on Decoder back in 2023.
Semafor, which is only four years old, is now a fast-growing and profitable media company, which makes about half of its revenue from events. So we asked Ben how that all works, and what it feels like to navigate the ethical conflicts that seem to be everywhere in media right now.

Source attribution: Original source

Interview details

Publication date: Aug 20, 2026
Duration: 1h 6m

Speakers

Ben SmithJournalist, Semafor Nilay PatelJournalist, The Verge

Viewpoints in this interview

Semafor is building an anti-scale media business

Smith says Semafor has moved away from chasing massive traffic and instead targets a specific valuable audience while combining quality journalism with a large events business.

Ben Smith Media Business Model Source at 2:59

Great reporting matters more than any distribution surface

Smith argues that strong stories, high-quality insight, and great reporters will remain valuable even as the platforms and formats carrying journalism continue to change.

Ben Smith Platform Distribution Source at 4:28

Facebook could have chosen a different content strategy

Smith rejects the idea that Facebook's refusal to sustain professional content was inevitable and describes its reliance on lower-quality user-generated content as a strategic choice that could have been different.

Ben Smith Platform Distribution Source at 7:17

YouTube empowers individuals while weakening media intermediaries

Smith says YouTube has enabled individual creators to build substantial businesses but has structured the platform so that media companies and other intermediaries have comparatively little leverage.

Ben Smith Platform Distribution Source at 9:54

Events became Semafor's fastest route to profitability

Smith says Semafor's events business grew faster than its digital advertising operation because events could be launched and made profitable before a large digital audience had been established.

Ben Smith Revenue Strategy Source at 13:50

News companies should avoid ideological revenue choices

Smith argues that publishers should pragmatically combine revenue streams rather than treating advertising or subscriptions as inherently superior, while acknowledging that subscriptions can limit audience growth.

Ben Smith Revenue Strategy Source at 15:17

Journalism should clearly separate facts from analysis

Smith says Semafor's article format is designed to distinguish agreed facts from a reporter's analysis and then deliberately include disagreement, making journalistic judgment more transparent.

Ben Smith Journalism Format Source at 20:53

Conference advisers should not influence the journalism

Smith says involving prominent newsmakers in conference advisory groups helps build an event community but maintains that Semafor's journalism and interviews remain editorially independent from those advisers.

Ben Smith Events and Editorial Independence Source at 29:43

Audiences still value tough independent journalism

Smith argues that journalists should retain confidence that audiences prefer accurate information, independent voices, and difficult questions rather than access-driven or deferential coverage.

Ben Smith Journalistic Independence Source at 37:16

Semafor does not want video growth at any cost

Smith says Semafor is consciously resisting the incentive to maximize video scale and instead wants to produce sophisticated conversations for a smaller but highly relevant audience.

Ben Smith Video and Algorithms Source at 40:52

Changing ad formats are not automatically ethical failures

Smith argues that media conventions around advertising change over time and that unfamiliar formats should not automatically be treated as corrupt, while maintaining a need for independent editorial operations.

Ben Smith Advertising Ethics Source at 43:50

Independence can itself be a valuable media product

Smith says strong ethical standards can differentiate a publication and that audiences generally do not want to be deceived or served undisclosed paid content.

Ben Smith Journalistic Independence Source at 50:01

AI regulation is entering a new political era

Smith says governments will need a more coherent framework for AI regulation and views the federal government's expanding direct role in technology markets as a major structural shift.

Ben Smith AI Regulation Source at 58:12

AI can transform internal newsroom production workflows

Smith says he has become highly optimistic about AI for internal tools and synthesis tasks, citing its ability to analyze hundreds of simultaneous event interviews that no single person could have attended.

Ben Smith AI in Journalism Source at 62:55

AI threatens production more than core reporting

Smith distinguishes the central journalistic tasks of obtaining new information and communicating it to people from the production work between them, which he believes is much more exposed to AI automation.

Ben Smith AI in Journalism Source at 64:20

AI editing crosses the line when it deceives

Smith says synthetic voice editing can be acceptable for routine corrections, but the ethical boundary is crossed when an edit deceives a guest or manufactures an interaction that never occurred.

Ben Smith AI in Journalism Source at 64:44