There have been three major trends in the past decade of media and Ben Smith, 46, has been a part of them all. 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. In 2020, as BuzzFeed struggled, he joined the New York Times as its media columnist.
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). Yet Smith soon left the Times, setting up Semafor, a new digital media play.
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