Ben Smith

Seven stories in 2023Q2 tied Ben Smith’s coverage to Twitter’s DeSantis launch, then shifted toward Semafor’s AI-news experiment and tech’s political power.

Who they are

Ben Smith appears in this coverage as a digital-media journalist and Semafor figure whose work and public comments connect the business of news with the technology platforms and political actors shaping it. He is also the author of Traffic, a book on BuzzFeed and Gawker, placing him directly in debates over the digital-media industry’s rise, retrenchment, and reinvention.

The recent arc

Coverage peaked in 2023Q2 around the collision of platform technology and electoral politics: Ron DeSantis’s Twitter Spaces presidential-launch event with Elon Musk and David Sacks suffered crashes, feedback glitches, and audio failures. That moment coincided with attention to Smith’s Traffic and a Vox Q&A with Nick Denton and Jonah Peretti on digital media’s reckoning, linking a high-profile platform failure to an appraisal of the media businesses built for the social era.

The later coverage is more institutionally focused. In February 2024, Microsoft’s deal with Semafor to create the Signals breaking-news feed put Smith’s stated model in view: journalists would write it, with AI used for research. By 2025, the surrounding stories concentrate on Meta’s political and regulatory position, including Joel Kaplan replacing Nick Clegg and the FTC’s antitrust case, while Smith’s September Semafor article examined David Sacks’ influence on tech, crypto, and AI policy in the Trump administration.

The tension

The central tension is whether digital journalism can retain human editorial authority while depending on the same technology industry for distribution, revenue, and now AI tooling. Smith’s Signals comments frame AI as a research aid rather than a writer, while his work on BuzzFeed and Gawker and coverage orbiting Facebook, Twitter, Meta, and politically connected figures such as Sacks show how platform power and political alignment repeatedly reshape the news business.

Why it matters

If this trajectory continues, Smith’s coverage will remain a useful lens on the convergence of media economics, AI-assisted reporting, platform governance, and Washington influence. The unresolved question is whether arrangements such as Semafor’s Microsoft-backed Signals can support journalism without deepening the technology sector’s leverage over the information ecosystem; the Meta and Trump-administration stories make that question more consequential, not less.

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