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Journalist Ben Smith: Targeting 200 Million Academics?
Photo: Drew Angerer / Getty Images
In just two years with the New York Times, the journalist Ben Smith managed to generate an above-average amount of attention with media coverage.
This was also felt in Germany when the media columnist's article about Axel Springer Verlag in October 2021 rekindled the debate about the behavior of the then »Bild« editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt - with his expulsion from Springer as a result.
Before Ben Smith was hired by the renowned »New York Times«, he was editor-in-chief at »BuzzFeed« for eight years, where he added a new journalistic dimension to the internet portal, initially known primarily for entertaining listicles.
Now Smith wants to found his own medium, as he announced in an article in the "Times" - together with his surname cousin Justin Smith, who was previously CEO of the business journalist Bloomberg Media.
Justin Smith, who is supposed to take care of the business side of the start-up, announced the plans in big words on Twitter.
The outgoing Bloomberg manager wrote that he had decided to make a personal dream come true, but also to seize a market opportunity: he wanted to found “a new kind of global news media company” that would present impartial journalism to “a truly global audience” .
The emphasis on the "impartial" made people sit up and take notice - including the employee of the "New Yorker", who Ben Smith, who was responsible for the editorial content of the new project, asked whether he considered his current employer, the "Times", to be impartial look at.
As in the rest of the interview, however, Ben Smith kept a low profile on the subject: "I would put it this way that I think there is a large audience that wants to be treated with respect," said Smith, referring to the approach Journalism for which he has stood for over the past few years.
Long planning, short-term farewell
In several articles, Ben Smith referred to the target group of the new project as "200 million people with an academic education who read English-language texts". Nobody really perceives this as an audience. These people are more similar to each other than their respective compatriots, that's what Justin Smith is counting on, said the experienced media entrepreneur Charles Bradley of the Wall Street Journal about the project, which he claims to have heard about months ago.
Bradley got to know it under the name "Project Coda," but the final name of the medium has not yet been decided, the Smiths say. The founders also give no information about the details of the financing or other employees. According to a report by Puck magazine, the New York Times was only informed a week ago about the impending exit of its media columnist.
»Puck« is itself one of the younger news media outlets in the US that want to compete with traditional newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal.
In addition to “Axios”, “Politico” is also often mentioned in this context - the medium that Axel Springer adopted in autumn 2021.
This investment, in turn, was the reason for Ben Smith's coverage of Springer boss Mathias Döpfner and Julian Reichelt in the New York Times.
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