Mixed Signals: How technology will shape media in 2025, with Jessica Lessin

Ben Smith:
Nice job, Max. That was Max’s first throw to break.

Max Tani:
It’s my first throw, so we’re giving it a shot. I don’t know. We’re going to have to make that a little bit better.

Jessica Lessin:
It was great.

Ben Smith:
It was well done.

Jessica Lessin:
It was great.

Ben Smith:
Our producer Sheena is in the chat saying that you did a good job, Max. I’m Ben Smith.

Max Tani:
I’m Max Tani. And this is Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. This week, techies and a lot of the marketing industry are gathered in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, CES. So we’re chatting with Jessica Lessin, the CEO of the technology and business publication, The Information, about how emerging tech is changing what we consume and how we consume it. We’ll also chat about what major media innovations we can expect from the biggest players in tech in 2025 and why Silicon Valley has soured on us in the news media.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I think Jessica, like me has avoided actually going to Vegas and has sent her team, but it’s also true that a lot of the big tech stories in Washington right now.

Max Tani:
That’s true. I actually like Las Vegas though.

Ben Smith:
You can go next year.

Max Tani:
Well, we’ll dig into all of that after the break.

Ben Smith:
Hey Max.

Max Tani:
Hey Ben. How’s it going?

Ben Smith:
Good. I’m thrilled to have you here with me.

Max Tani:
We’re through 30 seconds of it. It feels pretty good so far. It’s nice to be here, but obviously very sad to part with Nayeema, but we’re super excited for her new podcast, Smart Girl Dumb Questions. She has a lot... Even her dumb questions are a lot smarter than my smart questions, but we’ll give it a go.

Ben Smith:
Well that’s a really inspiring introduction to yourself.

Max Tani:
Bringing endorsement. I’m lowering the bar. I’m lowering the bar, but hopefully we can clear it in the first few episodes.

Ben Smith:
For the handful of listeners who don’t know him, and I should say there was in fact one, parentheses, one, comment on Spotify when we announced in the last episode that Max was coming that said that Tani-acs were really excited. But for everyone else, Max is the star media editor at Semafor, breaks a ton of news, breaks so much news that LinkedIn, which I didn’t know had the power to do this, but apparently does, declared 2024 the year of the Max Tani scoop.

Max Tani:
That’s true. I wonder what that makes 2025 though. Does that mean that it’s going to be the year of somebody else’s scoop? I hope not. I hope it’s the same. But yeah, I’m really thrilled to be on the show, to be hosting and to be talking to some really interesting folks that we have for the season. Excited to jump in.
So let’s get into the real meat of the show. So first of all, why is everybody in Las Vegas this week? What is going on there from a media perspective? I’m seeing some tweets, I’m seeing posts from hotel lobbies and et cetera. What’s going on there?

Ben Smith:
Yes, CES is this legendary gadget conference that is still a gadget conference in which I read all the coverage this morning and you had new chips, AI agents for ad campaigns, but also giant screens, stretchable screens, screens inside your glasses, smart TVs, suction cups to stick your smart TVs to the walls, and microwaves that will live stream your food onto your smart TVs. And to some degree it is a reminder the degree to which all these massive changes in media have been driven in large part by the underlying shifts in basically screens.

Max Tani:
Do you think we’re going to be seeing ads soon on your microwave or on your fridge or wherever else we’re deciding to put screens? Is that the next frontier? I mean, all I’m thinking about when I hear this is that it’s just more opportunities for advertising in different and interesting new places in the home.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, personalized ads on your corneas. That’s going to be CES 2026.

Max Tani:
Well, to talk about all of this today, we have somebody who actually understands and is thinking really deeply about a lot of these things, which is Jessica Lessin. Ben, can you tell us who Jessica is and why we’re having her on the show?

Ben Smith:
Yeah, Jessica is a great Wall Street Journal reporter. I remember when I was starting BuzzFeed News, everybody told me to go try to hire her and unfortunately she had just started this new, in 2013, business of tech and finance of tech publication called The Information, which has really established itself as the paper of record for the business of Silicon Valley and sits in an unusual way right at the intersection of these two worlds that often really hate each other, journalism and technology. Oh, and Jessica’s also an investor in Semafor.

Max Tani:
Well, we’re excited to talk to her and we’ll be right back with Jessica Lessin.

Ben Smith:
Thank you for joining us, Jessica.

Jessica Lessin:
I’m excited to be here.

Ben Smith:
So we’re recording this the week of CES, which 20 years ago would’ve been the center of your life, and you sent a bunch of reporters there and skipped it. But I’m curious, just to kick it off with talking about technology, what are you hearing from CES about the next year in tech? Is there anything you’re actually excited about?

Jessica Lessin:
Well, right now robots seem to be taking center stage. Jensen Huang of Nvidia previewed some stuff and I think that does fit with a theme which is actually related to AI and AI entering the physical world more. So that was something we were tracking at The Information. We’ve seen Elon’s robots over at Tesla. That does seem to be a strand out of CES and I think it’s quite interesting. Obviously self-driving cars had a big year with Waymo. But CES is always about trying to rally around the next new thing and many of the next new things in tech have been really slow to materialize in recent years. We’re not all wearing our Apple Vision Pros, we’re not all living in the metaverse. So I think it’s good to be skeptical, but there is a drumbeat around robotics for sure.

Max Tani:
Why do you think it is that it’s been so slow to materialize? I mean, it’s so interesting. I remember I was listening to you on your podcast and you were talking about Waymo, I believe, which I was in Los Angeles last week and I was in the part of the city where they have Waymos and it is just truly shocking, it’s head-turning to watch them go by and it’s obviously, it’s a more fantastic display of technological innovation than many of the things you’ll see, many of the small gadgets you’ll see maybe this week at CES. But why do you think it’s taking longer for these kind of things to materialize?

Jessica Lessin:
So one, I think there’s just such an extraordinary hype incentive around these things in the first place mostly because they’re so capital intensive. So if you put yourselves in the shoes of a founder or whomever, 10, 20 years ago, they’ve got to convince investors, they’ve got to convince employees. And the press always likes something new to write about. And so I think that just builds the expectations up here. In the case of self-driving, regulation has been a barrier and obviously some of that is really important. Obviously the tech industry thinks that’s all going to change now under Trump as well. So it’s really hard to calibrate if it was too much or not enough, especially when you’re talking about self-driving vehicles. But I think that’s been a big factor. And then a lot of the stuff just doesn’t work. I mean, in the same breath as self-driving cars, we were going to have these VTOL, vertical takeoff and landing taxis and Larry Page actually shut his company down on that front. So that’s a piece of it too.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, the real problem with the media coverage of technology is both that we are gullible fools and incredibly cynical.

Jessica Lessin:
Sure, yeah. Some of us, yes. But also that next new. I mean I think that it’s such an interesting moment now, you see all of these major tech companies and we’ll get into them who their next new thing is just their old thing. It’s still the iPhone, it’s still Meta’s advertising business. And maybe it’s just that change takes time. But I also think from the point of view of a press that that can be, it’s a harder story. You really have to dig to find what’s new when the answer is it’s just working really well.

Max Tani:
So let’s talk about a few of those companies. So on your podcast at the end of the year last year, you guys were talking about how ultimately it was a really big and good year for some of the biggest players in consumer-facing tech. Companies like Meta, Google, ChatGPT, X to a certain degree, Apple, maybe a little less so, but still an interesting year. What do you expect to see from those companies on the media front? Obviously this is a media show, we’re really interested in that specific angle. What do you expect to see from those big players when it comes to actual media?

Jessica Lessin:
I think that in some cases, clearly those that are acquiring and buying content. So really Amazon and to a lesser degree YouTube and Google, not so much Meta, but I’d add Netflix. I mean sports, sports, sports and sports. I mean it’s amazing to think... You can trace how they were dipping their toe and getting one football game or one package of cricket games, or whatever it was over years. But I think they’re all in and I think some of the experiments they’ve been doing around, I think Amazon got a Black Friday game this year, I’m going to get the specifics of, but I think they’ve worked or they’re proving out the case. And obviously we had Netflix with the big fight. So I think that from the point of view of capturing more eyeballs and entertainment, you’ll see a lot of that. I mean, I think some of these just general invest in original content efforts, I mean, we’ll see, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that pulls back.
So that’s more traditional media. I think when it comes to social media, which is more the purviews of these companies, I think one of the biggest ways consumption is going to change is that creation is going to change. And so just imagine a world where we could be here and with whatever filter behind us or whatever AI thing, and we can splice it in a million ways. All of a sudden we can go from creating one piece of content to 50 pieces of content or we can take the cost or the time down to making something funny or silly or cool. And I think AI will be a big part of that. I mean Instagram previewed something to this effect in just the general march of more tools and more creativity.
I think it actually, might just not that we already don’t have enough content, I mean we already have so much content, I think it could create even more of letting the floodgates open. I also think there’s interesting questions around what stands out, what is original in a world where we all have these same set of tools and creators have these tools that they’re using to just pump out stuff. But I think this will be a year where you see AI really impact content creation in big ways, and then downstream, I think that will have consumption effects. But I’m not hearing or seeing any new, we’re not going to be reading the news on our Meta Ray-Bans or any of that kind of stuff, but small changes in content creation can have big effects down the line.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, the cost of entry is just collapsing. It’s really interesting.

Max Tani:
So when it comes to listening to some of the things that you were mentioning, talking about some of the big tech players getting into licensing sports content, talking about the creation element with AI, it strikes me that all of those things are essentially video. Is media to these companies basically synonymous with video at this point? When we’re talking about the big players, do any of them still have any interest in literal text on a page, or is it just pure video?

Jessica Lessin:
I mean, yeah, I think video is it, in part, Max, because they’re interested in engagement. That is what content is to them, it’s engagement. Which is fine. That’s the business they’re in. I mean, I think that is aligned and that’s where the engagement is. Text and articles are really complicated from the point of view of rights and relationships with publishers and AI. And we saw, and you guys have spoken a lot about and written about the battles that really heated up last year, but were largely resolved through big licensing deals. And I think this year will be maybe a little more quiet on that in a sense, those deals were struck. I don’t think those deals are going to lead to transformative products. I think they were designed to basically be able to move forward in training and so forth. And so I think that’s the written word part of their relationship.
I mean the big question obviously also is search and what happens to search and how that affects the media business. So all eyes are really on that, especially as Google starts rolling out new ways to introduce AI into search.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. But the dominance of videos, it’s impossible to reverse. Though I’m still a text person. It’s interesting, everyone talks about how it’s all video, but if you want to know what’s going to happen with TikTok, you’re going to read an article in The Information or Semafor. And text is an underrated technology for all that stuff, I think.

Jessica Lessin:
Totally.

Ben Smith:
But in that context, I mean YouTube has, I think, just become so dominant. I mean, I thought in our 2024 What We Got Wrong issue last week, Chris Balfe said he thought somebody would pose a real challenge to YouTube and that’s what he got wrong because nobody did. And YouTube has just absolutely consolidated this dominant position.

Jessica Lessin:
Even now it’s a top cable provider, right? I mean it’s number four or something with YouTube TV. I mean, I pay YouTube 80 bucks a month to occasionally watch football. It is crazy.

Max Tani:
I pay basically cable, because I have HBO attached to it and I have NBA League Pass, so that’s $90 plus $30 plus $15. It’s cable package.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. So I mean it’s just a remarkable position. Do you get the sense of any of Google’s competitors, other tech platforms have any strategy for chipping away at that?

Jessica Lessin:
No. And they’ve tried, I mean, Meta launched a full on, was it Meta Watch? I can’t even remember, right? More originals, more Tom Brady shows, which I watch. I think YouTube is a juggernaut. I really do. I think at the same time though, things like Reels will continue to grow very, very quickly. Whatever happens to TikTok is the question. And so I think there’ll be just more video everywhere. But I think YouTube continues to ride that wave and it is just an incredible position they’re in.

Ben Smith:
And you mentioned TikTok. And there is this sense now, I think, in which all roads lead to Washington. And when it comes, I mean Silicon Valley, they’re really just business in America. If you’re in the steel business, if you’re in the advertising business, people who thought that they could ignore American politics are now so deeply in it. And the tech CEOs have made their pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago. They’ve found ways to transfer large sums of cash to Trump and to his committees. What are you hearing about how these meetings and how these conversations are going?

Jessica Lessin:
So I think what’s really happening here, Ben, is that Trump is giving Silicon Valley permission to be the Silicon Valley it always wanted to be. And by that I mean you have so many founders from Mark Zuckerberg, but really most of them, not all of them, who had fiercely resisted some of the things like content moderation as one example, and had been frustrated by it, had felt that they had to play ball, they had to play ball with say content moderation because of advertisers, or they had to play ball in not doing this military deal to make their employees happy. But along the way, these founders or CEOs felt they were compromising, or making concessions. And Trump in the election, I think has just given them, in their minds, permission to be controversial again.

Ben Smith:
Am I hallucinating or do I remember that in the 2006 to 2012 period, these many of the same people, certainly Mark, were at the heart of Barack Obama’s politics and seemed very happy there? And a lot of their friends, their platforms-

Jessica Lessin:
The Eric Schmidts of the world definitely. Yes.

Ben Smith:
But their platforms before they were boosting Trump were central to Obama’s style and way of doing politics. Were they pretending then, or have they just gotten older and more conservative?

Jessica Lessin:
Well, that’s a great point. It’s actually nice talking to someone who follows politics closely. I don’t think that to the degree there was a love affair, and I think there was with the Obama era and certainly Google, the Eric Schmidt era in Silicon Valley, I think it was also that some of those people leaned into using their technology. And it was opportunistic because these platforms were trying to grow up in the world. They were trying to prove they were more than a place to share cat videos. And the idea that you would have politicians using them was very legitimizing. And so I think there was a pact there that worked where they liked the engagement, it showed them that they could be players on a bigger stage. And then I think Silicon Valley founders felt betrayed. I mean, they felt that the Obama administration, Democrats, Republicans to some degree too, but just turned on them very, very quickly and made their lives very difficult, forced them to comply with consent decrees rather than build products.
I mean, this is, I think what they would say, not necessarily what I think. And then felt a deep, deep frustration, especially over the last four years with the way things were going. So I think you’re right. To refine, I think was an indifference to politics, but willing to play ball, to build those relationships because it was legitimizing in a certain way, and those were customers, they’re very active customers. I mean political advertising, all that kind of stuff. And then the press, I guess also plays a big role in this, but feeling totally betrayed or attacked by the press, by the democratic establishment. And now just, I mean, free rein I think doesn’t even begin to describe what’s on the minds of some of these folks who are now just winding back, whether it’s content moderation policies or policies around the kinds of customers they have or diversity initiatives internally, I think there’s a real sense that the tides have turned.

Max Tani:
So you don’t see some of these moves as cynical. You really see them as an expression of belief. When you look at Amazon, Ben reported on this over the weekend, Amazon’s Melania documentary this week, Meta’s appointment of Dana White to its board and some of the announcements that it made this week around content moderation. There’s an interesting debate. You see some of this chatter happening online about whether these are signals to Trump that these companies are willing to do business with him. But you’re saying that these actually represent maybe either legitimate changes to their thinking or just the way that they felt this entire time.

Jessica Lessin:
It’s absolutely both. And sorry, it’s absolutely both. No. I mean, Mark this week making an announcement that he wants to scale back content moderation. He called out Elon positively by name. I mean, last I checked these guys were going to fight in a cage, right? Yeah, so I mean, I think that is a very, everything is deliberate, and there’s no doubt that these tech leaders want the Trump administration to know that they want to work together, that on many things, they’re aligned. I think it just also, to me, it doesn’t represent a turn of political expediency. It represents really where they’ve come in their ideology, but they’re going to milk everything about this moment to curry as much favor with Trump and his allies as possible. No question about that.

Max Tani:
So we’re going to take this opportunity to take a break and hear from our sponsor. And after that, we’ll be right back with Jessica Lessin.

Ben Smith:
This week on our branded segment from Think With Google, I spoke with Google’s VP of marketing, Josh Spanier, about the highlights in the marketing industry in 2024. Google capped off 2024 by releasing their annual Year in Search video and report. It looked at breakthrough searches. So looking back, what were some highlights or breakthroughs from the year 2024 for marketers?

Joshua Spanier:
So I think there were three things that really jumped out to me from a marketing perspective. And ironically, perhaps as I talk to you, Ben, here on your podcast, last year was the year of podcasts where they really came into their own as it were. What’s fascinating to me, and perhaps surprising to people listening is that YouTube is the largest podcasting platform in the world, really successfully so. And increasingly, people are using video podcasts to actually listen and record their podcast, which is why YouTube is doing so well. But there’s something like 400 million hours of podcasts being watched on YouTube every month right now, it’s astonishingly large number and growing incredibly fast. The second thing that really jumped out at me from last year, and I think it’s going to play big in 2025, is the notion of big moments. Really, this is inspired by the two biggest things from last year, the Olympics, and perhaps the Eras Tour from Taylor Swift.
But people want to come together. People want to have these transcendent moments and marketers want to be part of them. So you’re going to see in 2025 and beyond these central moments in culture and society really being a galvanizing force in the area where we as marketers will gravitate and gather around. The third trend is perhaps unsurprisingly, given how much we talk about it, AI, and moving from this notion of AI hype into AI how. We’ve seen across our marketing campaigns from Pixel phone, 30%, 50%, 60% increases in performance. We’ve seen uptake of Notebook LM to create really magical, engaging, useful, practical experiences. I recently made a podcast with my daughter about her favorite YouTube channel. These things are enabling us in both our personal and professional lives to really change the game using AI. So between podcasts, moments, and AI, this next year is looking pretty exciting.

Ben Smith:
And where can people dive into these trends?

Joshua Spanier:
You can search for the Google’s Year in Search report on Thinkwithgoogle.com.

Ben Smith:
We are back with Jessica Lessin of The Information. And it’s interesting, I mean, one of the great things about the Trump era is that there’s not a lot of subtlety. You want to tell the Trumps you love them, you write a multimillion dollar check to Melania Trump to make a documentary, or you appoint Dana White to your board. I mean, it’s just so literal, it’s so direct. But one of the things that I know that they’re thinking a lot of it in Silicon Valley right now is this question, and it was old Andrew Breitbart, or at least a line attributed to Andrew Breitbart, that culture is upstream of politics.
And I think a really, for a decade, very frustrating failure for the right of this sense that they just had zero impact in shaping mass popular American culture, even as they had 40% of the population voting for Donald Trump. And now these big tech companies, Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok, are the gatekeepers to culture as much as anything else. They make the movies, they make what used to be called television shows, they decide who gets platformed and de-platformed. And I’m curious if they’re thinking about that, if you think we’ll see attempts to change the culture, change the cultural production.

Jessica Lessin:
Yes. I mean, because I think it’s all about seizing this moment for them. But not directly. I think the spending, I mean, we’ll see how spending hundreds of millions of dollars on original production directly goes. I mean, I think the jury’s still out on that. But, yes. One thing I want to pay attention to is also how the algorithms change. I mean, if you look at X, we were joking on my podcast more or less that X is content, and then Elon house ads, because Elon’s just tuned the algorithm. So Elon is every fifth post or whatever it is. And so I would be surprised if we didn’t see other platforms experiment, not necessarily in promoting their executives, but in putting the thumb on their scale more. Which is interesting because from a content moderation standpoint, they want to put it on less, but they clearly are coming to the table with a point of view now.

Ben Smith:
And Apple has done that in certain ways, and particularly you’ll see nothing negative about China on Apple TV. And at least a producer once told me, “You’ll also never see anybody throw an iPhone.” That they had gotten that written out of their script.

Jessica Lessin:
Yes, no, you can’t. So I do think you’ll see them shape it, but not in the way of necessarily commissioning documentaries or that sort of thing.

Ben Smith:
Unless they’re about Melania.

Max Tani:
You were mentioning earlier Netflix getting in and Amazon getting in on the NFL and Netflix is Jake Paul fight with Mike Tyson. I mean, how many of these changes in the big things on the horizon for tech this year revolve around, and maybe this is just content licensing decisions, but revolve around men. A lot of this stuff really seems aimed directly at men. There’s a masculinity to everything regarding the campaign that Trump just ran. How does that factor into some of the decisions that you’re making? I don’t know. Do you think about that at all? Have you noticed anything related to that?

Jessica Lessin:
It’s a great point. I mean, I feel it in the air. I’m not sure. I think a big part of that might be sports and how just general, which sports, which viewership of sports. I mean, it’ll be interesting to see how these platforms race to women’s sports. I mean, obviously they are in many ways, and some of these tech companies are the biggest sponsors of the WNBA and so forth. So I think that’s one question to figure out. But yes, the faces seem more male everywhere, certainly in the tech industry, certainly some of the folks with the loudest megaphones. And I think that’s something we need to watch.

Ben Smith:
I mean, as you mentioned earlier, one of the big points of pressure that drove Elon Musk crazy, that drove the free speech wing of the free speech party, drove journalists crazy, actually, has been the advertising industry. And the question of brand safety, which is something that I think news publishers rail about, and they’re put out studies saying, you really ought to buy ads against news, but nobody wants to try to sell their products against controversial news stories. I wonder, I mean, the tech industry, which has a lot more muscle than the news industry, is obviously going to run into these similar questions. Are the big ad agencies, are the giant consumer product advertisers going to say, okay, I guess we’ll come back to Twitter even if there are beheadings floating around or violent videos confrontation. Same with Meta, same with everybody else. Or does the ad industry remain the last constraint as all this other regulatory stuff goes away?

Jessica Lessin:
It’s an excellent question. And we had a story in the information a couple of months ago about a group of advertisers that were convening a brand safety summit to talk about these issues. And they canceled it. They canceled it out of fear, was the implication.

Ben Smith:
Fear that they would be seen as censors? Or fear that-

Jessica Lessin:
Yeah. Yeah. No, that that was out touch, that it would not be palatable to actively push back against these platforms or potentially, I mean, you see people like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk arguing that withholding your advertising from the platform constitutes collusion, illegally. Now I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the fact that that caused some of these events to be canceled, I think is telling and suggests that advertisers are quite leery of at least openly withholding on the grounds of brand safety. My thesis on this is that digital advertising is so much a question of how many clicks do you get and what is engagement and so on and so forth. And so there’ll be a couple of big advertisers that will make it about something else, and the platforms will make what they will out of that. But the question of whether more advertising really, really flows to X, I think is a question of whether it performs for them or not.
And X in particular has been challenging on that front because you’re caught between brand and direct response. But I think a year ago, an advertiser could get a positive headline for pulling their dollars from these platforms. And now I feel like if they chose to, they’d actually face a lot of criticism, if they chose to be public about it. Of course, they should do whatever they want.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I mean, it is interesting, because they’re obviously very goal-oriented. And ultimately in a way that neither the government nor we, the users of these platforms, are their customers. The advertisers are their customers. And it’s going to be interesting to see. I mean, I think a lot will, as you say, depend on does it work. Are people actually buying things? All the rhetoric aside. I mean, the environment that I think you and I spent a lot of the last few years writing about and thinking about is one in which, and you referred to this earlier, just this enormous hostility between our friends in technology and our friends in journalism. I think, yeah, I don’t know. I feel like I find myself caught in that crossfire from time to time, as do you. And I feel like we’ve both, at times attempted to position ourselves as mediators, which is not really particularly effective or useful. I don’t know. Is there some truce developing? Are the news people just going to surrender in this battle?

Jessica Lessin:
Oh, man, I hope not.

Ben Smith:
How do you see that shaping up?

Jessica Lessin:
Ben, I think we really, I don’t know. I think professional journalism faces, which has always been in crisis by definition, but faces a real identity communication trust problem. And that we really have to explain why, yes, all this content on social and all the citizens sharing information is a great information source, but what we do also matters. And that yes, we’re individuals, but we can do this in a way that’s important. We can tell you that the Chinese government is accessing US user data on TikTok when they say it’s not, right? And that’s not something that’s going to bubble up through the we, the media, X platform, which by the way, I’m also glad exists, and I’m also glad exists for free expression. But that is a nuanced point of view that right now certainly doesn’t translate into a sound bite.
But I also think we have to stay really curious and open-minded, just to be corny about it. And there are many, many publications that while they say they don’t, they do have a worldview and vision and it’s really coming through in their coverage, and they really lost trust of a lot of readers. And so I think we have to work extra hard to check all that stuff at the door, and journalists have always had to do that. But it is especially important in this moment. Our job is to get anyone possible to talk to us and trust us if they have useful information. And if we just divide along these lines, it’s never going to happen.

Ben Smith:
That sounds easy.

Jessica Lessin:
Buckle up.

Max Tani:
Well, and I would be remiss if I didn’t ask this as a media reporter and editor, but thinking about some of the big storylines of last year, the relationship between, and the changing relationship between Silicon Valley and Trump and the conservative movement, or at least changing attitudes within Silicon Valley and among these leaders, this has obviously been a huge story that a lot of people are interested in. Has that reflected at all in you guys’ business and interest in what the information is doing? Is it driving subscriptions? Have you seen any change as this storyline has progressed?

Jessica Lessin:
So there was in the run-up to the election, we were getting more feedback of people on both sides, mad that we were for their other side. So more liberals saying we were too conservative, or more conservatives saying too liberal. And I mean, we’re a business publication. And so what’s really clear to me is our readers are trying to decide whether to trust us every single day. And because everything has become so politicized and is they’re constantly reading things into things we’re doing, even if that makes no sense to us.
And so I think that that’s just a dynamic that we have to be extra careful about and recognize. Overall though, our business is driven just by can we reveal new important facts people need to know and nothing about that’s changed. We were actually the first to break that. Andreessen and Horowitz were going to endorse Trump. And so that’s where we like to exist, breaking the news, giving people the information. But there’s just no question. I mean, I think our readers, and this just makes sense, they want to trust us and as individuals too, as writers, as editors. And there’s that constant calculus of what do we stand for? And so the question is, can you articulate that in a nonpartisan way that still builds that loyalty in this moment?

Ben Smith:
Are you going to staff up in Washington?

Jessica Lessin:
Not necessarily in headcount, but all of our tech reporters are now probably calling Washington cell phones multiple times a day because that’s where we’re at, and it’s going to be a wild ride.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Well, we’ll have you back on in four years to consider the whole thing.

Jessica Lessin:
Yes.

Ben Smith:
Thank you so much for joining us, Jessica.

Jessica Lessin:
Thanks for having me, Ben and Max.

Max Tani:
It is so funny that as much as we endeavor to make the show focused on CES and gadgets and tech, the progression of technology just doesn’t lend itself to that. And obviously some of the most interesting storylines about tech are not focused in Las Vegas so much as that we’d like to be discussing robots that tell us the news or robot podcast hosts or something like that.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, let’s not get carried away here. The only robots, the main robot they unveiled at CES seemed to be one that can pick up your socks from the floor. So-

Max Tani:
Okay, wait.

Ben Smith:
Baby steps here.

Max Tani:
That’s pretty interesting though. I don’t know. If you can have the cost of that robot, it picks up your socks and it reads you a 30-second ad, I think that might be a pretty interesting business, something I might be interested in having in my home.

Ben Smith:
I thought that Jessica, I mean, I think she’s very optimistic that, and we are, I think in some ways following the same playbook, which is that the kind of journalism that people want right now, or at least that the people we’re talking to want is very careful about a neutrality, isn’t trying to tell you what to think, isn’t politically engaged, isn’t part of the political cultural battle. And she said something about checking all that stuff at the door. I think that’s a good point and a good way to go. I think there’s an optimism too, and then people will trust us and that will fix what ails the media, because I think that so much of just the underlying turmoil of this moment really isn’t that some CNN host said something inappropriate and now nobody trusts them. It’s actually what comes out of CES.
There’s been this unbelievable technological revolution with screens and AI and social feeds everywhere. And in a moment, it’s so radically changed that it’s not like whether or not the Washington Post endorsed Kamala Harris is going to deeply alter the shape of people’s relationships with the media. I think we’re just in this very strange, interesting new moment. Which we ought to do our jobs well, but I don’t think it should fool ourselves that by doing our jobs well, there won’t be a huge audience for obscurantist weirdness on social in lieu of hard reporting.

Max Tani:
Right, exactly. And what we saw with the Washington Post and some other media companies we’ve seen with the success on the flip side, is that so much of the reason why audiences actually open their wallets is that they want to support you for reasons that don’t necessarily have to do with necessarily the scrupulousness of your reporting or whatnot.
But I want to end on one thing that we talked about and that Jessica didn’t really have an answer for and that I’m curious if you have an answer for, as somebody who is in the position to control certain levers of content in a very small way for us here at Semafor, but when you think about the idea that, the last thing that really changed media in a serious way, the last technological innovation was the smartphone, was the idea that you could consume media at any time, video, audio, reading, whatever. Do you think that there are any technological innovations on the horizon that you see that really could change our experience of consuming media? I don’t know. You list them off and you think smart TVs, probably not. It’s just a TV, I don’t know, like an Alexa. What do you think?

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I think the ubiquity of smartphones is now paired with a real resentment of them and people wishing they could look at them less. And I think that whatever the media technological breakthroughs will be, it’s going to be voice products that allow you just never to look at your phone and glasses or contact lenses or some variety of that that just removes the phone as a necessity.

Max Tani:
Hopefully that future involves more easier ways of listening to this show, consuming this show. Maybe that’s on our technological horizon.

Ben Smith:
We got to get on Neuralink.

Max Tani:
You can just plug us into your brain. Well, that is it for us this week. Ben, thank you for bearing with me in my first week of hosting.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, you’re pretty good for an amateur.

Max Tani:
Yes, but still an amateur, that’s for sure.

Ben Smith:
I think you may have done more podcasting than me in your life.

Max Tani:
That’s going to be all for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced by Sheena Ozaki, with special thanks to Max Toomey, Britta Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pezzino, Garrett Wiley, and Jules Zern. Today’s episode was mixed by Steve Bohn, and our theme music is by Billy Libby. Our public editor is Nayeema Raza, of course, who will still be listening, and vice versa. Nayeema, give me some tips. Tell me what I did right, what I did wrong.

Ben Smith:
And if you miss Nayeema, you can follow her on her new show, Smart Girl Dumb Questions. If you like Mixed Signals, if you still like Mixed Signals with Max on it, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to review us.

Max Tani:
And if you’re still listening and want even more of us, you can’t plug us into your brain yet. But what you can do is sign up for Semafor’s Media Newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.