The News
A year ago, we set out to invent a new global news brand designed to address the three big pain points in global news — bias and polarization, information overload, and the lack of global perspectives.
We also talked then about building for a world after social media. That has arrived quicker than we expected. With two wars raging and consequential elections approaching, those of us who love and rely on journalism find ourselves stuck between the chaos of declining social media and the walled gardens of legacy publications.
We believe there’s a third way: synthesizing the authority of legacy media with the openness and diversity of sources that has always been the best of the internet. This idea animates our original reporting and its Semaform structure, and the curation across our newsletters and articles.
Last spring, Semafor was just a handful of us in Justin’s kitchen — Gina Chua, Rachel Oppenheim, Steve Clemons, Meera Pattni, Garett Wiley, various Smiths. We can now say that some of the most talented people in global media are building this brand with us: we have a world-class cohort of beat-dominating, news breaking journalists. Our product, design, and engineering teams are among the industry’s most experienced and our commercial team is as talented and relentless as any in media today.
And we find ourselves in a small group of ambitious newcomers — Axios and Punchbowl, The Information and Puck — trying to build in a new era in which interest rates are high and venture capital has lost interest in news. We’re humbled that we were able to raise $19 million after an, um, unpleasant surprise about one of our investors. (We learned of the news, like many other people, from our own Liz Hoffman). We’re intensely aware of our responsibility to manage our investors’ money carefully.
We started in two regional markets — the world’s biggest, the U.S; and the world’s most ignored — sub-Saharan Africa. We expect to launch our third region next year. We’re pleased with our success so far: agenda-setting scoops and exclusives, unique UX and design (Semafor Yellow!) that rapidly built our distinctive identity, nearly 500,000 engaged newsletter subscriptions, three million monthly readers on and off platform, a community of thousands of live event participants and 40 global marketing partners. The response has exceeded our wildest expectations and gives us a deep sense of hope for the road ahead.
With every good story, with every new reader, with every new commercial partner, we are more confident in our model for the future.
In this spirit, and on our first birthday, we wanted to share — with our friends across the industry — six insights that we believe can propel quality journalism forward in this radically new era.
Here are the lessons we’ve learned after 365 days of Semafor
- A New Talent Model for Journalism: Great journalists expect great editors, great legal and publishing support, and great platforms. They also expect and deserve the direct relationship with an audience that platforms from blogging to Substack pioneered. Legacy institutions are lumbering toward this future, for instance by modestly increasing the size of journalists’ photographs; meanwhile, creator platforms are offering half-baked legal and editing support. Successful new media companies can beat both with a talent-first approach to journalism that offers robust support both for a journalist’s work and their voice.
- The Multi-Source Advantage: The digital age gave us access to a profusion of sources and points of view, and there’s no going back. Now, audiences want coherent, smart and authoritative voices who know the difference between news and opinion. But they’re also accustomed to digesting a wide range of sources and points of view, a recognition at the core of our Semaform format. More perspectives on facts beats one.
- Know Your Audience, Literally: We’ve spent the year building outside of the social media ecosystem, and for partners who are tired of promises of indiscriminate scale. Our audience model is obsessively built around targeted, qualified, engaged readers. The new battle is for conversations, not traffic. We seek out 1-1 relationships and sophisticated pools of cross-referenced, first party data.
- Free To Be B2B (even if you’re a consumer brand): General interest global news faces a trap. Sophisticated readers expect news that draws connections between the most important stories in the world. But top advertisers expect news organizations to connect with specific, targeted audiences, not broad general ones. We’ve addressed that challenge with deep verticals that deliver world-beating stories — and also build out the defined stakeholder audiences - on digital and live platforms - that corporate brand advertisers want to talk to.
- Sequencing is the new scaling: The venture-backed companies of the social media age raced to scale. Our new generation will succeed by carefully matching our big ambitions — in our case, building a new kind of global news brand around the world — with a hard-headed sense of what it takes to win the long-term trust of an audience, and to build a sustainable business. Semafor has embraced patience at the heart of our company’s model.
- Global is Regional: In just 12 months, Semafor Africa has surged as a dominant force in premium pan-African news, with 16 journalists spanning the continent and over 100,000 newsletter subscribers with nearly half a million monthly web visitors. We’ve done this by treating a global African generation as our audience and our partners, not as the subjects of stories written for audiences in New York or London. We’re eager to expand this networked model into other regions.
We want to thank our team, readers, subscribers, advertisers, event sponsors, partners and investors for helping build Semafor across our first year. With time, Semafor will bring independent, transparent journalism to every corner of the world, profitably no less. Here’s to a fantastic first step!