The Scoop
When we announced on January 1 of 2022 that we planned to launch a new global news organization, it sounded a bit crazy — even to us.
Skeptics, reasonably, questioned our grandiose goals: To fight polarization in a divided era and to bring a global lens to a splintering world — not to mention building a thriving business in a gloomy industry.
When we stopped to reflect on our first anniversary last October, we were relieved to report that it wasn’t that crazy: Great investors, then journalists and media business people had believed in us and joined Semafor, breaking big stories, hosting major events, and building a business around them.
Now, on the second anniversary of Semafor’s launch, we’re proud to say that, even amid global conflicts and harsh domestic politics, we’ve held our ground on the core issue of political polarization. We’ve earned the trust of sophisticated people in leadership roles around the world by focusing on what you need to know — not just what you want to hear. We’ve separated news from opinion in our Semaform, brought room for civil disagreement across our products, and pulled in views from all over the world.
In a divided and noisy Washington, our political coverage has drawn respect across America’s divided politics, and interviews with figures from Donald Trump to Nancy Pelosi. Semafor Principals has stood out as a trusted, bipartisan source of information and antidote to partisan blindspots. And outside Washington, we’ve made clear that we’ll deliver on what was, for many people, our most puzzling promise: To be truly global in a networked age. We launched in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as the US, and Semafor Gulf opened last month with big scoops and fresh voices.
We’ve broken big news across our platforms, including the moves of companies like Nvidia and OpenAI, the showdowns between Wall Street and Washington, and the battle for the White House. Since launching, we’ve built a powerful, global C-Suite, policy-maker and opinion leader audience — including you — with over 750,000 newsletter subscriptions and more than 2,500 newsletters sent, which have been opened 115 million times. And our business has grown rapidly through global partnerships with over 65 of the world’s most influential companies.
If you’ve been able to join us in person, you’ll know that we’ve placed live journalism and convenings at the heart of our editorial and business model, open conversations that are an antidote to divisive social media. By year’s end, we will have convened 75 events across the world from Washington DC to Zurich to Lagos, Doha and New York, including our signature World Economy Summit, which is aiming to become the “Davos of the United States” in the heart of Washington DC, and our tentpole Next Three Billion Summit alongside the United Nations General Assembly in New York. (Next stop, the Gulf!)
As we look ahead, the US election will be a key test of what we’ve built. The political landscape is more divided than ever, but our mission stays the same: to provide clear, fair, fact-based coverage that our audience can trust.
Thank you, our readers and subscribers, for coming along with the journey — and thanks to our incredible team, to our partners, and investors for being with us every step of the way.
Justin B. Smith, Co-Founder and CEO
Ben Smith, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief