16 newyork| september14–27, 2020
intelligencer
“I like askingweird, awkwardquestions thatdon’t necessarilymake me seemlike a good person.”the basement press bullpen of City Hall.
Seth Lipsky, one of the Sun’s founding edi-
tors, said Smith called him the day after
9/11 from Latvia, where he was a stringer,
and said he was coming back to New York
and looking for a job. The two had known
each other since Smith’s days as an intern at
the Forward. “The weird thing about it is
that he was already a scoop hound,” Lipsky
wrote in an email. “He just got the concept
that if a story wasn’t first, it wasn’t news.”
Smith describes himself as a creature of
blogs from the early to mid-aughts. “People
were arguing heatedly with each other, but
there was an assumption that the people
you were arguing with were thinking
humans who might change their minds,” he
said. He called Andrew Sullivan “an obvious
influence in my own career” in a recent col-
umn that went on to lament Sullivan’s flirta-
tion with theories of racial determinism (a
column timed to Sullivan’s departure from
this magazine).
But Smith, whose father is a retired con-
servative judge and whose mother is a lib-
eral semi-retired teacher, is hardly moti-
vated by some earnest lefty zeal. He even
once asked the Times to issue a correction
for identifying him as “left-leaning.”
BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold told me
that when he ran into Tucker Carlson on a
plane one time, the Fox News host ended
their conversation by saying, “Tell Ben, who
I secretly like, I say hello.” Which may just
be game recognizing game—a 2017 clip
shows Carlson pillorying Smith on his show
for being part of the liberal Establishment,
and a faint smile plays on Smith’s lips. (He
likes getting yelled at, remember.)
When I asked how he now identifies
politically, Smith paused. “I don’t really
think about myself politically,” he said. “My
ideology, to some degree, is really very much
about journalism.” Meanwhile, in the
Trump years, the Times has grown more
openly adversarial toward the president—
lies are called lies, and racism, racism.
Inside the paper, reporters speak up, and on
social media they speak out when they’re
unhappy, leading to the resignation-under-
fire of editorial-page editor James Bennet
(and, less directly, the resignation of op-ed
editor and writer Bari Weiss). And Times
subscriptions continue to grow, proving it’s
pretty good for business to be on the right
side of history as its readers see it. But that’s
not exactly Smith’s style.
Partly, this is just because Smith gets
bored easily. He would strike up conversa-
tions in the BuzzFeed newsroom while
reading Twitter and then would “walk away,
depending if what you’re saying is interest-
ing or not,” Leopold said. His reputation at
BuzzFeed was as a boss intensely interested
His handling of unionization seemed to
particularly burn BuzzFeeders in part
because of their sense that he’d always
backed up his reporters in the past. “I iden-
tify with the reporter, I think of myself as a
reporter,” he told me. Sometimes to a fault:
Before BuzzFeed writer Benny Johnson was
fired for over 40 instances of plagiarism in
2014, Smith issued a strong public state-
ment in his support. (Johnson now works as
the chief creative officer of a pro-Trump
nonprofit.) And Smith’s desire to break news
has pushed boundaries. BuzzFeed pub-
lished the Steele dossier before the rest of
the media. Smith defended that controver-
sial decision, which ultimately fed Trump’s
blanket denials of a media “witch hunt”
against him, to the end.
He still does. “I think it was totally the
right call to publish the dossier at BuzzFeed,”
he told me, “but I’m not sure it would have
been within the New York Times’ institu-
tional remit.” Which leads us to the question
of where Smith goes from here.
Ryan, Smith’s editor, is on the Times
masthead, and—self-deprecation alert—
“She told me that I was the most difficult,
and possibly worst, writer she’d ever worked
with in her life,” he said gleefully. “I feel like
we had to wage a little psychological war-
fare on each other just to kind of get rolling.”
Ryan was a bit more diplomatic (and
pointed out that the two like each other very
much). “We’re both editors of extremely
high demands and kind of accustomed to a
certain authority,” she said. Another editor
might have been cowed by Smith; as Ryan
put it, he is “somebody who, just a few
months ago, was a media mogul.”
Does Smith miss media moguldom? He’s
something of a Times Kremlinologist him-
self (he wrote about the race for the top edi-
tor’s job last year, and Ryan is in the run-
ning). Perhaps he’ll try to stick around and
rise through the ranks. I asked him if he
ever thought about getting into TV. He said
that he was asked to try out for what is now
Brian Stelter’s chair at CNN but that TV’s
not a good fit for him: “I like asking weird,
awkward questions that don’t necessarily
make me seem like a good person.” (“I’m
very curious to hear where that came from,”
a CNN rep said before disputing that Smith
had ever been approached.)
So for now, it’s scoops at the Times. Jones,
for one, was introspective about the value of
Smith’s column at this moment. “So much
of the discourse on Twitter is ultimately lost,
even though it’s talking about all of this
stuff, and there’s a really rich conversation,”
he said. “You want some record of how this
industry weathered, engaged, or ignored
what was going on, and I feel like it could
definitely be a helpful text.” ■in the work of scoops—the best way to get
mainstream attention for his upstart
newsroom—with an at times intensely
weird style. He had a habit of standing
behind reporters, not talking to them, and
reading their screens over their shoulders.
Once, he grabbed a cheeseburger off Jones’s
desk and ate it as he passed by.
Smith is interested in raw power and
how it’s accrued, which shapes his story
instincts—he’s covering Hollywood and Sili-
con Valley, not just the parochial New York
City news world. “Every beat is basically just
power,” he told me. And when he got the
Times gig, sources came out of the wood-
work. “I definitely had people who were like,
‘Welcome to the job. I was really helpful to
David [Carr] and to Jim [Rutenberg], and
now I’m going to be helpful to you,’ ” he said.
Big stories beget big sources beget big sto-
ries. While it may not protect tipsters from
scrutiny forever, there must be something
nice about seeing your enemies twisting in
the wind for a breathless media moment.
“Ben is interested in the question of who’s
winning and who’s losing,” former BuzzFeed
editor Rachel Sanders said. And she wasn’t
sure that, as a member of management—
who had stock grants whose worth was
dependent on some eventual profitability
for the organization—he grasped the moral
imperative the newsroom felt about union-
izing. BuzzFeed’s unionization process was
contentious, and, like many staffers, Sand-
ers, who now works for the NewsGuild of
New York, thought Smith handled the pro-
cess poorly. “Editorial management, par-
ticularly Ben, threw up their hands and sort
of said, ‘I don’t know, it’s all Greek to me.
Whatever the lawyer says must be right,’ ”
she said. In May, Smith wrote about the
push toward unionization in his column. “I
doubted that the guild would be able to help
its members make real gains at places
where profits are scarce, and I worried that
they’d simply make a tough business even
harder to operate,” he wrote of BuzzFeed’s
bargaining fights.