Journalist Ben Smith, who was a media columnist for the New York Times until two weeks ago and editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, is starting to put together his new vehicle, based in New York and focused on worldwide coverage.
As yet unnamed, it is handled by Project Coda and provides for a major global writing. Asked about the eventual presence in Latin America, he replies: “For sure, we plan to launch at some point in Brazil and the rest of Latin America, although we don’t know when.”
He adds: “I think there’s a huge amount of great journalism being produced in Brazil, but I’ve also found from BuzzFeed that there’s a huge appetite for a high-quality, independent voice.”
The Brazilian edition of BuzzFeed News, in Portuguese, lasted four years, closing due to the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic, as announced in August 2020. Smith had left for the NYT seven months earlier.
His target audience is now different, as he and the executive in charge of the project, Justin Smith, have been repeating for more than two weeks. “There are 200 million people with a university education, who read in English, who talk to each other”, described the journalist to the NYT himself. “It’s our audience.”
There are 200 million who would have more in common with each other than with their fellow citizens, their countries of origin.
The Smiths, as the two have come to be called, aim to offer “unbiased” journalism, without bias, to a global audience that today “is served largely by national media, with stories through the lens of social media and national politics.” polarized”.
The assessment of Ben Smith, who became an influential media analyst in his two years at the American paper, is that newsgathering itself has been affected by social media — which prizes polarization.
The vision would originally come from Justin Smith, who stepped down as chief executive of Bloomberg Media to build Project Coda. It is described in notes he sent to colleagues, almost a farewell to Bloomberg, obtained by the website Axios.
In short, the executive writes, “Around the world, national media and global social networks are often cacophonous, tribal, partisan, radicalizing, algorithmically serving the lowest common denominator and amplifying the most basic content, presenting people with alternative facts. what they want to hear rather than the shared facts they need”.
On revenue streams, he provides the basics of today’s business model, subscriptions, premium advertising, and events. But he added to Puck’s Dylan Byers that he was in talks with investors who “will be announced in the near future.”
They will not necessarily be Americans. In a memo to colleagues, he emphasizes that his career, especially at Bloomberg, took him to live in Beijing “for two years” and Hong Kong, as well as Paris, London, New York and Washington. Also Ouagadougou, in Africa.
Justin Smith does not hide that his reference is Bloomberg herself, who, despite being the creation of American tycoon and politician Michael Bloomberg, is seen as relatively impartial even in the Chinese government.
And this week Hejuan Zhao, an editor who has worked on China’s most independent financial vehicles, Caijing and Caixin, announced that she wants to turn the one she founded, TNT, into “Bloomberg chinesa“.
.
