Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, at the company's office in New York. Drew Angerer Getty Images

It was around 7 p.m. on a Friday in January when Ben Smith, the top editor at BuzzFeed News, left his house in Brooklyn, stepped into his red Jeep Patriot, and drove to Piccoli, a cash-only Italian takeout spot not far away. He bought two orders of spaghetti with meatballs, set the bags of food on the passenger’s seat, and headed back home. Darkness had settled over New York City as he navigated the quiet streets.

His cell phone buzzed with a call from one of his best investigative reporters.

For Smith—and, indeed, the entire BuzzFeed newsroom—it had been a day of triumph. Less than 24-hours earlier, on January 17, Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier had published an incendiary story alleging that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team had obtained evidence that President Donald Trump had directed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The story electrified the cable-news cycle, offering anti-Trump pundits and lawmakers the kind of smoking-gun revelation that they’d been dreaming about. “If these facts are true,” Democratic Congressman David Cicilline told CNN, “there’s no question it’s an impeachable offense.” But now, as Smith pulled his car to the side of Coney Island Avenue, Leopold was calling with a less gratifying message.

Smith arrives to work at the BuzzFeed offices in New York City. Guy Calaf/LUZ/Redux

The Special Counsel’s office was about to release a 28-word statement that would turn their big scoop into a bombshell of a different sort. “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.” Leopold had pressed the Special Counsel’s spokesman to clarify the points of the story that Mueller was disputing; the spokesman refused.

After twenty years in journalism, Smith didn’t get rattled by the carefully-worded denials of government officials, which, in his view, typically turned out to be bullshit once all the facts came to light. He and his team had carefully vetted the story and were certain of its accuracy. In one sense, it was a familiar situation for an editor at a high-profile news outlet. At the same time, though, Smith—whose judgement had triggered Trump-era media eruptions before—recognized that this wouldn’t be just another routine dustup, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Mueller, at the time, was a totemic figure in the American psyche, and he’d never publicly discredited a story like this. As Smith sat in his car on that Brooklyn street, calling his top lieutenants and determining his next steps, his mind circled a thought: “Here we go again.”

It had been eight years since Smith arrived at a company best known for creating viral cat videos to establish a news-gathering outfit for the social media age. While still in his mid-thirties, he immediately went about building a 200-person newsroom, opening bureaus on five continents, expanding coverage to include everything from investigative reporting to LGBT issues, and earning prestigious journalism awards. The New York Times soon anointed him “The Boy Wonder of BuzzFeed.” Around the time that Smith entered his 40s, however, life got more complicated.

Smith had come to BuzzFeed after a pathbreaking career as a political blogger, one in which he’d developed a thirst for holy-shit scoops and a high threshold for risk. “He’s not a safe journalist,” says Chris Geidner, BuzzFeed News’ former legal news editor. “He’s a good journalist. He’s an aggressive journalist. He wants to make news that people are going to talk about.” It’s a mindset that has allowed Smith to dance past the veterans of print journalism and establish himself at the vanguard of the new-media revolution. But it can also lead to controversy. “BuzzFeed is not as strait-laced as The New York Times,” says Politico senior media writer Jack Shafer, “and I think that both works to BuzzFeed’s detriment and to its advantage.”



“He’s not a safe journalist. He wants to make news that people are going to talk about.”

Smith’s decision in January 2017 to publish the so-called Trump dossier—the thirty-five-page compendium of salacious but unsubstantiated allegations about the president, including the infamous “pee tape”—outraged MAGA bomb throwers and high-end media critics alike. And, of course, the president. He called BuzzFeed News “a failing pile of garbage” and predicted that “they’re going to suffer the consequences” of Smith’s judgement. And now, two years after the Trump-dossier hysteria, amid financial turmoil and a unionizing workforce at the news outlet he built from scratch, Smith found himself at the center of an explosive dispute once more. Only this time, Mueller’s denial wouldn’t just unleash a hurricane of criticism on Smith, it would trigger a more fundamental question: Can a modern-day digital news enterprise—fast, swashbuckling, attuned to the prerogatives of the 24-hour news cycle—succeed in the vitriolic, truth-agnostic crucible of the Trump era?

On the receptionist’s desk at BuzzFeed’s headquarters in Union Square there’s a glass jar filled with brightly colored stickers reading “omg” and “wtf.” By the entrance to the cafeteria, the chalkboard reminds staffers that beer club will meet this Thursday at 5:30 p.m. The newsroom itself so resembles the Hollywood set of an online-news movie—open layout, exposed ceilings, cans of energy drinks on desks—that BuzzFeed is regularly approached by producers looking to film there. (They’ve declined all requests.)

Smith has short brown hair and a slightly round frame, and even at 42, he still resembles the boyish prodigy that the Times described years earlier. Wearing a dark suit and a necktie, he taps at a laptop on a standing desk in the corner of the newsroom and chats casually with staffers. “One of his great skills,” says Shani Hilton, BuzzFeed News’ recently-departed vice president of news and programming, “is that you can have a conversation with him while he’s literally writing.”

As a leader, Smith keeps his cool under pressure and stands behind his reporters amid criticism—a quality that has earned him the loyalty of staffers like Anthony Cormier. “If he told me to go run through fire right now,” Cormier says,” I would ask him, ‘where?’”

Smith talks with one of his colleagues at the BuzzFeed offices in New York City. Guy Calaf/LUZ/Redux

Settling into a chair in a glass-walled conference room, Smith identifies the common denominator between his past feats as a blogger and his current achievements as an editor. “My success to some degree has been that I was lucky enough to come up in this moment when my quite-possibly—in a more stable environment—self-destructive impulse to go dive into the weird new thing, turned out to be valuable as the weird new thing kind of swallowed the old thing,” he says. “And I think that part of the reason that we’ve been successful [at BuzzFeed], both broadly and in our reporting about Donald Trump, is that we are fundamentally outsiders.”

Smith was raised on New York’s Upper West Side, in a household where dinner-table debates between his father, a conservative New York appeals court judge, and his mother, a liberal school-reading specialist, kept him ideologically centered. As a boy, Smith devoured Jimmy Breslin columns and went fishing with his grandfather, a novelist and reporter at the New York World who liked to tell stories of his days as a big city newsman. In one possibly embellished tale, Smith’s grandfather recounted watching financiers jump to their deaths during the 1929 stock market crash—as journalists looked on and cheered. “He was,” Smith says, “sort of my idol growing up.” Smith soon envisioned himself with a fedora and City Hall press badge, and although he came from a more privileged background, he identified with his grandfather in one key respect. “Even when he was successful, he always saw himself as an outsider and had a bit of a chip on his shoulder,” he says. “And I think I probably got some of that from him.”

Ben’s grandfather Robert Smith. Courtesy of Ben Smith

After graduating from Yale in 1999 and completing a roughly two-year stint reporting for newspapers from the Baltics, Smith began his career as a City Hall journalist. He started at a desk in a dank basement press room, beneath the bustling workplace the more senior members of New York’s political press corps reported from. Despite these less-than-glamorous conditions, covering city politics was every bit as thrilling as he’d imagined; he relished the opportunity to cause trouble for the powerful, and he thrived on the rush of landing scoops.

“He was just one of the hungriest young reporters I’d ever encountered,” says Seth Lipsky, the editor of The New York Sun, where Smith worked from 2001-2003. “He didn’t need me to tell him that the primary measure of quality in a news story is whether it is first.”

Maggie Haberman, today a White House correspondent for The New York Times, but at the time working for the New York Post, first met Smith in the mid-2000s, when another City Hall reporter pulled her aside and nodded in Smith’s direction. “Be nice to that kid,” the friend told her. “We’re all going to be working for him.”

After joining the New York Observer in late 2003, Smith—a voracious consumer of emerging political blogs—began considering a new approach to his coverage. He found the behind-the-scenes discussions with his City Hall sources and newsroom colleagues more interesting than the stories that typically appeared in the paper. And he didn’t see why that conversation should be secret. He called around to his sources and asked if they’d read a blog that reported on New York politics with an insider’s sensibility, and, believing he might have an audience, convinced his editor to support the project. When he got a tip that Chuck Schumer wouldn’t be entering the 2006 governor’s race, he posted the item on his new blog, The Politicker. “It was like a little scoop,” he says, “and that was my first thing.”

Smith in 2008 as he waits to go on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. Courtesy of WNYC

While his competitors waited for the evening’s deadlines, Smith began breaking news about local power players—Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, Hillary Clinton—in real time. “It certainly made an immediate impact on the habits of the small but intensely interested group of readers who really deeply gave a shit about New York politics,” says Josh Benson, the former editor of Capital New York and a friend of Smith’s. “And then, very quickly, it made an impact on everything else.” As rival newspapers launched blogs of their own, political press offices scrambled to adjust to the accelerated news cycle. Before long, even the gritty old timers in the City Hall press room were reading Smith’s dispatches. Benson says it was “a little bit of a mind-blow.”

At the time, Smith viewed the ascendance of digital media with unqualified enthusiasm; it was simply—obviously—a superior way to distribute information. He didn’t reflect on the crushing impact it might have on the industry. While he was working at the Indianapolis Star, where he’d landed a fellowship after college, the city’s evening paper, The Indianapolis News, announced plans to shut down. “I really had no idea what was going on,” he says. “I sort of remembered it in passing as a curiosity and didn’t realize that it was symbolic of anything at all.”

Smith’s work eventually drew the attention of John Harris, a former Washington Post editor who had left the newspaper in 2006 and, along with his colleague Jim VandeHei, was preparing to launch a digital-first political news outlet, Politico. “What Ben had succeeded in doing in the New York political arena was what we wanted to do in the Washington political arena and in the national political arena,” Harris says. As a member of Politico’s original staff, Smith’s buzzy, constantly-updated blog made him one of the best-known political writers on the web. And inside Politico, he was respected for his willingness to piss people off. One item that Smith wrote about Roger Ailes so enraged the then-Fox News CEO that, according to a former Politico editor, Ailes banned all Politico reporters from appearing on his network for several years.

Smith (background, left) listens as Hillary Clinton speaks to reporters at a cafe in Manchester, NH during her presidential campaign on Jan. 4, 2008. DOUG MILLS /The New York Times/Redux

Politico’s coverage during the 2008 presidential campaign was a leading indicator of where news media—and Smith—was headed. The outlet was simply a juggernaut, racking up page views, becoming a must-read for anyone who followed politics. As was Smith. But this period of Smith’s rise has also drawn criticism. In his haste to break the big story, Smith incorrectly reported that John Edwards would be suspending his 2008 presidential campaign. And strangely, it was another scoop about Edwards that would prove more significant. Smith broke the news, which went on to be widely shared, that Edwards paid $400 for a haircut. It was a pioneering example of a brand of reporting, known as “insider journalism,” that obsesses over trivial campaign minutia while treating politics itself as a consequence-free game. It’s derided today; this past August, on BuzzFeed, Smith declared the age of insider journalism to be over and expressed ambivalence about his role in its creation. But in 2008, Smith’s work was an early sign that political reporting was experiencing a shift, from news intended strictly to inform voters at the ballot box to stories that would, as Politico’s founders liked to say, “drive the conversation.”

In 2011, Smith was introduced to Jonah Peretti, the then-thirtysomething CEO of BuzzFeed. Since its launch five years earlier, BuzzFeed had been focused on creating videos, lists, and quizzes that relied on emerging social media platforms to catch fire on the internet. “But then,” Peretti recalls, “we’re like, ‘Well, news is going to be shared this way, too.’” He believed that the social media age would soon make scoops and original reporting much more valuable than aggregated news stories, and he was looking for the right person to create a news division at BuzzFeed that could thrive in this era.

Smith, who had already seen the political conversation begin to migrate from the blogosphere to social media, was compelled by the idea, and he viewed the upcoming 2012 election cycle as an ideal time for a new media company to make its bones. Although he’d been perfectly happy at Politico, Smith became so enthusiastic about going to BuzzFeed that he resolved to leave Politico even though he was still under contract there, according to a person familiar with Smith’s thinking. While Politico had refused in the past to release similarly situated employees from their legally binding agreements, Smith, the person says, was willing to walk away from his contract, consequences be damned. “Jonah [Peretti] was like, ‘Cool, let’s litigate. This would be great for us,” this person tells me. In the end, the two parties avoided a lawsuit when Smith agreed to write a short-lived column for Politico while building his team at BuzzFeed News.

Jonah Peretti, founder and chief executive of BuzzFeed, with Smith at the BuzzFeed offices in New York on Aug. 7, 2014. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times/Redux

“Ben is willing to take risks in a very risk-averse industry,” says Politico’s founder, VandeHei, now the CEO of Axios. “You don’t help popularize blogs, dominate a beat, or build a massive newsroom being a polite, complacent, conventional rule-follower. You mix it up—unapologetically—and own the consequences.”

Scooping the competition was the quickest way to put BuzzFeed News on the map, so Smith assembled a group of hungry young reporters—at least two hadn’t yet graduated from college—and sent them out on the 2012 campaign trail to dig up as much news as they could. But it was Smith himself who made BuzzFeed’s first big splash, when he broke the story of John McCain’s plans to endorse Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee for president. As Smith and his team continued to outcompete bigger and more established news organizations, they developed an underdog spirit that still exists today. “We found the idea that we were this small upstart band of people who had come out of nowhere to be fun and exciting,” says Rosie Gray, one of BuzzFeed’s first reporters. “And I do think that that gave us a lot of energy.”

In 2014, then-BuzzFeed reporter McKay Coppins wrote a now-famous takedown, “36 Hours on the Fake Campaign Trail with Donald Trump,” in which he described the real estate mogul's flirtation with running for public office as a shameless publicity stunt. The article so enraged Trump that he fired the press aide who orchestrated it and called Coppins a “dishonest slob.” Coppins later wrote that the article made him, in the eyes of Trump, one of the “haters and the losers” whom Trump had spent most of his life seeking revenge against. “There is a running Twitter joke that McKay baited Trump into running for president,” Smith says. “I think there’s some truth to that.”

McKay Coppins, pictured talking to Seth Meyers in 2018, wrote a story about Donald Trump for BuzzFeed News that may have partly inspired him to run for president. NBC Getty Images

While it hadn’t taken long for Smith’s BuzzFeed team to get crossways the future president, for most of his career Smith had dismissed Trump as insignificant. Although he’d been aware of Trump since his days covering City Hall, during the early 2000s, Smith says, Trump was “unbelievably thirsty for attention, and totally irrelevant.” He was so easy for reporters to get on the phone, and so over exposed in the media, that The Observer instituted a rule against quoting Trump in most articles. Smith was baffled as to why the legendary Village Voice journalist Wayne Barrett had decided to make the future president the subject of a 1992 biography. Says Smith, “I remember thinking, ‘God, how could Wayne have wasted so much time writing about Donald Trump, of all people?’”

It was only when Trump drew closer to the political arena that Smith began writing about him. In 2011, he teamed up with his old buddy Maggie Haberman, who’d since joined Politico, on a story exploring The Apprentice star’s interest in mounting a White House bid. “Is Trump serious?” the reporters asked. “Yes. And no.” But the idea that this billionaire reality-show star would emerge as the champion of the working class and pull off the most unlikely political upset in American history simply did not seem possible. Just as startling was Trump’s impact on the media industry; his compulsion for misleading statements and outright lies thrust news outlets into the center of a fundamental debate over truth in the age of alternative facts: Do people believe things because professionals have investigated, and found them to be true? Or because someone with a big enough audience says them? (And it’s the damnedest thing—to the untrained eye, they can look the same. Especially with the presidential seal affixed.) As the stakes increased and the margin for error evaporated, altercations with the White House began to take on more significance for news organizations—none more so than BuzzFeed News.

Smith was fiercely criticized by the president and the press for publishing the Trump dossier. "Not how journalism works,” tweeted now-USA Today justice and investigations editor Brad Heath. “Here’s a thing that might or might not be true, without supporting evidence; decide for yourself if it's legit.” Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn, who’d previously written about the dossier, tweeted: “I didn't publish the full memos from the intelligence operative because I could not confirm the allegations.” He continued, “Even Donald Trump deserves journalistic fairness.”

“If Smith told me to go run through fire right now, I would ask him, ‘where?’”

Smith has always maintained that BuzzFeed was justified in publishing the dossier—with a disclaimer noting that it contained "unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations”—because it had been widely circulated among Washington policy makers and because intelligence officials had briefed Trump and President Barack Obama about its allegations. It was news. At the same time, the decision reflected the journalistic mores that Smith developed during his years in the blogosphere. "It wasn’t a coincidence that we were the ones to publish it,” he says. “I do think that was something that came from having come up on the Internet, with the instinct being, ‘Of course you publish the thing, unless there’s a good reason not to’—rather than your first instinct being to hide things from your audience. I think it did reflect the fact that we were coming from a different place.”

This past December, BuzzFeed won a federal lawsuit brought by a Russian technology executive who claimed to have been defamed by the dossier’s publication. Smith considered the legal victory a complete vindication of his editorial judgment in this case. But one month later, while he was out picking up dinner for his kids, he got the phone call about the Special Counsel’s denial of the Cohen scoop.

From his car on the side of Coney Island Avenue, Smith reached out to other members of his team to decide what the reporters on the story should do next. Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold were an experienced team. Cormier had won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2016, and Leopold was a Pulitzer finalist for international reporting in 2018, though he’d also been at the center of controversies involving plagiarism and faulty reporting earlier in his career. Together, they’d done powerful reporting about Trump and his business dealings, most notably their revelation last May that Trump’s associates had continued to pursue a major real estate development project in Moscow well into the 2016 presidential campaign.

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The instructions to Cormier and Leopold were simple: get back to work in order to try and figure out what the Special Counsel’s office was disputing and to get to the bottom of the situation. After they returned to their sources and were told that their reporting was solid, Smith issued a statement of his own. “We stand by our reporting and the sources who informed it, and we urge the Special Counsel to make clear what he’s disputing.” Upon returning to his house in Brooklyn, Smith called around to cable news hosts—Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Anderson Cooper—to defend the story live on the air, kicking off a campaign of support for his embattled reporters that lasted through the weekend.

Smith’s team got a lift in February, when Michael Cohen, in an appearance before the House Oversight Committee, testified that the president told him to lie to congress about the Trump Tower deal. At the time, the statement seemed to validate the essence of BuzzFeed’s controversial scoop, and as Cormier and Leopold continued reporting, they turned up additional documents that appeared to further bolster their story, despite the denial from the Special Counsel’s office.

Then, on April 18, the Mueller Report was finally released to the public.

Michael Cohen, former attorney and fixer for President Donald Trump is sworn in before testifying before the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill February 27, 2019 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

In his 448-page document, Mueller concluded that, in the opinion of the Special Counsel’s office, there was not sufficient evidence to establish that Trump had directed his personal attorney to lie, after all. Smith published an update to BuzzFeed’s original story explaining how the mistake, which he conceded, had occurred. He wrote that the story had been based on, among other things, notes from an FBI interview of Cohen in which a law enforcement source had written that the president had "personally asked Cohen to say" the Trump Tower negotiations ended in January and that "White House counsel office knew Cohen would give false testimony to Congress."

While BuzzFeed’s sources interpreted this and other evidence to mean that Trump “directed” Cohen to lie, Smith wrote, Mueller did not. The report states that “the evidence to us does not establish the president directed or aided Cohen's false testimony,” even though, as Smith explained, “The Mueller report finds that Cohen lied, that he did so at what he believed to be the president’s behest, that the president knew he was giving false testimony, and that the president’s lawyers encouraged that testimony.”

BuzzFeed’s story had landed in the narrow gap between reasonable, provocative interpretation of fact and that which is technically true. This gap is a perilous place for the news media to live; Trump has mastered the art of widening it. And as journalists have pointed out repeatedly since 2016, he’s given license to the powerful around the world to match his tactics.

The setback landed at an inconvenient time. Only a couple months earlier, in January, BuzzFeed’s leaders announced plans to layoff about 220 of the company’s 1,450 employees, or 15 percent of its workforce, including 42 BuzzFeed News staffers. Although the news division is unprofitable, Peretti says it remains central to his long-term vision. “It’s core to BuzzFeed and who we are,” he says. “Every great media company has news as part of what it does.”

The company's latest test, however, is coming from inside. In the wake of the layoffs, nearly 600 BuzzFeed staffers signed a letter of solidarity, denouncing the handling of the staff cuts. "Every aspect of the way that these layoffs have been handled so far—from communication to execution to aftermath—has been deeply upsetting and disturbing, and it will take a long time to repair the damage that has been done to our trust in this company," the letter said before calling on the company to pay laid-off staffers for their unused days off. Weeks later, newsroom employees moved to form a union.

Ultimately, Peretti agreed to give dismissed employees their pay for paid-time-off, but the BuzzFeed founder and Smith have frustrated staff by refusing to directly participate in negotiations over its recognition. In April, BuzzFeed's lawyers and human resources team canceled a meeting with members of the union's organizing committee just minutes before it was slated to take place. And earlier this month, the standoff between management and staff escalated when the news division at BuzzFeed staged a walkout.

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Rachel Sanders, deputy culture editor for BuzzFeed News and a member of the union organizing committee, says she’s been disappointed by Smith’s handling of the situation. “If Ben values the work that our newsroom does, if he respects us as journalists, we’d appreciate seeing that reflected in the actions of the company,” Sanders says. “And so far that hasn’t happened.”

When asked about the union's frustrations, Smith says, “I'm eager to get to recognition, and to work together on the shared interests of management and workers in making sure this industry supports great jobs for reporters.” (According to a BuzzFeed spokesman, the company is open to voluntary union recognition and is deep into negotiations with the union about which employees will be included.)

Then, just two weeks before the Mueller Report’s release, BuzzFeed’s vice president of news and programming, Shani Hilton, said she was leaving for a job at The Los Angeles Times. For Smith, the loss of his veteran lieutenant served to highlight a central truth about the news outfit he’d launched more than seven years earlier. “This is a moment of real change around here," Smith wrote in a memo to staff. "We’re at a natural point in our life cycle for these changes to be happening."

To move beyond this period of controversy and change, Smith is focusing more of his energy on one of BuzzFeed’s newer initiatives: television. Over the past 18 months, BuzzFeed has launched its own morning show on Twitter focusing on political, cultural, and celebrity news, as well as programs on Facebook and Netflix. Smith maintains that this increased investment in video will not reduce the breadth or ambition of its news coverage.

Smith working at the BuzzFeed offices in NYC. Guy Calaf/LUZ/Redux

In fact, after he’d read the Mueller report and recognized, at long last, that their big Cohen scoop was indeed at odds with the investigation’s findings, Smith, the now middle-aged “Boy Wonder of BuzzFeed” offered Cormier and Leopold a word of advice. “All you can do,” he told them, “is keep reporting.” Especially because Smith sees big potential in a medium whose predominant format, cable news, is in Smith’s view “very aimed at elderly people.” He insists the increased investment in television is not a pivot. “The thing is, if we’re doing it right, it’s a megaphone for the journalism. It has to be. If it’s just some technical trick, nobody wants it. The whole point is getting the journalism to people where they are."

BuzzFeed’s goal, he says, is to reach younger viewers, not by recreating MSNBC shout-fests, but by “pulling newsmakers into our space.” That might mean questioning presidential candidates about student loan policy. Or, as one BuzzFeed host did on a program in February, asking Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker—who doesn’t drink—to name the ingredients in a margarita and, as Smith says, “watching him flail.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Ben Smith’s reaction upon reading the Mueller report. He recognized that the investigation’s findings were at odds with Leopold and Cormier’s Michael Cohen scoop, not that the report disproved their reporting.

Luke Mullins Luke Mullins is a senior writer for Washingtonian magazine.

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