Ben Smith, BuzzFeed News editor in chief, has been named the new media columnist of the New York Times.
“We are excited to announce that Ben Smith, a relentless innovator who helped change the shape of modern journalism, will become our media columnist,” the Times said in a statement announcing the hire. “Ben not only understands the seismic changes remaking media, he has lived them — and in some cases, led them.”
Smith, who is in his early 40s, is a veteran journalist who has worked at a number of news outlets. He started out at the Jewish Daily Forward and later worked for the New York Sun, a short-lived broadsheet founded in 2001, and the New York Observer. He also worked as a blogger for Politico, pioneering the kind of scooplet-driven reporting that is now standard among political journalists.
He took over BuzzFeed in 2012 and transformed what many considered at the time a viral clickbait farm into a respected news operation that broke a number of notable stories.
In 2017, Smith made the controversial decision to publish the 35-page Steele dossier, the intelligence report that detailed alleged collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian government during the last election.
Smith takes over the column during a tumultuous time in journalism, as tech platforms such as Google and Facebook have siphoned valuable ad dollars away from the media industry, which has put local as well as national news operations in financial peril.
But in many ways, Smith is well prepared for the role. Over the past couple of years, he has published a number of columns on the media for BuzzFeed, the most recent of which about the Times itself.
The Times media column was previously written by Jim Rutenberg, who recently became the paper’s writer at large. Before Rutenberg, legendary reporter David Carr, known for his gruff style, was the Times media columnist. He died in 2015.
“I’ve been here for eight years and (as I’m sure many of you have picked up) am eager for a spell of writing and reporting and thinking,” Smith wrote in an email to staffers that he posted on Twitter this afternoon. “I’ve taken a job doing that, as a media columnist for the Times. The newsroom and the company as a whole are now in a strong position. We have a CEO who fundamentally believes in news and has proven again and again that he’ll stand up for the toughest stories, about anyone, and colleagues across the organization who share that view.”
Smith did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mediate, and a successor at BuzzFeed has not yet been announced.
