Photo: Charlotte Klein/New York Magazine
On Thursday evening, more than 1,000 flacks, hacks, and titans of industry gathered for a gala in the glass-ceilinged courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The black-tie-optional celebration was hosted by Semafor, capping off a week of events for the World Economy Summit, the newsletter company’s attempt to create the “Davos of D.C.” Heading into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday — which was marked this year by the absence of the president — the atmosphere was notably Trump free in ways both refreshing and telling. “You should have seen the entreaties we made to people in the administration,” one political reporter said about the dinner. “Couldn’t even get random governors to sit at our table.”
With Trumpworld shunning the festivities, the gala was a bit like being in an alternative universe where foreign diplomats are treated with respect and free trade still rules the world. Semafor, founded by Justin Smith and Ben Smith, presented itself as a media outlet for just such a global audience when it launched three years ago, even if these days it more closely resembles a company that puts on lavish events for the powerful boardroom-and-backroom crowd. “It’s entirely possible that a Justin Smith ballroom is the most globally committed place in North America circa 2025,” David Bradley, Smith’s former boss at The Atlantic, told me.
Semafor’s backers insist that the company remains a news organization foremost. The philanthropist David Rubenstein, the chair of the board of the venerable Brookings Institution and a co-chair, along with billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, of this week’s events, told me that Semafor had filled a gap in Washington for “an independently owned publication that covers Washington and world events and also can put conferences together that people want to attend.” He added, “People come to me all the time and think I know what’s going on in Washington. I really don’t; I just read Semafor.” His favorite newsletter is Semafor Gulf. Justin Smith, hovering nearby with his swept blond hair, noted they had just arrived from a dinner for visiting dignitaries from the Middle East.
Rubenstein added that the summit “turned out to be extremely successful.” His praise for Semafor was expected; less so was the Semafor-themed rendition of the Gettysburg Address he recited on the stage a few minutes later: “No score and three years ago, our host brought forth on this content a new publication …” He asked the crowd, “How many people here get all their news from Semafor?” The crowd cheered. He then asked how many people were under the age of 30 and received a muted response. “Under the age of 40?” Better. Pritzker said Semafor is the first thing she reads in the morning and the last before she goes to bed.
Bill de Blasio told me he is a fan of the morning Flagship newsletter, its “100 words or less” global-news briefing. “I feel like it’s really objective reporting,” said the former mayor. “Semafor sees where things are going better than a lot of media outlets, so I get a lot from it.” And the gala’s attendees were likewise trying to get something from him, like the guy who approached to say he’d love to get de Blasio on “at least one” of his “global boards” and maybe a think-tank as well. They exchanged cards.
Ben Smith, the cherub-faced veteran of BuzzFeed News and the New York Times, was walking around with his bow tie undone like one of the last guests at a wedding. “I feel so good about how much news we broke,” he said, referring to the items Semafor reported earlier in the week from the summit’s live interviews with global luminaries, including Germany’s finance minister, Democratic senator Michael Bennet, and Netflix’s Ted Sarandos. In his own remarks from the stage, Justin Smith thanked the crowd for coming to “celebrate journalism in this challenging time.”
Three years since its founding, and three months into Trump’s second term, Semafor today presents an interesting proposition: a media outlet geared toward the powerful, hosting events with all the traditional trappings of power, minus the people across town who actually wield it.
To get to Justin Smith’s historic Georgian Revival home amid a row of embassies in Kalorama, you first have to get through the Secret Service permanently stationed on either side of the street (the Obamas live nearby). On Monday of the week of the gala, I found the Smiths in Justin’s kitchen drinking San Pellegrino. The house functioned as a kind of base camp for Semafor in its early days and is still where Ben stays when he’s visiting from Brooklyn. This was the “calm before the storm,” said Ben, clad in a coat and tie (at the actual Davos, the CEO of Ralph Lauren told one of his reporters that ties were back, he explained). We moved to the screened porch, a sprawling sun-dappled enclosure with brick floors and a built-in red chambray couch adorned with a few Semafor-branded pillows.
We were joined on the deck by Justin’s dog, Teddy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling retriever, who slept on the couch, stirred only occasionally by the sound of a bird nearby, and Meera Pattni, Semafor’s comms chief, a spunky Brit formerly of Vice and Condé Nast who has admirably kept her bosses in line over the past two and a half years. It was a lesson learned the hard way, following a breathless press tour Justin and Ben did months ahead of their launch, speaking, now somewhat infamously, of their lofty ambitions to target the “200 million people who are college educated, who read in English, but who no one is really treating like an audience.” At one point Ben compared Semafor to the Netflix of news, a comment not even he seemed to know the meaning of. There was “a lot of anticipation,” said Justin, who added, with a smile, “The benefits of partnering with the Pied Piper of the media-writing community is that you get a lot of coverage.”
The company that emerged was quite different from what was advertised. The Smiths raised $35 million, narrowed their target audience from every college-educated English speaker around the world to a select group of opinion leaders, and built a bare-bones newsroom centered on a core of reporters including former Wall Street Journal business reporter Liz Hoffman, political reporters Dave Weigel and Shelby Talcott, media reporter Max Tani, and Hill chronicler Burgess Everett, whom they poached from Politico last summer. Today, Semafor has 50 editorial staffers and 50 more on the business side.
“It’s a very talent-centric business,” said Ben. “If you’re going to be successful in media now, you’re going to build around talent. You see the New York Times figuring out how to move towards that.” That the Times has some 1,700 journalists doesn’t faze the Smiths, with Justin noting that what Hoffman and Everett are doing could “count for 10 or 20 or 30” people in a newsroom. “Burgess breaks a vast majority of the important consequential stories in the Senate,” said Justin, which “means that everyone in the Senate has to read Semafor, which means everyone in the House has to read Semafor, which means K Street has to read Semafor, which means the White House has to read Semafor, which means Wall Street has to read Semafor.”
Instead of disrupting media, Semafor ended up slotting into a space that other D.C.-focused newsletter-oriented start-ups like Punchbowl and Axios occupy, even if the Smiths resist the comparison. “I think a lot of people put us in the category of not so much Axios and Puck but more like The Economist and the Financial Times,” Justin said. Semafor from the get-go wanted to compete at an international level, launching with two reporters in sub-Saharan Africa, which required lower-cost investment and “had the least amount of competition,” Justin said, making for a “sandbox of experimentation that would be an interesting way to begin testing out our international model.” In September, they expanded to the Gulf, where they have a team of three journalists and a handful of contributors. “We definitely have more boots on the ground than the FT does in that part of the world,” said Justin. “Certainly more editorially than The Economist.”
But where Semafor has really differentiated itself is with events that convene big names from the private sector and government, so much so that rivals in Washington media, seeing the stacked lineup for the World Economy Summit, are wondering why they aren’t doing the same. The Smiths have acknowledged that their high-end events played a bigger part in the business than initially expected — with the World Economy Summit alone, Semafor is making something in the eight-figure range from sponsors — and that the emphasis on them has increased over time.
They do not, however, just want to be seen as running an events company, a mere outgrowth of their formidable rolodexes. Connections, built over decades and for the most part in a vastly different political-media landscape, constitute a precious resource both Smiths possess in abundance, but these days connections are difficult to monetize through journalism. They insist the key to the success of their events is their journalism. “Journalism is the beating heart of the whole organization, whether it’s journalism expressed through newsletters or breaking news or curated news or live journalism,” said Justin. “That’s the core thing that we actually are offering and selling to consumers and sponsors.” The goal at the events is to make news from the live interviews onstage, snippets that’ll get picked up by other outlets and maybe even move some markets.
Ben said Semafor has broken “two or three of the really big stories of the Trump administration in the last two weeks,” citing an article about the law firm Paul Weiss’s overture to Trump and “a big chunk” of the administration’s attack on Harvard. A day later, he texted to send over a scoop from March about how the Trump administration was considering recognizing Crimea as Russian territory in a bid to end the war. Bloomberg later confirmed the potential concession.
Unlike its rivals in the newsletter business, which depend on subscriptions, Semafor relies on advertising. And events are notoriously difficult to profit from, with thin margins, even if Semafor’s events are impressively sized and populated. Still, Justin said the company was profitable in the first six months of this year, claiming “about a hundred-plus percent revenue growth a year.” He added, “In due time, there’s no doubt that we’ve got to try out subscriptions.”
His team would not divulge just how profitable Semafor is, but it is likely that the enormous amount of time and effort invested in both the events and the newsgathering has produced but a trickle of money. “Journalism’s a tough business, and to design business models that support it — that’s sort of been my life mission,” Justin said. “If a news organization can own and operate the most influential gathering of global economic and business leaders in the heart of Washington, D.C., and make a great business of it and generate tons of news, that is a really, really good start for a young company.”
In year one of the World Economy Summit, Semafor hosted five Fortune 500 CEOS; in year two, it was 20; and this year, more than 200. Semafor doesn’t charge for the event, instead working with various sponsorship partners “who get a series of benefits tied to primarily being able to associate their corporate brand with this high-level conversation on the future of the global economy,” said Justin. Sponsors don’t have any control over the programming aside from a few “custom content moments” onstage, which are conducted not by Semafor journalists but, oftentimes, by Justin. (“Still a start-up here,” Ben said, laughing.) In addition to Rubenstein and Pritzker, the event’s co-chairs were Ken Griffin and Henry Kravis — not a bad group of names to have on your letterhead.
Much of the summit happens onstage, but not all of it. Semafor also hosts an opening dinner with a hundred or so CEOs and speakers as well as a “bilateral program between the CEOs,” Justin said, “basically a kind of matchmaking service where they can find time together.” Despite speculation among competitors in the industry that Semafor is taking a cut from all the networking it provides, Justin said, “We don’t charge for that.”
The Smiths’ vision of where Semafor sits in the media landscape doesn’t resonate with everyone. “They are an event company that also has a B-level journalism component. I don’t understand what their goal is,” one rival media executive told me. “They have no real identity. Who are these events trying to reach? Congress is in recess. The administration barely listens to business. What’s the point of it all?”
Two days after my interview with the Smiths, the summit began at a series of carpeted ballrooms at the Conrad Hotel. The live journalism on display could be boring, an occupational hazard when you’re interviewing the vice-chairman of Chevron at an event sponsored by Chevron. Several interviews did make news — including a quote from Rachel Reeves, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the front page of the FT — but they didn’t have much staying power. There were more interesting things being said in private CEO briefings happening in smaller conference rooms, like the one where Ben Smith was interviewing Sarandos. The guidelines for the 16 or so people there, I was told, were Chatham House Rules (a fancy term for “on background”). Sarandos took questions from the audience and from Ben about the future of streaming, programming decisions, and culture in the age of Trump. Justin popped into the room with Iván Duque Márquez, the former president of Colombia, who was scheduled to answer questions on one of the main stages in a few minutes.
The summit had received an assist from the global upheaval initiated by the Trump administration, which gave private-sector and political figures new incentive to be in the nation’s capital. Suddenly, the bookings that the Smiths were struggling to get a few months before the event — like Reeves — were no longer a problem. Semafor even booked a few members of Trump’s Cabinet, such as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, which is remarkable given the fraught relationship of the administration and non-right-wing media. But the event still had the feeling of a group of exiled power brokers talking among themselves, the remnants of a world that no longer exists.
As we walked into the green room, where Sarandos was chatting with the French finance minister and dealing with an exploding bottle of sparkling water, I brought up the Crimea scoop to Ben, noting that it wasn’t until Bloomberg confirmed the potential concession a few days ago that anyone seemed to pay attention. “No, everybody talked about that. It was on Drudge. Bloomberg’s was a real scoop: We said they were thinking about it, and now they’re actually doing it,” Ben said. “Our things hit. Although I do think there’s a different thing happening — that nothing hits.”
A few minutes later, Ben was typing “semafor crimea” in the search bar of X. “There are a lot of tweets about Semafor and Crimea,” he said. “I was briefly concerned. I was like, Wait, did nobody see that story?”
