The Revenge of the Home Page: As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate.
The Revenge of the Home Page: As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate.
As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate.
Semafor, a global news publication that launched in late 2022, originally focussed on publishing e-mail newsletters. The rise of the newsletter was another strategy for building loyal audiences without relying on social media: rather than try to get readers to visit your Web site, you deliver your content straight to their in-boxes. But over time Semafor’s site has become more important. “It actually felt like a slightly counterintuitive choice to say, ‘We’re going to invest in building a Web page,’ ” Ben Smith, the co-founder of Semafor, told me. Smith was the long-running editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, a publication built to distribute content through social media. “We were convinced that home pages were dead. In fact, they were just resting,” he said. (The New Yorker launched a redesigned home page in late 2023, having reached a similar conclusion.)