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.)
Home pages? Can we please have the
⟨blink⟩tag and the “UNDER CONSTRUCTION” .gif again? Those were of utmost importance!Okay, serious now. I might be wrong but I think that the whole internet is going full circle, and that what the link describes towards homepages is part of a bigger process, of re-decentralisation. It isn’t just about getting news from homepages instead of social media; it’s also about how we find content (again, through human recommendation) and who owns it (individuals or small groups, as the ad “industry” is going kaput). It don’t think that’ll be exactly the same as the 90s/00s internet but similar in spirit.