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Semafornication

www.todayintabs.com

Semafornication

You fool, this isn't even my semaform.

Rusty Foster
Oct 18, 2022
25
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Semafornication

www.todayintabs.com

Listen You Dummy

If you want to launch a new publication but you don’t want to experiment with the ownership structure or the business model, you only have one choice: to invent a gimmicky story format. This format must strike a difficult balance—flattering your reader’s discerning eye for news and respecting their valuable time, but also reassuring them that they will uniquely be able to understand your news with their tiny idiot hamster brain. So Vox invented both its now-abandoned card stack and its recently revitalized StoryStream, Axios has “Smart Brevity,” Politico has “conventional wisdom,” Puck has its hard, indigestible “news pucks,” even Tabs has our trademark “baffling chaos.” But today the Smiths dot news launched Semafor with what I’m certain will come to be the prevalent news story format of the future: the Semaform.

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What is the Semaform? Executive Editor Gina Chua explains:

We’re breaking articles into:

  • The News

  • The Reporter’s View (or analysis)

  • Room For Disagreement (or counterargument)

  • The View From (or different perspectives on the topic)

  • Notable (or some of the best other writing on the subject)

Go Deeper

Confused? Of course you are. According to our content strategy memo you can barely read. So let’s break this down into a more digestible info-slurry:

  • The News: What crusty media dinosaurs would have called “the lede,” or the first couple paragraphs.

  • The Reporter’s View: What Grandpa would have wheezily described as “the rest of the article.” What an old dingbat! Love that guy though. He survived the plague.

  • Room For Disagreement: Old fashioned news websites used to have a “Comments” section where any idiot could spout off about anything. Semafor cannily replaced this with just one comment by just one idiot, carefully chosen by the reporter. Smart!

  • The View From: A special section to add some random information from “places where the press isn’t free,” such as China, Nairobi, or James Bennet.

  • Notable: Traditionally known as “the chumbox,” this is where Semafor will link to Skin Thing and Weird Food.

The Tuesday Quiz

With only the brief explanation above, I bet you’ll have no trouble identifying what section each of the following excerpts came from:

Semafor text screenshot A reading: A key US-Saudi meeting under review in the White House has been canceled, according to the contents of a letter obtained exclusively by Semafor.
Semafor text screenshot B reading: The natural skepticism about the public polls is driven by the fact that it’s still a ways to go to the election, and some of the key poll results have been collected from smartphone apps in a country where basic feature phones dominate. Also by recent history. Obi’s Labour Party is a minnow up against president Muhammadu Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) in power for seven years, and the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which spent 16 years in power until 2015. The Labour Party has no political machinery in large swathes of the country.
Semafor text screenshot C reading: On Monday, Hunt scrapped most of Truss and Kwarteng's proposed tax cuts and spending policies. The reversal followed an earlier government U-turn on controversial plans to abolish the top rate of income tax for the highest earners.
Semafor text screenshot D reading: Since 1980, at least 24 workers (mainly technicians) have been killed while at work in the space industry while many more have sustained injuries that were never reported or are not classified as space industry accidents in the data.

If you said (A) “The Scoop,” (B) “The News,” (C) “Know More,” and (D) “Reed’s View,” then you’ve already got the hang of it. Simple!

A Tweet

Twitter avatar for @jbenton
Joshua Benton @jbenton
Did @semafor already roll back the bold-the-first-few-words-of-every-graf thing? It's been 3 hours! ~7 a.m. vs. now:
This August, a former New York Times reporter named Riva Atlas called to ask me some questions about The Times on behalf of an unnamed institutional investor.

"Is the Times always going to be fundamentally a news company expanding into these ancillary tech products?" she asked. "Or is it trying to morph into something like a tech company with an ancillary news product?"

My caller was raising one of the great questions hanging over the Times: What do they want to be?

And she wasn't just any former Times reporter. Times executives told me her questions closely matched the interests of a major activist investor, ValueAct, which revealed a 6.7% stake in the media company in August.
This August, a former New York Times reporter named Riva Atlas called to ask me some questions about The Times on behalf of an unnamed institutional investor.

"Is the Times always going to be fundamentally a news company expanding into these ancillary tech products?" she asked. "Or is it trying to morph into something like a tech company with an ancillary news product?"

My caller was raising one of the great questions hanging over the Times: What do they want to be?

And she wasn't just any former Times reporter. Times executives told me her questions closely matched the interests of a major activist investor, ValueAct, which revealed a 6.7% stake in the media company in August.
1:43 PM ∙ Oct 18, 2022
22Likes3Retweets

The View From Space

While it’s not clear whether the future is random section headers and arbitrary boldfacing, nor is it clear whether Semafor is actually just eight newsletters in a trenchcoat, what is clear is that the best thing about Semafor so far is this weird backward-spinning globe doodle on the homepage.

A gif of the globe spinning backwards that looks hand drawn in MS Paint. It appears very tiny on the Semafor home page, to remind us what world the website is referring to.

No More

Oh yeah there’s also the events business, SemaForks. Excuse me, “3D journalism platform.”

Yet another screenshot: "SemaforX, our 3D journalism platform, curates high-impact, compelling, and consequential editorial encounters between informed audiences, key leaders, and the most dynamic change agents in Washington, the U.S. and the world." with the Semafor eXperiences logo.

Buy Buy Birdie

Today in Tabs’s 3D newslettering platform is your body, which I’m now calling TodaX in TabX. To finally experience the third dimension in newsletters, please buy one of our increasingly scarce You Can Always Quit t-shirts, now with free shipping!

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Credit: Photo Intern Ash Ponders for TodaX in TabX

Notable

NYC boldly asks residents to put trash out later. Hell Gate columnist A. Rat responds. “Shein is even worse than you thought.” Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz in NYMag (Via Channel 4) drastically overestimates what I thought of Shein. The New York Times found the clitoris. Jokes aside, this is a really great story. Also great but inherently funny, “More Proof That This Really Is the End of History” by yr boy Francis Fukuyama. Seriously you guys, this time? Definitely the end of history. I mean it. “Tiny cretin of a man” James Corden banned from Balthazar but later un-banned. Terrible mistake. Clio Chang’s “Helicopter Landlord” story has the group chat divided between people who think this is normal human behavior and people who desperately want a faceless impersonal landlord experience. “Majority of Tory party members want Liz Truss to resign now - as Boris Johnson tops list to replace PM.” RIP any hope of satirizing British politics. Meanwhile in the U.S., Tulsi Gabbard compared Joe Biden to Hitler, which is pretty bad even before you learn her point was that Hitler had some good ideas.

And Finally

The ghosts are hooooOOOOOoooorrrrrnyyyyyy.

A screencap of the horny ghosts local TV news segment. Haunted house owner and woman of a certain age Linda Hill stands in profile, reflected in a round mirror. The caption reads “the ghosts talking dirty ohh baby.”

Another Tweet (That Is Actually Just a TikTok)

Twitter avatar for @WrittenByHanna
STOP DONATING TO BLM NATIONAL AND SHAUN KING @WrittenByHanna
This is the only thing men should talk about on podcasts
6:00 AM ∙ Oct 15, 2022
90,967Likes14,429Retweets

Sing, O Muse

Vundabar, “Shadow Boxing”

If you give me $25 million, I promise not to spend it reinventing the news. If you don’t have $25 million, please give me $35 but I might reinvent the news just a tiny bit with it, no promises.

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It’s pronounced “SEE-ma-FORE-ee-um.” Rhymes with “crematorium.”

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Free shipping in North America and only $6.00 everywhere else, which believe me I am taking a hefty loss on the shipping for those.

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