Even in 2011 the digital operations at most of the major news outlets amounted to a website that was only marginally sleeker than it had been more than a decade prior. News websites were still designed to be digital twins of newspapers. For Smith, this presented an enormous business opportunity. “I feel in general the 800–1,200 word form of the news article is broken,” he said in a Nieman Lab interview. The basis for that conclusion: “You don’t see people sharing those kinds of stories.”
