CEO of (FAKE NEWS) Bloomberg leaves to start new media venture "Project Coda"

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - A new source of FAKE NEWS or will it be a legitimate source?

According to the KoopaTV Game of THAT Year 2021 awards, exposing the FAKE NEWS media throughout 2021 (particularly as it related to the Nintendo Switch and hardware revisions) was KoopaTV.org's best article series. A lot of that was about Bloomberg Media Group, a FAKE NEWS media company of which Bloomberg News is a part. Now it turns out that Justin B. Smith, the CEO of Bloomberg Media Group, has stepped down in order to create a new media venture with New York Times media columnist and former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief Ben Smith. (The two Smiths are unrelated.)

Justin Smith recommends reading this Wall Street Journal report, while Ben Smith recommends reading this FT report. So let's examine those.

It appears their new venture, called “Project Coda” for now, will be a very multimedia publication aimed at general topics (as opposed to just business topics), with modern digital reporting besides just written articles, but also videos, podcasts, and other things you might expect nowadays from sleek, modern websites (not like this one). Certainly a higher budget and a bigger team than what KoopaTV has, though I strongly disagree that the written word is antiquated and obsolete. Their target audience are “200 million college-educated, English-speaking professionals” throughout Earth. This is apparently a big differentiator from other media outlets, which target mostly one country (like the United States), or they don't care about the education level of their audience. (KoopaTV, for example, targets Koopa Kingdom readers and mostly United States-residing English-speakers 13 (preferably 18) and up, without regard to education. As long as you appreciate our excellent writing quality.) This makes it have an “international focus”, though how they plan to do that differently than already-existing publications with regional offices and reporters is a mystery.

For example, at Justin Smith's now-former company, FAKE NEWS Bloomberg, they have many regional offices and “journalists” around the world. Many of the anti-Nintendo fabricated stories—including about Nintendo Switch 4K; the Nintendo Switch Pro to be revealed around E3 2021; and their hit piece about the Nintendo Switch (OLED model)'s price—came from tech “journalist” Takashi Mochizuki, who is based in Japan. How does that not make FAKE NEWS Bloomberg an international publication? They're certainly causing havoc and chaos with made-up information all around the world.

Will Justin Smith be as loose with the truth in his new organisation as he was with the last one?

Apparently, Project Coda will try to be an unbiased news publication that is different from current news outlets. Does that mean that Justin Smith, formerly of FAKE NEWS Bloomberg, is ashamed of the organisation that he helped to build up? That it's gone out of control and is making the universe a worse place with its commitment to false and misleading stories, and that it's so rotten to the core that the only way to change it is to defeat it by creating a new publication to outperform and bury FAKE NEWS Bloomberg? Justin Smith admits that it'll take decades to accomplish this, but he apparently will be working on this project for the rest of his life. I mean, that SOUNDS like shame over the FAKE NEWS monster he developed, and now he's making it his life's work to atone for it.

The founders also mention stuff about how social media (companies) has warped people's ways of getting news, and that's very true, and FAKE NEWS Bloomberg has definitely participated in that as well. It's a problem when these companies and their curators and algorithms act as gatekeepers to information, though the Project Coda fellows didn't mention what they'd do about this.

As far as I'm concerned, the universe doesn't need another media outlet. There should be fewer of them, actually. (Don't start cutting with KoopaTV, though.) I guess we'll see if this new one ends up being a menace just like FAKE NEWS Bloomberg currently is. Unfortunately, that one doesn't seem to be going away. Project Coda currently has no launch timeline whatsoever.


Ludwig chose to wrote on this topic because he obviously didn't get enough of his fill in writing “FAKE NEWS Bloomberg” on Monday. Do you think this Project Coda will produce more FAKE NEWS, or will it live up to its aspirations? Do you think that reading KoopaTV requires a college degree?


Project Coda became the media outlet Semafor, which does, in fact, produce more FAKE NEWS.