Good evening, and Happy Friday. Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of American media. Tonight, we check in with Ben Smith and Justin Smith’s Semafor, weeks ahead of its highly anticipated launch. Plus: Some notes on The Washington Post’s fits-and-starts turn-around effort, and a Murdoch tabloid’s strange obsession with a seemingly baseless Today show rumor.

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Six years ago, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen were ever so slightly less low-key. They spent the spring, summer, and fall of 2016 keeping mum about their exit from Politico and future plans. Sure, people in the industry knew that they were coming up to New York to meet with venture capitalists and institutional investors, but the business was still largely a black box minus some well-orchestrated leaks in Vanity Fair’s The Hive and other sources. Eventually, Jim began to drop more effusive hints about the concept, adding to his thesis that the media was “broken,” and “too often a scam.” He and his co-founders promised, in typical VandeHeian fashion, to introduce an entirely different style of journalism, dubbed “smart brevity,” that would scrape away the crap and give readers nothing but the essential information and analysis. It was only three months before launch that news broke that they’d hired Fortune’s private equity scoop machine Dan Primack, offering the first real hint of what was in store...