Media and tech aren’t just intersecting — they’re fully intertwined. And to understand how those worlds work, and what they mean for you, veteran journalist Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers - and gets them to spell it out in plain, BS-free English.
Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
📻 Siste episoder av Channels with Peter Kafka
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Craig Finn on Friendship, Fans and The Hold Steady’s Second Life (00:48:49)
Craig Finn makes music — as the head of the Hold Steady, and on his solo records — about grown-up lives and bad decisions. Back in 2017, we talked about his life as a working rock musician — and how touring actually works, how the band found a second life, and why fans and friendship matter more than old ideas of rock stardom.
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Podcast Pioneer PJ Vogt’s Second Act: Less Budget, More Control (00:54:48)
PJ Vogt helped invent modern narrative podcasting with “Reply All.” Now he’s running “Search Engine” with a much smaller team and a lot more control. We talk through what he gave up this time around, what he gained, and how he actually makes the show each week.
I loved this conversation when we recorded it earlier this year. And I think it’s just as relevant now, as media talent — and lots of people in other industries, too — are figuring out how to think about money, ownership and scale.
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"Neither Side Is Used to Losing." Lucas Shaw on What’s Next for Netflix and Paramount in the Battle for Warner Bros. (00:41:56)
The backstory here is that weeks ago, Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw agreed to join me for my 2025/2026 look back/look ahead episode. And then things got way more compelling, because Paramount and Netflix got into a truly unprecedented fight over the future of Warner Bros Discovery.
So that’s what we’re talking about here, including:
*Why this truly is a turning point for Hollywood, and streaming, and the great media/tech collision we’ve been covering for years.
*How Trump, Middle Eastern money and antitrust regulators complicate the deal
*Who actually needs this merger more.
*What happens now that WBD has formally dismissed Paramount’s bid? Again: we recorded this a few days before the news — but as you’ll hear, we had a pretty good sense of how it was going to go.
And because this still is a wrap-up episode, we got some AI vs. Hollywood chat into this one, as well as some listening/watching recs.
PS: I’ve got some bonus programming coming to you over the next couple of weeks. Have a great holiday, and I’ll see you in January.
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Lachlan Cartwright Started in Tabloids. Now He’s a Must-Read Media Gossip. (00:46:51)
I chat with lots of media reporters. Lachlan Cartwright is a different beast: An Aussie who started out working for Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids in London and New York, and then on to the National Enquirer — yes, that National Enquirer — back when it was catching and killing stories on behalf on Donald Trump. Now Cartwright runs Breaker, a must-read New York media gossip newsletter and podcast, and spends his time staking out Sulzberger family barbecues, knocking on doors at 4:45 a.m., and writing about the people who run the news.
We talk about how tabloid training shaped the way he reports; what he saw and did during his Enquirer years — and how he thinks about that period now; and why he believes there’s still a business (and an appetite) for smart, funny, deeply-inside media gossip. And then I put him to work, dishing on the big under-covered stories we will be talking about in the next year.
Cheers!
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"Hollywood is Truly Freaked Out." Inside the Netflix/WBD Deal with Lucas Shaw (00:18:45)
In 2013, Netflix wanted to become HBO. Now Netflix is going to buy HBO along with the Warner Bros. Studio, in a blockbuster $83 billion deal.
Wowza. Here to talk me through this is Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, who has been deep in the deal talks for weeks. Discussed in this one:
*How did Netflix maneuver its way into a deal everyone thought Paramount would win?
*Will this deal actually get past Donald Trump and U.S. regulators?
*What does this deal — a kind of deal Netflix has never, ever made in the past — tell us about Netflix today?
*What happens to my favorite HBO shows?
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PBS Lost a Billion Dollars. Now what? With CEO Paula Kerger (00:40:26)
The last time I interviewed PBS CEO Paula Kerger was 2019: Donald Trump was President, and Republicans were trying to defund public media — as they had been trying to do for decades.
That didn’t happen then, but this year it did, and now Kerger is trying to fill a $1 billion funding hole.
So far, she says, PBS and its member stations have held up ok — no one has had to shut down, yet.
But while Kerger holds out hope she can convince Congress to start funding public TV again, it’s worth talking about why federally funded public media was created in 1967 — and whether it still makes sense to continue that setup in 2025. And if federal funding is permanently off the table, what will PBS do — and not do -- in the future?
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What Happens To Media When The Web Goes Away, with Tony Haile (00:39:09)
We built the modern media business for the web — for people who visited websites, read articles, and saw ads. What happens when no one does that anymore?
That’s been one of the big themes of conversations we’ve been having on Channels with this year — with people who run big and small media properties, and with people who are trying to build media businesses. And that’s why I wanted to talk to Tony Haile.
Tony got into digital media years ago, when he was the CEO of Chartbeat - the analytics site that trained every web publisher to watch what was happening to their properties in real time. Then he went on to build Scroll, a sort of ad-blocking subscription service that was meant to work with lots of news publishers. Twitter bought that one, then killed it.
The point is that Tony has spent a lot of time talking and working with media companies of all sorts, and now… it looks like he’s getting out. So I wanted to talk him about why his new company — Filament — is not a media startup, and what he thinks is going to happen to the rest of the media business as AI washes over the landscape. This is going to sound like a bummer of a conversation — and in some parts it is! But he’s a good guide, and there are some glimmers of hope here and there.
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Kevin Reilly got to the top of the TV heap. Now he's in AI. (00:40:10)
If you watched something on TV that you liked in the past few decades, there’s a good chance Kevin Reilly was involved: at various times he’s held top jobs at FX, Fox, NBC, Turner and HBO Max.
But that run ended in 2020, and now Reilly is running Kartel, an AI company that… well, I’m still not entirely sure what it does. (To be fair, as Reilly notes in our chat, it’s a young company that’s still figuring it out itself.)
But I really wanted to talk to Reilly to get his POV on TV, which more or less peaked when he was working in the industry. Now, of course, it is in what appears to be permanent decline, while its remaining participants try to merge their way to safety.
Why did TV flourish in its not-that-long ago Golden Age? And why didn’t its leaders see — or act on — the threat that streaming/digital/internet tech would have on their industry?
You probably have some ideas yourself. Now you get to hear it directly from a guy who was there, at the top.
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What the Disney–YouTube Battle Tells Us About the End of Cable (00:52:39)
It’s not unusual for a big TV network and a big TV distributor to fight about money. But the Disney-YouTube fight is unusual -- at the bare minimum, because it has stretched out for so long. CNBC’s Alex Sherman lives and breathes this stuff, so I asked him to walk me through it, and make some prognostications about when it might get settled (spoiler alert: he thinks some football fans who pay for YouTube TV may be unhappy for a while longer.)
Then Sherman and I move on to the other Big Media deal: the battle for the company we currently call Warner Bros. Discovery, but is likely to be owned by someone else, in some form…. eventually.
Discussed here: why, really, did Larry and David Ellison put in multiple offers to buy another media company weeks after they bought Paramount? What would they do with WBD if they got it? And are any of the theoretical other buyers for all or parts of WBD real?
Bonus question for you: did I use the word “degradation” correctly in this one?
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The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell on Why Republicans Won the Attention War (00:45:25)
In some ways, the Bulwark feels like other small publishers in 2025: it’s found growth and profit by pushing itself out on any platform it can find.
But that wasn’t the plan when the company started in 2018. Back then, it was a non-profit cofounded by Republicans who couldn’t stand their party’s embrace of Donald Trump, and wanted a place to organize, debate and push back.
Over the years the site turned itself into a for-profit, and found success selling Substack subscriptions — it’s currently on pace to do more than $12 million a year from those alone, says CEO Sarah Longwell. But it has really caught fire in recent years by embracing YouTube. “The thing that made the biggest difference was when we decided to turn the cameras on,” she says.
I talked to Longwell this week about the Bulwark’s evolution, and the tension between running a mission-driven company and one that wants to make money. And since Longwell still does political consulting and focus group work, I also talked to her about the state of the art when it comes to political media — and why she thinks Republicans are so much better at it then Democrats.
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The Man Who Fixed The New York Times Wants to Fix CNN (00:52:17)
Would you pay $7 a month to stream CNN?
Because CNN CEO Mark Thompson would like you to do that.
I know, I know, I’m skeptical, too. But Thompson has been here before: At his last job, as CEO of the New York Times, he helped shepherd that company’s subscription business, which had a gazillion naysayers at the start. And now the Times’ business model is the envy of everyone in journalism.
Can he do it again? One big difference is that the Times launched its paywall all the way back in 2011, before everyone was asking consumers to pay for monthly subscriptions for everything. I also have a hunch that the Times brand registers more deeply for its audience than CNN does for its. But now we’ll get to find out.
Meantime, all of this is happening as CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery is likely to get sold, yet again. Which means all of the work Thompson and his team are doing could get upended by a new management regime.
But that’s the future. For now, it’s very much worth listening to Thompson make the case for CNN, and TV news in general.
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The End of Mass Media—and What Comes Next (00:56:54)
We spend a lot of time on this show talking to people who run media companies. We also spend a lot of time talking to media reporters.
So here’s our one-man Venn diagram: Brian Morrissey runs The Rebooting, where he podcasts, writes and hosts events, all geared at making people in the media business smarter about the media business. If you want to hear from a guy who understands the big picture, but also the practical realities of operating, he’s your guy.
Brian has been preaching the gospel of small media for some time, so we start there: What is the upside of running a scaled-down media company these days — and what happens to all the businesses that spent years chasing scale?
And yes, Brian and I also talk about AI, and what it will and won’t do for (and to) media. But we also spend a lot of time talking about Google, and the enormous power it currently has — particularly when it comes to the company’s Discover feature, which drives an astonishing amount of traffic.
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The PR Guy Who Says the AI Boom Is a Bust (00:54:36)
The AI story is changing fast. A few months ago, it was all promise and inevitability. Now even AI boosters are asking if the numbers make sense.
Ed Zitron got there early. He runs a PR firm for a living, which means he’s supposed to help people sell their stories. But he’s become best known for tearing tech’s biggest stories apart. And he’s been pushing at the economics behind the AI boom, via his newsletter and podcast, for some time.
We talk about how he built a career out of skepticism, why the media keeps falling for big tech’s favorite stories, and what happens if the AI party ends early.
(And yes: I wrote the paragraphs above with an assist from ChatGPT — mostly so I can imagine Zitron fuming when he reads this.)
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Why the Guardian Doesn't Need a Billionaire to Thrive (00:39:00)
In lots of ways Guardian Media Group is facing the same problems as every other news publisher: A tricky ad environment, platform problems, looming AI threats.
One big difference: The Guardian also has a $1.5 billion trust backing the non-profit, which seems way, way better than being owned by a run-of-the-mill billionaire who might want to meddle with the paper.
But CEO Anna Bateson says the Guardian needs to be a self-sustaining publisher. So it has been steadily, and successfully, getting readers to shoulder the load, via donations, which now account for 40% of the company's revenue.
We talk about how and why the Guardian switched its business model; why it still wants ad money; how the British, lefty news shop is trying to break into America yet again, and why asking readers for donations is, and isn't, like asking them to pay for subscriptions.
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Almost Everyone is Taking Money from OpenAI. Why is Ziff Davis suing them? (00:34:22)
In the future, digital publishers could get run over by AI. In the present, they are deeply concerned about Google, and the prospect that the search giant is going to choke off their last reliable traffic stream.That may explain why lots of publishers are making deals with OpenAI now -- and doing a lot of grousing about Google.Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah is going the other way: he's one of only two big publishers to sue OpenAI (the other one is the New York Times) and he says his portfolio of sites would like more traffic from Google, but is confident things will work out.Shah and Ziff Davis never got the attention some of their digital peers did a decade ago. On the flip side, they're still standing in 2025. So this is a POV worth paying attention to.
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The Future of Late Night TV, Jimmy Kimmel, and The First Amendment (00:26:53)
When’s the last time you stayed up to watch a late night TV monologue? Months? Years? Decades?
I’m not sure, either. But I stayed up Tuesday night to watch Jimmy Kimmel’s return. James Poniewozik, who covers TV for the New York Times, just caught up with it the next day on YouTube.
Which underscores one of the odder parts of the Trump v. Kimmel fight - it revolves around a time slot and a format that has been on its way out for a long time.
So how did late night TV become a flashpoint in a crucial First Amendment fight? And how long is it going to stick around?
James is the perfect person for this discussion: Not only does he watch TV (or YouTube) for a living, he’s also become a professional Trump-watcher, because Trump is a TV character. (Trump and TV are the subject of James’ excellent 2019 book). But make no mistake: the threats he’s making — on his own and with the help of his regulators – are very real.
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I tried Zuckerberg's $800 Ray-Bans. Are they the future? With Alex Heath (00:45:00)
A year ago I got try a pair of $10,000 computer goggles from Meta. The tech was super-impressive, but you couldn’t buy them them. You still can’t.
Now Mark Zuckerberg is trying a similar idea. But this time around the the tech is scaled-down, lighter and way cheaper: the new version costs $800, and you’ll be able to buy them in a couple days.
Why would you want to wear a computer on your face - no matter how much it costs and how much they weigh? And why do all the big tech companies keep trying to make this happen? I have some ideas, but Alex Heath is deeply sourced on this stuff, so asked him.
Up until this week, Alex was a star tech reporter at The Verge. Now he’s off on his own, with Access (a podcast) and Sources (a Substack). He’s kicking off his foray into indie media with a long interview with Zuckerberg, so we used that as a jumping off point to talk about Zuckerberg’s political shift, his AI obsession, and his big bet on wearable tech.
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How TBPN Made a Tech News Splash (00:39:10)
John Coogan knows what you’re thinking: the world does not need another tech podcast. And the world does not need another podcast featuring two dudes talking.
Yet Coogan and Jordi Hays have started another tech podcast, featuring the two of them talking and… it’s a hit. In the span of a year, TBPN has become the place where tech execs go to chop up the news of the day - first in a daily livestream, and later in clips that circulate around the internet.
And Coogan and Hays are carving out a niche for themselves: Insidery, in-the-know, but also not that serious about the whole thing. They don’t have a huge audience, but they have an influential one, and the beginnings of a very intriguing business.
I talked to Coogan about how TBPN got off the ground, how it works today, where he and Hays go from here — and whether their success has built a playbook for others to follow.
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Patch’s AI Experiment: Thousands of Newsletters, Zero Humans (00:39:07)
Everyone agrees that the decline/disapperance of local news is a big problem. No one agrees about the best way to solve it.
So let’s check in on a new AI push from Patch, the people who have been trying to do local news, online, at scale, for more than two decades.
Last spring, Patch CEO Warren St. John announced that he was running local newsletters for thousands of communities across the U.S., without employing a single human to make them. This week, I asked him how it’s going.
No one is going to mistake these “Patch AM” emails for a fully-staffed local news outlet — and in fact Patch relies on other local outlets to help populate their newsletters. But they also seem like a well-meaning effort to provide residents with something, as opposed to nothing. Or, in St. John’s words: He’s providing them with a Kind bar, not a 5-course meal.
Does that make you nervous about the future of news? Or optimistic? Somewhere in between? Take a listen and let me know what you think.
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Oliver Darcy Thinks the Media Doesn’t Get It. So He Built Status (00:53:40)
One thing about the internet is that it lets you build really, really fast. A little more than a year ago, Oliver Darcy was an unemployed former CNN media reporter. Today he’s the proprietor of Status, his must-read media newsletter.
In our conversation, we spend a little bit of time talking through the mechanics of his two-man operation, and how he thinks about the future. But I wanted to focus our chat and something that’s a little harder to sum up: How Darcy’s reporting and writing fits into the larger media landscape in the Trump 2.0 era, and why he goes out of his way to spell out exactly what’s happening. “We say the things that everyone else is thinking and no one is else saying,” he says. I think that’s part of it. Another is that Darcy is uniquely well-suited to covering right-wing media — which used to be on the fringes and is now squarely mainstream - because he used to be a right-wing media creator himself. So he’s particularly clued in to the way a lot of this stuff works, and impatient that others can’t or won’t see it.
Oh, and Darcy has one bit of advice for people running big media operations wondering how they can get influential creators to work with them: “Don't let them leave.”
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Why Henry Blodget is Building Another Media Company (00:57:56)
Henry Blodget can’t help himself. The Business Insider founder is starting another media business, knowing full well how difficult the industry can be. You can watch him build it in real time: Regenerator on Substack, and Solutions on TikTok, YouTube and everywhere you hear your favorite podcasts.
Henry — who hired me to work at Business Insider in 2007, back when it was called Silicon Alley Insider — sat down for a chat about what’s changed in media and the internet over the years, and what hasn’t. We also took time to talk about the AI boom, whether it’s a bubble, and why bubbles can be useful. It’s a blast from the past and a look at the future, all in one chat. Enjoy!
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ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro on streaming, the NFL and sports betting (00:48:14)
The media industry has been waiting for ESPN to cut the cord for a decade. Now it’s finally happening: This week the sports TV giant will let you start streaming — without a cable TV subscription — for $30 a month.
Why now? ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro is quite frank about it: Along with his boss — Disney CEO Bob Iger — he wanted to make as much money from the cable TV business as he could before it dwindled away. And even now, Pitaro says he hopes the new service brings in customers who don’t have cable — as opposed to getting ones who do still pay for cable to trade down.
That illustrates the issue facing all of the big TV players these days: They know the future is a digital one, where they’ll have to work much harder to win and keep customers. So they’re hanging on to the old TV model as long as they can. At the same time they’re trying to build a profitable streaming future. That tension is the main thrust of this conversation I had with Pitaro this week in Disney’s new Manhattan headquarters. We also had time to get into his recent deal with the NFL, his ongoing commitment to sports betting — and whether ESPN is still committed to diversity in 2025.
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A Busy - and Expensive - Summer for AI, with NYT's Mike Isaac (00:51:42)
What makes a particular engineer worth $250 million to Mark Zuckerberg?
What does Trump 2.0 mean — and not mean — to people building large language models?
I didn’t know the answers to these questions either. So I got the New York Times’ Mike Isaac, who covers this stuff for a living, to walk me through some of the biggest questions in AI right now — which means we’re also getting at some of the biggest questions in tech.
Warning: This is a pants-free episode. Probably still Safe For Work, though.
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Why the Algorithm is Making Comedy Boom, Again (00:58:53)
The last time I talked to Jesse David Fox about the comedy boom it was… March 5, 2020.
Since then, some things have changed. But in other ways it’s just the same: comedy - or at least, some kinds of comedy - seems almost custom-built for our current technological and cultural moment, and it’s easier than ever to get this stuff on your devices whenever you want. Or whenever the algorithm thinks you want it.
Fox is a great person to talk to about this stuff: he covers comedy very, very seriously over at Vulture, and on his Good One podcast, and he has a lot of thoughts about the way tech - and perhaps politics - is shaping the stuff that makes us laugh.
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What is TV’s endgame? (00:47:28)
A decade ago, Disney CEO Bob Iger freaked out the media industry by acknowledging something many of us saw coming — his previously unassailable TV business was starting to erode.
But even with a 10-year warning, today’s moguls seem unable to copewith 2025’s reality: The pay TV business is permanently eroding, and there’s nothing in its place that’s likely to generate the same kind of revenue and profit.
But the people who run Big TV are trying to find answers, anyway. So I asked Lightshed analyst Rich Greenfield to talk through some of their moves. What will David and Larry Ellison do once they finally buy Paramount? What are the prospects for ESPN’s soon-to-launch streamer? What about Fox’s soon-to-launch streamer? Who’s going to buy all of these ailing cable TV networks that are coming on the market? And what kind of deals - if any - can get done in the Trump 2.0 era?
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