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PODCAST

Channels with Peter Kafka

Vox Media Podcast Network

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.

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All Episodes

38:03

Matthew Ball: Why the games business is broken

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/02/19

Everyone knows that video games are giant, fast-growing business that's going to swamp traditional media.Except that's not true: The games business is now in a prolonged and confusing funk. Investor and analyst Matthew Ball has been diving deep into the industry, so I asked him to take a stab at explaining what's going on. Bonus question: When does the face computer's moment finally arrive? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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34:52

BuzzFeed wants to build a… social network?

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/02/12

A decade ago BuzzFeed was the bleeding edge of digital media, and Serious People thought it was going to be a threat to the likes of the New York Times. Many rounds of layoffs and asset sales later, BuzzFeed is a much more modest operation.But say this for Jonah Peretti: He continues to pitch Very Big Ideas for his company. Now the BuzzFeed CEO thinks he can create an internet that doesn’t run on content that makes you feel lousy, and that he can also create his own social network. I am… skeptical,

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61:34

Why Michael Lewis is worried about the sports betting...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/02/05

It’s hard to remember now. But just a few years ago, sports betting was illegal in almost all of United States. And sports leagues and the media companies that worked with them wanted nothing to do with anything that even referenced gambling.Things are very, very different now! And it happened so quickly that very few people have stopped to ask what any of this means for America, and what it will mean down the road. Those questions — and the reasons why so few of us are posing them — turn out to be

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51:15

How Silicon Valley really feels about Trump, TikTok...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/01/29

I haven’t checked in with Jessica Lessin in some time — and I have to say I picked a pretty good time to catch up with her. Because Silicon Valley is undergoing something meaningful right now, and she’s in a great position to tell us more about it: Lessin is a veteran technology reporter who founded The Information in 2013, and it has been a go-to for anyone who wants serious reporting about tech in the Bay Area and around the world, ever since.Discussed in this episode: What’s really animating

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40:03

How TikTok (still) works

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/01/22

TikTok banned itself for less than a day. Now it’s back in the U.S. - despite a law that says it shouldn’t be operating. We’re not going to weigh in on all of the… weirdness around the last few days on this episode, in part because we don’t know how it’s going to play out.But in the meantime I wanted to talk to someone who knows how TikTok actually works — from a content creator’s perspective, at least. Adam Faze runs Gymnasium, a small production studio that specializes in TikTok videos, and so

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42:14

How does Wall Street think about Trump, media and tech?

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/01/15

Why didn’t Meta’s stock move when Mark Zuckerberg announced his pro-MAGA pivot? Why do big media companies want to dump their cable TV networks — but hang on to their broadcast TV networks? What’s going to happen in Google’s antitrust case?These are all good questions, right? I think so, too. So I posed them, along with many more, to MoffettNathanson’s Michael Nathanson, one of the sharpest Wall Street analysts covering tech and media. We cover a lot of ground in a short time, and I think you’ll

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55:43

Why Katie Notopoulos still loves the internet

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/01/08

I’m a lucky man. Whenever I’m baffled by the internet, and social media, I turn to my co-worker Katie Notopoulos, who is there to explain it to me. That’s because Katie’s job at Business Insider is to explain how the internet works — how the people who run big internet platforms want it to work, and what the people who actually use those platforms do on it, for better and for worse. So that’s what we’re talking about today, to help ease us into the new year.Discussed here: Why Katie still loves the

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44:51

Looking back, and ahead, with Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/12/18

I don’t love a lot of year-end #content . But I do love talking to Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw every year, to help put the year in media in perspective, and to think about what might be coming in 2025. And that’s exactly what we did here. Enjoy it now, or over your break. We’ll see you again in January.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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52:57

1440’s newsletters are short, popular and profitable

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/12/11

Newsletters are not a new idea. Yet every few years the media business rediscovers them, anyway — either as a way to quickly launch a startup with bigger ambitions, or as a standalone business. Tim Huelskamp took the second route in 2017, when he co-founded 1440 — a newsletter that promises to quickly bring you the most important news of the day. Again — not a new idea. But Huelskamp seems to have figured out how to build something pretty big: He says 1440 has 4 million readers, and is turning a

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60:30

Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/12/04

You probably shouldn't know Renee DiResta's name: She's a researcher who studies online bad behavior, not a celebrity. But the work DiReata did studying the "stop the steal" movement after 2020 has made her famous in some corners of the internet, and not in a good way: She's been harassed, pelted with subpoenas and sued twice.Now things could get really unpleasant for her. Donald Trump's victory means that a lot of people who have target dDiResta in the past are newly ascendant. But she tells me

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54:08

How to build your own media company - without VCs or...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/11/27

Lots of people start media companies using money from rich people. Jason Koebler and his colleagues did it themselves, using a grand total of $4,000. That was back in the summer of 2023. Now 404 Media, the tech news + investigations site they started after leaving Vice Media, is a success story. Koebler tells us how they started, how it’s going, and what he’d like to do next.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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45:38

Meet the man making money for Tucker Carlson and...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/11/20

Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Bari Weiss all used to work for big mainstream media companies. Now they’re on the internet, building their own companies, with the help of Chris Balfe. Balfe’s Red Seat Ventures helps online creators set up shop, produce programming, and — crucially — helps them monetize through ad sales and/or subscriptions. Balfe got his start working with Glenn Beck when the former Fox News star left and started his own online business. I always assumed we’d see other high-profile

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50:54

Taylor Lorenz on Joe Rogan, Joe Biden and goodbye to...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/11/13

One take you may have heard after the election: Democrats need their own Joe Rogan.Taylor Lorenz disagrees. And Lorenz is worth listening to. For years, she has been a really sharp observer of social media and online spaces, and she built a high-profile career explaining the internet for audiences at places like the Atlantic, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Now Lorenz is on her own, which is where she says she always wanted to end up. We talked about how and why she left the Post this

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73:48

Elon Musk funds Trump — and owns Twitter. What does...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/11/06

You want up-to-the minute election analysis? Sorry, not on this episode.But: If you want smart thoughts about politics and media and tech all merged together? We got you here, courtesy of The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel, who came on to discuss how we should think about Elon Musk, Donald Trump supporter, being the same person as Elon Musk, guy who owns Twitter. Plus, because it’s Charlie: A useful way to think about what misinformation is, and isn’t. And! If you don’t want politics in your podcast

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43:47

Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett wants to win an...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/10/30

Jon Lovett and his cofounders at Crooked Media are a good story - former Obama aides who started their own media company after the 2016 election, and are now generating 25 million podcast downloads a month. But for a few weeks this summer, after they became prominent voices in the push to replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket, their story got even more interesting. I’ve wanted to talk to Lovett about that experience for months, so a week before the election seems like good timing, no? Also

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33:21

Emma Tucker brought fresh eyes to the Wall Street...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/10/23

Emma Tucker became the Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief in 2023, and she’s been moving fast ever since.For starters, there are punchier, more provocative stories and headlines. Just as important: She’s been making a series of cuts and staffing changes. That approach has its critics, but it also seems to be working: Subscriptions are up 7% in the last year. In our chat, we discuss all of that, plus more: What her background as a British journalist means as stakes out the Journal’s niche of

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41:15

Tubi CEO Anjali Sud says you can’t beat free

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/10/16

What if you could watch shows and movies on a screen, for free, in exchange for watching some ads? In olden times, we called that “TV”. Now the industry term is “advertising-based video on demand,” and it seems to be growing quite quickly. This is good news for Tubi, the AVOD/streamer Fox bought back in the spring of 2020, and for Anjali Sud, who has been running Tubi for the last year. At the moment, Tubi’s programming is helping it beat services with much bigger profiles, and budgets, including

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67:21

Behind the scenes of the Trump movie you almost never...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/10/09

What do Donald Trump and the video game industry have to do with each other?Nothing! Yet we’re combining them into a single podcast, anyway. First up: A chat with Gabriel Sherman, the longtime Vanity Fair reporter who wrote and produced “The Apprentice.” That’s the new Trump biopic that isn’t what you think it is, and is very much worth your time — and which almost never got released in the U.S. As Sherman tells us, this is a movie that’s a sort of Trump creation myth, centering around his

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48:25

Matt Yglesias on the election, Substack success and...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/10/02

The last time I talked to Matt Yglesias, we were co-workers at Vox.com, and Joe Biden had just been elected president. Now Yglesias runs Slow Boring, a tremendously successful Substack, and I wanted to check back in. Discussed here: What a policy nerd does in an election that’s awfully light on policy; why hating the media is now a popular pastime across the political spectrum; what it’s like to run a three-person business that’s grossing something like $1.4 million a year.Learn more about your ad

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36:12

I tried Orion, Mark Zuckerberg's $10k face computer

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2024/09/25

Mark Zuckerberg, along with most of the men running big tech companies, has spent many years and tons of money trying to put a computer on your face. Now it looks like he’s getting very close to making it a reality: He’s just debuted Orion, a pair of bulky — but not too bulky — glasses that are also a computer. You can’t buy these things yet - they cost Meta a ton to make — but Meta thinks you’ll buy something like it in the not-too-distance future. The crucial caveat here is that we don’t know if

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