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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

48:49

Craig Finn on Friendship, Fans and The Hold Steady’s...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/12/31

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.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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54:48

Podcast Pioneer PJ Vogt’s Second Act: Less Budget,...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/12/24

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. Learn

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41:56

"Neither Side Is Used to Losing." Lucas Shaw on...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/12/17

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

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46:51

Lachlan Cartwright Started in Tabloids. Now He’s a...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/12/10

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

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18:45

"Hollywood is Truly Freaked Out." Inside the...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/12/05

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

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40:26

PBS Lost a Billion Dollars. Now what? With CEO Paula...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/12/03

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

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39:09

What Happens To Media When The Web Goes Away, with...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/11/26

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

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40:10

Kevin Reilly got to the top of the TV heap. Now he's...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/11/19

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

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52:39

What the Disney–YouTube Battle Tells Us About the End...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/11/12

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:

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45:25

The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell on Why Republicans Won...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/11/05

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

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52:17

The Man Who Fixed The New York Times Wants to Fix CNN

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/10/28

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

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56:54

The End of Mass Media—and What Comes Next

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/10/22

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

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54:36

The PR Guy Who Says the AI Boom Is a Bust

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/10/15

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

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39:00

Why the Guardian Doesn't Need a Billionaire to Thrive

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/10/08

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

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34:22

Almost Everyone is Taking Money from OpenAI. Why is...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/10/01

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

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26:53

The Future of Late Night TV, Jimmy Kimmel, and The...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/09/24

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

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45:00

I tried Zuckerberg's $800 Ray-Bans. Are they the...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/09/18

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

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39:10

How TBPN Made a Tech News Splash

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/09/15

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

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39:07

Patch’s AI Experiment: Thousands of Newsletters, Zero...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/09/10

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

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53:40

Oliver Darcy Thinks the Media Doesn’t Get It. So He...

Channels with Peter Kafka ·

2025/09/03

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

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