Channels with Peter Kafka
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.
Episodes
October 15, 2025 • 54 mins
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...
Mark as Played
October 8, 2025 • 39 mins
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-sustainin...
Mark as Played
October 1, 2025 • 34 mins
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 ...
Mark as Played
September 24, 2025 • 26 mins
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...
Mark as Played
September 17, 2025 • 45 mins
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...
Mark as Played
September 15, 2025 • 39 mins
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 circulat...
Mark as Played
September 10, 2025 • 39 mins
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 t...
Mark as Played
September 3, 2025 • 53 mins
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 lit...
Mark as Played
August 27, 2025 • 57 mins
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 wha...
Mark as Played
August 20, 2025 • 48 mins
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 ...
Mark as Played
August 13, 2025 • 51 mins
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.
Warnin...
Mark as Played
August 6, 2025 • 58 mins
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 t...
Mark as Played
July 30, 2025 • 47 mins
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 Bi...
Mark as Played
July 23, 2025 • 35 mins
Reporting on the place you work is not fun. But it is an occupational hazard for media reporters — particularly for NPR’s David Folkenflik.
That’s because National Public Radio — along with Public Broadcasting Service, its TV counterpart — is quite frequently the target of attacks from critics on the right, who would like the federal government to stop funding it. Now it looks like they’ve gotten their way, and the two networks ar...
Mark as Played
July 16, 2025 • 47 mins
Here's one way New York Times reporter Michael Grynbaum described Condé Nast to me in this week’s chat: “A real exporter of American cultural influence in the late 20th century.” And here’s another one: "A kind of enchanted land” but also a “lost world."
And here’s one way I’d describe it: it’s hard to imagine in 2025, but just a few decades ago, magazines were incredibly important — and Conde Nast was the most important, most gla...
Mark as Played
July 9, 2025 • 48 mins
You’re probably a normal person, so you didn’t spend your holiday weekend talking to people at the New York Times about a local politics story that some people didn’t like.
But that’s Max Tani’s job: He’s Semafor’s media reporter, which means he’s supposed to burrow into the paper of record — as well as other important media institutions — and tell you what’s going inside and why it actually matters.
So we spent a bunch of time i...
Mark as Played
July 2, 2025 • 43 mins
"Black Mirror" creator Charlie Brooker knows that everyone thinks his show is about tech-fueled dystopias. But he says it's really about humans, not their tools.
I loved this chat back when we recorded it in 2023, when Brooker was promoting the sixth season of his Netflix show. Now there's a new season - and Brooker's vision of the world is as relevant as ever.
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Mark as Played
June 25, 2025 • 47 mins
What's the best way to describe what Emily Sundberg does?
Substacker? Influencer? Journalist? Brand-builder?
Let's go with "yes". And she does a much better job of describing herself in our conversation, where we talk about how she went from being a laid-off marketer at Meta to a one-woman business with a devoted following and a revenue line that’s up and to the right.
A very quick primer for those of you haven't heard of Sundbe...
Mark as Played
June 18, 2025 • 64 mins
If you want smart, nuanced insight into Apple’s products and would-be products, you turn to John Gruber, who’s been blogging about this stuff for more than two decades at his Daring Fireball site.
So in March, when Gruber announced that Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino — focusing on Apple’s botched plans to imbue its ailing Siri service with state-of-the-art AI — lots of people paid attention. Including, apparently, f...
Mark as Played
June 12, 2025 • 28 mins
Here’s one where we try to do two things at once:
Have a convo about green shoots in media with two smart guys who know media really well — Semafor’s Ben Smith and The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey.
Try to find new audiences for our respective podcasts, by cutting up that conversation into 3 parts, and distributing those parts to our respective feeds.
Which is to say: You can hear more of the this conversation by heading to ...
Mark as Played
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