Recode Media
What happens when media, entertainment, and technology collide? Peter Kafka, one of the media industry's most acclaimed reporters, talks to business titans, journalists, comedians and podcasters to get their take. Produced by Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Episodes
November 23, 2021 • 40 min
Rhys Thomas used to make short films for Saturday Night Live. Now he’s making Hawkeye, the newest installment of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, which debuts on Disney+ this week. Thomas sits down with Recode’s Peter Kafka to give a behind-the-scenes look at producing the series and how his previous work at SNL and IFC’s Documentary Now prepared him for his entry into the superhero world.
Featuring: Rhys Thomas (&#...
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November 18, 2021 • 58 min
HBO has brought us nearly 50 years of riveting movies and TV shows; the behind-the-scenes stories are equally compelling. Journalist James Andrew Miller, who has written definitive oral histories of media institutions like Saturday Night Live and ESPN, tells Recode’s Peter Kafka about his newest work: Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers. Included in their chat: How HBO ascended to power; why attempts to combine the c...
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November 11, 2021 • 31 min
Twitter is free. But Twitter Blue — a new service for Twitter super-users — costs $3 a month. So what is Twitter Blue and why should you pay for it? Twitter product executive Tony Haile, who joined the company last spring after it acquired his Scroll startup, joins Recode’s Peter Kafka to make the pitch.
Featuring: Tony Haile (@arctictony), Senior Director of Product at Twitter
Host: Peter Kafka (@pkafka), Senior Editor at...
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Before Mark Zuckerberg told the world he was turning Facebook into a Metaverse company, he called Matthew Ball, one of the Metaverse’s chief evangelists. Now Ball tells Recode’s Peter Kafka what Facebook’s move means.
Then Bloomberg Media Group CEO Justin Smith talks about building a $100 million subscriptions business that’s separate - but related to - Bloomberg’s much larger terminal business. And why he loves video - but not po...
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October 28, 2021 • 68 min
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen is handing over thousands of documents to reporters like The Verge’s Alex Heath. The next step: Sorting through all of those files, and figuring out how and when to write about them. Heath talks to Recode’s Peter Kafka about the weeks of stories we’ll be reading in the future, and his first one - about Facebook’s rapidly aging user base.
And then for something completely different: Saturday N...
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October 21, 2021 • 32 min
Neil Vogel had no publishing experience before he took over About.com, the how-to website he turned into Dotdash for owner Barry Diller. Now Vogel is about to become one of the most powerful people in media if he completes a deal to acquire magazine heavyweight Meredith - the people behind People, InStyle, and Better Homes & Gardens. He talks to Recode’s Peter Kafka about merging an online-only operation with a print publisher....
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October 14, 2021 • 37 min
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple and infused it with his love of product design and attention to detail. His successor, Tim Cook, is widely perceived as lacking Jobs’ vision and innovation. But he managed to do something Jobs never could: make Apple the most valuable company on the planet. So who are these two men, and how have their leadership styles shaped the company that shapes our lives?
Host: Peter Kafka (@pkafka), Senior Edi...
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October 7, 2021 • 51 min
Five days after the New York Times’ Ben Smith wrote an astonishing piece about the fakery supporting Ozy Media, the digital publisher announced it was shutting down. What, if anything, does the fiasco tell us about media startups and investors? Smith teases it out with Recode’s Peter Kafka. Then Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch drops by for a progress report on his attempt to turn the magazine giant into a modern entertainment company - ...
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September 30, 2021 • 32 min
More consolidation in Hollywood - but this time it’s talent agency CAA buying rival ICM. Puck’s Dylan Byers sits down with Recode’s Peter Kafka to explain why the streaming boom has created another merger. Then, podcaster and game streaming expert Bijan Stephen joins for an update on Twitch and its new “hate raid” problem - and what the platform and the community are doing to fight back against trolls.
Featuring: Dylan Byers (@...
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September 23, 2021 • 55 min
Peter Thiel used to be a Silicon Valley investor best-known for early investment in Facebook. But in recent years he seems to have shifted into something different: A Trump-supporting billionaire who wants to remake American politics - and someone who nursed a years-long grudge against Gawker and ultimately bankrupted the publisher and its owner. Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin details Thiel’s story in his new book The Contrarian: Peter Th...
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September 16, 2021 • 66 min
Instagram is no longer going to be a photo-sharing app, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri announced earlier this summer. So what is Instagram going to be instead? Mosseri talks to Recode’s Peter Kafka about his plans to emphasize video and commerce for the service, competing with Tik-Tok, and looming regulation. Mosseri also talks about recent revelations in the Wall Street Journal about Instagram’s own research, which suggests the app c...
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September 9, 2021 • 43 min
Mark Gurman has been one of the best-sourced Apple reporters since he was in high school. Literally. Now he’s at Bloomberg, with deep insight into Apple’s new product line - new iPhones this year, new “mixed reality” headsets next year - and its political and philosophical ideology - why it's fighting regulation in courtrooms and capitols around the world. He talks to Recode’s Peter Kafka about the future of the world’s most va...
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September 2, 2021 • 37 min
Defector Media launched a year ago as a digital publishing experiment: What if the former staff of Deadspin built and owned their own site, fueled entirely by subscriptions? Now it looks like we have an answer: It’s working, really well. Editor in chief Tom Ley walks Recode’s Peter Kafka through Defector’s financials and argues that a site that runs on readers’ dollars instead of advertisers is more fun to work at and to read.
Fea...
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What is OnlyFans, and why did OnlyFans abandon and then come back to its primary business model in the span of a week? MEL Magazine’s Magdalene Taylor joins Recode’s Peter Kafka to explain the rise of the NSFW platform, and why some banks are reluctant to work with a company that consumers seem to love. Then BuzzFeed News’ Joe Bernstein talks about his recent story on the disinformation/misinformation industry, which isn’t exactly ...
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August 19, 2021 • 35 min
Nick Khan used to be a CAA agent who represented the WWE. Now he’s president of the pro wrestling company and is pivoting it from a direct-to-consumer strategy into a content studio for the likes of Peacock and Fox. Khan tells Recode’s Peter Kafka why the WWE has abandoned its pioneering streaming model, how he’s managing the company through covid, and what got him into the TV business.
Featuring: Nick Khan, WWE President & Ch...
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August 12, 2021 • 36 min
The New York Times’ Shira Ovide, writes the popular and incisive “On Tech” newsletter, which means she gets to write about… everything. She sits down with Recode’s Peter Kafka to discuss some her latest stories in her column like why “Tech Can’t Fix Everything”, how society rather than social media itself is more to blame for the spread of misinformation, and the pros and cons of writing a popular newsletter.
Featuring: Shira Ovid...
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Puck News Hollywood expert Matthew Belloni sits down with Recode’s Peter Kafka to discuss the biggest stories in the past week: Reese Witherspoon’s new $900M deal and the lawsuit between Scarlett Johansson and Disney. Then, The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson joins the show to discuss how the media has been reporting on COVID-19 recently, especially now that the concerns of the Delta variant begin to increase.
Featuring: Matthew Belloni...
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Stillwater was supposed to debut in theaters last fall, but the pandemic changed those plans along with everything else. Academy Award-winning director and writer Tom McCarthy explain how he used the extra time to improve the Matt Damon movie, why the film isn’t on a streaming service — and what it was like to play one of TV’s best villains in the final season of The Wire. Then, creator Kyla Scanlon joins the show to discuss her qu...
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July 22, 2021 • 46 min
Anthony Bourdain is dead. So how does a new documentary have audio of him reading his emails? It’s not him: It’s a deep fake. The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner explains. Then journalist Richard Rushfield takes us behind Hollywood’s closed doors to talk about the return of movies, the dominance of Netflix — and why he can more candid than ever because he’s writing about all of it on The Ankler, his subscription-only newsletter.
Featuri...
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July 15, 2021 • 43 min
Wall Street Journal’s Eliot Brown first became interested in WeWork back in 2014 after an encounter with founder co-founder Adam Neumann, who quickly told the reporter that he should not “think about his company as a real estate business, but as a community-building startup”. Fast forward seven years, Brown, along with his colleague Maureen Farrell, plan to release their new book The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great ...
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