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 14, 2026 • 48 mins
Most of us stopped watching traditional TV a long time ago. Political campaigns, meanwhile, still spend most of their ad money there.Rob Flaherty has been trying to change that from inside Democratic politics. He’s been the digital guy for Hilary Clinton, and then Joe Biden, and then Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign. (Here’s his post-mortem of that one.) Now he runs a political shop of his own.
We talk about w...
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October 7, 2026 • 61 mins
Larry Ellison bought his son a media empire. What does he want from it? Vanity Fair’s Tom Dotan joins me to talk about the billionaire behind Paramount and Warner Bros., his connection to TikTok, and his politics. Tom’s reporting suggests there may be less of a master plan than you’d think. We also discuss why even Ellison’s enormous fortune has limits—and how his media bets are tied to Oracle’s ...
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September 30, 2026 • 44 mins
David Ellison has won Warner Bros. Discovery. Now he has to figure out what, exactly, to do with it.
LightShed analyst Rich Greenfield joins me to talk through the next version of the Paramount-Warner empire: Why Ellison wants to be Netflix; why CBS and the NFL still matter so much; and why simply bolting Paramount+ onto HBO Max won’t magically create a winning streamer.
Then we zoom out to the much bigger problem for Holly...
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September 23, 2026 • 40 mins
I went to Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters to try Mark Zuckerberg’s newest face computer: a $1,300 pair of virtual-reality glasses that are much lighter and cheaper than Apple’s Vision Pro, and still make you ask a very basic question: What am I supposed to do with this thing?So I asked my pal Mike Isaac, the New York Times tech reporter and longtime Meta watcher. We talked about why Meta keeps spending billions...
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September 16, 2026 • 40 mins
AI companies have spent years telling us that we’ll be able to use them to go shopping for us, or book us airplane tickets, or get us awesome restaurant reservations. None of that ever materialized.But in the last few weeks, services like Instinct and Meta’s Muse have made that promise feel much less theoretical. Are they actually ready? What’s holding them back? And, crucially: Do we even want them doing th...
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September 11, 2026 • 54 mins
Nicholas Thompson runs one of the few media companies that can say things are going pretty well: The Atlantic is profitable, growing, and boasts 1.6 million subscribers.But that's today. What comes next is the bulk of our conversation: Thompson — a big AI guy — tells me what The Atlantic's deal with OpenAI has and hasn't delivered, why he thinks publishers may need to make money from a web increasingly run by bots...
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September 2, 2026 • 53 mins
Not long ago, most Americans had never heard of data centers. Now most Americans are actively opposed to them.It’s a head-snapping change — one that is befuddling tech bosses, and forcing some politicians to quickly change their tune.It’s the second part that I wanted to talk to David Weigel about. Weigel has been covering politics for years — he’s at Semafor now — and has a well-earned reputatio...
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August 26, 2026 • 48 mins
Microdramas are the new phone-first soap operas: stories chopped into dozens of one-minute episodes: Low-budget productions filled with romance, werewolves, secret babies, and cliffhangers—and, eventually, a request that you pay to keep watching. Surprisingly, lots of people do.So how big is this business? And is it sustainable?I talk with Ali Albazaz, the CEO of Inkitt, which runs the CandyJar microdrama app, about turning w...
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August 19, 2026 • 42 mins
Sports teams keep selling for more money because, in theory, their media rights keep becoming more valuable. But the companies that actually pay for sports TV are starting to push back.
John Ourand of Puck joins me to break down Bob Iger and Josh Kushner’s $12.5 billion deal for the Los Angeles Lakers— and whether the number makes sense if local and national TV money is no longer guaranteed to keep rising.
Then: the N...
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August 12, 2026 • 48 mins
Joanna Stern spent more than a decade explaining technology to Wall Street Journal readers. Now she’s doing it on her own — with a new media company, New Things, and a new book, I Am Not a Robot, about spending a year outsourcing as much of her life as possible to AI.
Joanna and I talk about what AI turned out to be surprisingly good at, why robots still can’t fold your laundry, and why she thinks the new Siri is...
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August 5, 2026 • 52 mins
Two years ago, Oliver Darcy left CNN and launched Status, a paid newsletter focused on the media business. The basic bet was that readers would pay for the scoops and insider reporting he had been producing at CNN.
That bet appears to be working. Status now has four full-time employees, more than 130,000 people on its email list, and “many thousands” of paying subscribers. Darcy has also added advertising, a podcast an...
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July 29, 2026 • 44 mins
When I last talked to Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, Netflix was buying Warner Bros. Discovery. Six months later, Paramount has the deal — but, surprisingly, it’s on hold while a group of states tries to block it in court.Lucas and I talk about whether Larry and David Ellison can still muscle the acquisition through, how long the fight could drag on, and what this fall’s elections could mean for the would-be deal.T...
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July 22, 2026 • 42 mins
You are a normal person, so if you think about “people writing their own newsletters” you probably think: “Substack”.
But just as Xerox isn’t the only way to make photocopies, Substack doesn’t own the professional newsletter industry.
So let’s meet a competitor: Beehiiv, run by 32-year-old CEO Tyler Denk. Denk helped build Morning Brew’s newsletter machine before launching Beehiiv, ...
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July 15, 2026 • 45 mins
Chris Balfe is the CEO of Red Seat Ventures, the company behind some of the biggest names in podcasting, including Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, and, more recently, Kill Tony. Since we last spoke, Red Seat has been acquired by Fox, making it one of the company’s biggest bets on the creator economy.
So I asked him what that actually means—for Fox, for creators, and for the podcast business itself.
W...
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Joe Kahn runs the New York Times newsroom, which means he runs the most powerful news operation in the world. He joins me to talk about what that power is for — and why he thinks the Times’ next big transformation is video, and why the paper is in “a race against time” to compete with "AI-generated slop.” We also discuss whether the Times is really a Games company now, how he handles angry readers, why...
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July 1, 2026 • 58 mins
We originally published this interview with Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal on Feb. 11, 2026, and it's one of my favorite chats of the year. We'll be back with a new conversation on July 8.
If Joe Weisenthal didn’t exist, the internet would have to invent him. Because Joe Weisenthal is built for the internet — more specifically, an internet personality: Knows a lot, curious about even more, often right, happy to be wrong, a...
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June 24, 2026 • 29 mins
The Rebooting's Brian Morrissey joins me from Cannes, where OpenAI is pitching advertisers, creators are becoming media brands, and thousands of people are still flying across the Atlantic to meet with people they could see back home. We talk about what's changed in advertising, what's changed in media, and why Cannes keeps getting bigger.
We also get into why the ad industry's biggest gathering feels increasingly disconnected fro...
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June 17, 2026 • 53 mins
Today’s show is about money, and how to make it in entertainment.
The streaming boom made Hollywood feel like it had solved its money problem: Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney and everyone else wanted endless stuff. Top talent got paid, and so did everyone else.
That boom is over, and now the industry is consolidating. And at the same time, lots of artifacts of old Hollywood that could generate a lot of money for some people ...
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June 10, 2026 • 66 mins
Brian Stelter and Nilay Patel are both covering big, powerful institutions that are undergoing real change, whether they like it or not.
Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, joins me to talk about the mess at CBS News and 60 Minutes: What is Bari Weiss’s rationale for trying to remake Paramount’s news operations? And does owner David Ellison care about the very inevitable stumbles that have followed since she show...
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June 3, 2026 • 37 mins
Dhar Mann’s videos look simple, because they are simple: Someone acts badly, someone learns a lesson, everyone gets a moral by the end. You don’t have to be a kid to enjoy these, but it helps.The business behind them is complex. Mann has built a scripted-video studio that turns out TV-length episodes in weeks, generating billions of views a month. Now he tells me he’s expanding beyond YouTube and Facebook into pla...
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