We had to stop recording this one for a minute, because Matt Belloni got a text. More on that below. Big picture: Matt is a longtime Hollywood reporter - and lawyer before that - who now has the industry's ear via his writing at Puck and his The Town podcast. I asked him to talk about what lies ahead for the Oscars, the out-of-step TV production that still has big audiences and prestige; and the current state of Hollywood, the business. Also discussed here: Awards party catering, and the most po...
Mar 05, 2025•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast The most useful class I ever took in college was a media law class, where I learned two things: 1) Journalists in the U.S. (along every other American citizen) have enormous freedom to say and write what they want, without fear of a defamation suit and 2) this freedom exists largely because of New York Times v Sullivan, a seminal Supreme Court case. Now NYT v Sullivan is under concerted attack, from a group that includes wealthy and powerful people and companies; lawyers who see an opportunity; ...
Feb 26, 2025•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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
Feb 19, 2025•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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… skepti...
Feb 12, 2025•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 t...
Feb 05, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jan 29, 2025•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 s...
Jan 22, 2025•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jan 15, 2025•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jan 08, 2025•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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
Dec 18, 2024•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Dec 11, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 m...
Dec 04, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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
Nov 27, 2024•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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-pro...
Nov 20, 2024•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 th...
Nov 13, 2024•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Nov 06, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Oct 30, 2024•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 “A...
Oct 23, 2024•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, includin...
Oct 16, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 rela...
Oct 09, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Oct 02, 2024•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Sep 25, 2024•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast YouTube turns 20 next year, which makes it positively ancient by internet standards. Yet the world’s biggest video site is still incredibly relevant for huge swaths of the globe, even if it doesn’t get the media attention other sites generate. It’s also the only major social platform that routinely shares revenue with the users who create the stuff that powers the site. I think that if Google executives took a truth serum they’d tell me they’re jealous of places like TikTok and Instagram, which ...
Sep 18, 2024•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast When David Remnick got to the New Yorker in 1998, it was very much a capital M Magazine — it existed on ink and paper, and that was about it. Now it’s still a Magazine, but it’s also everything else you need to be to survive as a media company in 2024 — a robust online publisher, a podcast machine, a video operation, conference host and more. Along the way, it also pivoted from an ad-based business model to one that thrives on consumer subscriptions. And it remains one of my favorite publication...
Sep 11, 2024•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast What happens when you mash up media, tech and business? You get a million things to talk about, and that’s what we’ll be doing on this show: Talking to people who run big tech and media companies, the people who are doing some of the most interesting work in those worlds, and people who can help us understand all of it. And by “we” I mean “me” - I’m Peter Kafka, and I’m a journalist who has been covering the collision of tech and media for a long time, at places like Forbes, Recode, Vox and now ...
Sep 10, 2024•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Peter Kafka, soon to be formerly of Vox, reviews the year in media with Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw. What did we learn from the strikes? Is the bundle back? Are movies back? What’s going on with whatever the NBA is doing right now? And what’s up with Bob Iger saying he didn’t say something he definitely said on live TV? This is the last episode of “Recode Media” in its current form, but stay subscribed to this feed! Peter and this show will be back with a new name and a new corporate daddy in 2024. L...
Dec 07, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast After a wild series of events, Sam Altman is back as CEO of OpenAI… with more power than ever before. The Verge’s Alex Heath worked sleepless nights covering every twist and turn of this saga. He updates Vox’s Peter Kafka about where we are now, what all of this means moving forward, and how tech journalism can drive someone to mistake alcohol for water. Then, we continue with artificial intelligence talk as News/Media Alliance President and CEO Danielle Coffey pops in to discuss the journalism ...
Nov 29, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast The board of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, ousted CEO Sam Altman on Friday. Since then, the board has appointed not one, but two, interim CEOs. And Altman and his OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman got snatched up by Microsoft. The New York Times’ Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) joins Vox’s Peter Kafka to talk about what we know and what we don’t about this whole situation. Host: Peter Kafka (@pkafka), Senior Editor at Recode More to explore: Subscribe for free to Recode Media, Peter Kafka, one of ...
Nov 20, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast SiriusXM makes money by beaming music and talk radio - especially Howard Stern - to your car using satellites and selling monthly subscriptions. That turns out to be a surprisingly resilient business: The company has 34 million subscribers and $9 billion in annual revenue. But CEO Jennifer Witz knows she has to adapt to the streaming world, so she’s refreshing the company’s brand and app, with the hopes that you’ll keep listening when you’re not driving. Vox’s Peter Kafka talks to Witz about how...
Nov 16, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s a double shot of media business takes, with conversations about the Walt Disney Corporation and Fox News, with references to “Succession” in both. First, CNBC’s Alex Sherman (@sherman4949) joins Vox’s Peter Kafka to talk about Disney’s strategy, or lack thereof. What does it want to do with ESPN? ABC? Marvel? Star Wars? And although it plans to buy the remaining third of Hulu… what the hell does it want to do with Hulu? Plus, he gives us some hot goss about the Bobs (Iger and Chapek), and w...
Nov 09, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
