Channels with Peter Kafka

Roger Lynch has spent the last seven years trying to turn Condé Nast from a magazine company into a profitable portfolio of global brands. Now he has a new set of problems: Google traffic is disappearing, AI companies want to use Condé’s work, and everyone in media is trying to figure out who still has leverage. I talked to Lynch about the end of Google search traffic, why Condé is doing deals wit...

The internet is in its let-it-rip era: more AI slop, more video, more clips — and very little in the way of guardrails or rules. Charlie Warzel, who writes and hosts Galaxy Brain for The Atlantic, joins me to talk about what happens when the platforms stop trying very hard to separate the good stuff from the garbage. Do we actually care if a human made the LinkedIn post, the marketing copy, or the...

Learn to code, they told us. Then the computers went and learned to code. Now anyone can do it, in theory, courtesy of Claude Code and other vibe coding apps. Tech people I talk to are very, very excited about this. But they often have a hard time explaining to me, a non-coder, why AI-powered coding is such a big deal. And whether it’s a big deal to everyone who already codes or deals with softwar...

Jason Blum built one of Hollywood’s smartest businesses: make low-budget horror movies, give filmmakers room, pay talent on the back end, and let the hits carry the misses. It worked so well that it became a Harvard Business Review case study. But the movie business that made that model work has changed: Theatrical is weaker, lots of people are making horror movies, studios are consolidating, and...

Sam Altman has spent years presenting himself as the face of AI: The guy warning that the technology could change everything, and the guy insisting that he should be the one to build it. Now we are facing some overdue questions: Can we trust Sam Altman with the massive power AI may generate? And should we trust anyone with that power? Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz join me to talk about their New...

Jonathan Glatzer has written for shows like Succession and Better Call Saul. Now he’s got his own: The Audacity, a new AMC drama set in Silicon Valley. So why make a Silicon Valley show right now — and what, exactly, is he trying to say about tech? Glatzer tells me he wasn’t interested in making a wall-to-wall “tech show,” or in doing spot-the-billionaire satire. Instead, he says, he wanted to foc...

Elon Musk has spent the last year being quieter than usual — by Elon Musk standards. That may be about to change in a very big way, as his SpaceX moves toward what could be one of the biggest IPOs in history. So what, exactly, is Musk selling? A rocket company? A satellite internet giant? An AI play? Or just the latest, biggest version of Elon himself? Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin, who has been trackin...

Prediction markets are suddenly everywhere: in sports, in politics, in the media business — and, depending on who you ask, they’re either a useful forecasting tool or just gambling with better branding. So what changed? And why is the federal government sounding more like a booster than a regulator? WIRED’s Kate Knibbs joins me to explain why she made prediction markets her beat, how Kalshi and Po...

Lots of publishers are freaked out about “Google Zero” — the notion that one day, Google will stop sending them any traffic at all. That’s more or less already happened at People Inc., says CEO Neil Vogel. Vogel says Google used to account for 70% of his properties’ traffic, but dropped off quickly in the last couple years. Now Google represents about 25% of his mix. That decline is supposed to be...

Oscar season is supposed to be Hollywood’s lap. It is also, increasingly, a reminder of how shaky things are in Hollywood right now. And this one comes as one of the town’s most prominent players is about to be swallowed by a new mogul, backed by tech money. Here to unpack all of it is Puck’s Matt Belloni, who explains why we may never see an Oscars like this again; how the show will — or won’t —...

The World Cup is coming to the U.S (and Canada, and Mexico) in less than 100 days. Perhaps you’re an American who doesn’t care about soccer, and has given this news zero thought. That won’t be an option when the games arrive, says Roger Bennett. The CEO of the Men in Blazers podcast network — and author of “We Are the World (Cup)”, a personal history of the tournament — tells me this won’t be like...

Netflix shocked the world last year by winning a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. This week it shocked us by walking away. In this emergency bonus episode, CNBC’s Alex Sherman walks us through the whiplash: Why Netflix chose not to counter Paramount, what the market blowback signaled, and how much of this was about price versus the very real prospect of a long, ugly regulatory and political slo...

Brian Stelter puts its clearly: "All M&A runs through the Oval Office right now.” So how much does Trump matter in the Netflix/Paramount battle for Warner Bros. Discovery — and what does he want out of it? Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst and author of the newsletter Reliable Sources, walks us through the information vacuum around the deal, Trump’s habit of inserting himself as a would-be kingma...

Janice Min and Reed Duchscher are both building new media companies in LA. But their perspectives are quite different: Min runs The Ankler, the trade pub that mostly focuses on the fate of Big Media companies like Paramount and Netflix; Duchscher runs Night, a talent agency focused on digital talent like Kai Cenat and Hassan Piker (he’s best known for his work with Mr. Beast).So it’s not totally s...

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, always has something to say about anything. That persona/personality did wonders for Joe in the early days of Business Insider — which, not coincidentally, were als...

Jeff Bezos used to be the savior of The Washington Post. He bought it for $250 million in 2013, and then invested money and energy into turning it around — and it worked. Now the Amazon founder is decimating the Post’s staff, and his managers are telling the ones who are left that things have to change. So what happened, and what happens next? Erik Wemple is the right person to ask: He spent years...

In February 2020, Disney CEO Bob Iger finally announced his successor: Bob Chapek, who ran the company’s parks business. That didn’t work out. Now Iger is running it back: This time around he’s announced that Josh D’Amaro, who runs the company’s park business, is going to succeed him. So: Who is Josh D’Amaro, and what has he done to prove himself CEO-worthy? Why does Iger (and the Disney board) th...

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t be bringing you an interview with the editor of the Minnesota Star Tribune about her paper’s coverage of the killing of Alex Pretti in the same episode where I interview the man behind HBO’s newest Game of Thrones show. But we’re not in an ideal world right now. So here’s a conversation with Star Tribune editor Kathleen Hennessey — who left the New York Times to take...

Football isn’t just the biggest show on TV — at this point, it’s basically the only reason some TV networks exist. So it’s a very worthy subject for Chuck Klosterman, the provocative and prolific writer, to tackle in his new book, which is called… Football. The big Channels idea here is to talk about football’s dominance in American media and culture, and What That Means — and how that might end,...

News is a tough business. So how did Semafor, the news startup founded by Ben Smith and Justin Smith, figure out how to turn a profit in their third year of business? Excellent journalism certainly helps. But it’s really because the company made two key decisions: Focusing on events — and focusing on events in Washington, D.C., where companies will pay a lot of money to reach a relatively small cr...

How, exactly, did Bari Weiss become the head of CBS News? We know that David Ellison, who bought Paramount last year, hired her — and bought The Free Press, the publication she started a few years earlier. But how did she get on Ellison’s radar? And why are so many media moguls, like Ellison, huge fans? New York magazine’s Charlotte Klein knows. She recently published an excellent profile of Weiss...

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

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 peop...

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...

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 s...