Channels with Peter Kafka

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 busines...

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 c...

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...

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 intellige...

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...

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...

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 d...

This week, an episode of the latest season of Land of the Giants: The Twitter Fantasy, hosted by our own Peter Kafka. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe! Twitter began life as an accident. In the beginning, even its founders weren’t sure what it was: the internet’s town square, a real-time information source, or the next Facebook, maybe? Twitter's power has always been misunderstood -...

When Sam Reich bought CollegeHumor from Barry Diller’s IAC for pennies in January 2020, the comedy site was long past its heyday. A few months later, the pandemic hit. It wouldn’t have been a surprise if CollegeHumor had vanished entirely. Instead, Reich pushed the company to lean into Dropout, the subscription streaming part of the business, and create more improvised comedy content that lent its...

The New York Times issued a rare editors’ note Monday: a mea culpa for a headline repeating unverified claims from Hamas that a Gaza hospital explosion was caused by an Israeli airstrike. Vanity Fair media reporter Charlotte Klein (@charlottetklein) obtained internal Slack messages from the Times’ editors which reveal an internal debate about the framing of the original headline. Vox’s Peter Kafka...

The war in Israel and Gaza is hugely complicated - dangerous, horrifying, and moving fast. Which means it’s a huge job for those who have to cover it. The Washington Post’s international editor, Douglas Jehl (@jehld), joins Vox’s Peter Kafka to discuss how a major news operation covers the conflict between Israel and Hamas. How do you weigh the need to keep on top of the story with the need to fac...

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is an interconnected series of movies and TV shows that produced four of the top-grossing movies of all time and changed the way Hollywood works. It also may have a hard time sustaining the cultural and business dominance it has enjoyed for the last decade-plus. Here to discuss the superhero’s journey is writer and podcaster Joanna Robinson (@jowrotethis), co-author o...

Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) is the person who told you what “cheugy” means, what a “content house” is, and basically anything else you want to know about young people, the social media they use, and the people who make that media. Now the Washington Post journalist has a book out explaining all of this: “Extremely Online”, which is a history of social media told from the POV of the influencers/c...

When Robert Kyncl (@rkyncl) worked at YouTube, he made deals with companies like Warner Music Group. Now, he’s the CEO of Warner Music Group. Vox’s Peter Kafka interviewed Kyncl live on stage at the Code conference. Kyncl explains how Warner Music Group approaches AI both as a tool and as an intellectual property concern, and why he wants Spotify to charge more. And even though the blockchain and...

The Hollywood writers’ strike is over and there’s hope the actors guild and studios will also settle their differences soon. So people like HBO and HBO Max Content boss Casey Bloys (@caseybloys) may be able to start making shows again shortly. But how will new deals affect what he makes… and what he doesn’t make? Bloys talks to Peter Kafka about that and much more: TV’s attempt to re-bundle the bu...

After a historic strike that went on for almost 150 days, the studios and the Writers Guild of America have a (tentative) deal. What’s in the deal, and why did it take almost half a year to get there? And what does this mean for the Screen Actors Guild strike, still in progress? And what happened to the AI issue we were told was existential? Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw (@Lucas_Shaw) joins Vox’s Peter K...

One of the most powerful people of the 21st century says he’s retiring. Rupert Murdoch, 92, will hand over control of News Corp. and Fox Corp. to his son Lachlan, in November. What does that actually mean? And what happens next? Here to offer some very informed speculation is longtime Murdoch family watcher Brian Stelter, who wrote one book on Murdoch and Fox News and has another one on the way. U...

Once the domain of the nerdiest of sports fans, these days fantasy football analysis is on primetime TV. Matthew Berry (@MatthewBerryTMR) comments on fantasy football for NBC Sports (and before that, ESPN) and founded the website fantasylife.com. It's the culmination of a career that, for many people, would have already been a fantasy: serving as George Carlin’s assistant and writing for Married w...

Wait a minute. For a couple of years there - 2020 through 2022 - everyone acted like bitcoin and even weirder crypto things were worth trillions of dollars. And cartoon apes were on Jimmy Fallon? And now none of us want to pretend that happened at all? Zeke Faux (@ZekeFaux) wants to talk about it with Vox’s Peter Kafka. Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg, and his new book Number Go Up...

Taylor Swift is on one of the most successful concert tours of all time, but what's her secret? Switched on Pop's Charlie Harding (@charlieharding) sits down with Peter to discuss the business of Taylor Swift. How her music, her fans, and her industry expertise catapulted her to being one of the most profitable singers of this generation. Host: Peter Kafka (@pkafka), Senior Editor at Recode More t...

The US and China are in a sort of cold war, and the tech industry is caught in the middle. But it’s complicated: Ask TikTok, the Chinese-owned app that dominates entertainment in the US. Or Apple, which couldn’t exist without the Chinese supply chain that makes the iPhone. Here to explain the state of play to Vox’s Peter Kafka is The Information’s Jessica Lessin (@JessicaLessin) who just returned...

David Zaslav sent up the white smoke, marking the selection of a new CNN CEO. Mark Thompson comes from The New York Times and the BBC, and has his work cut out for him to dig CNN out of the hole dug by his predecessor - but really, the hole that every TV news operation is in. Puck’s Dylan Byers (@dylanbyers), who broke the news of Thompson’s hire, returns to tell Vox’s Peter Kafka all about Thomps...

Born at BuzzFeed in 2014, The Try Guys make online videos where they try all sorts of things: earwax extractions, baking pie without a recipe, getting kidnapped, the usual. Since then, they’ve become their own independent media company, wrote a bestselling book, hosted a Food Network show — and broke up with one of their founding members in a public cheating scandal that was even parodied on Satur...

A movie made for peanuts and distributed by a studio far outside the Hollywood system has done better box office numbers than both the new Mission Impossible and Indiana Jones movies. Sound of Freedom is about a rogue federal agent who goes to Colombia to break up a child sex trafficking ring. The conservative media love it. Faith-based groups love it. QAnon loves it. But how did this movie get ma...

This week, a quick update on Disney’s deal to get into sports betting. Then, we’re bringing you an episode of The Verge’s latest season of Land of the Giants, The Tesla Shock Wave. This episode tells the story of how Elon Musk joined the electric car company - and how he eventually led a coup against the original founders. Musk went on to make the car company’s brand synonymous with his own, which...