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
April 23, 2025 • 48 mins
Every day some 85 million people - most of them kids - show up to play, chat and spend money on Roblox. That’s a massive audience just about any tech or media company would like to have. But David Baszucki wants more: He thinks his platform can eventually command 10% of the worldwide gaming market.
I spent time talking to Baszucki about those ambitions and what has to happen to make it a reality. But I also wanted to spend time ge...
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April 16, 2025 • 44 mins
Some people don’t want to pay for media. But lots of people are paying Jake Sherman and his team at Punchbowl News: The 4-year-old startup is thriving by providing super-insidery news and data about what’s happening in Congress. I chatted with Sherman because I wanted to get an update on his business (he says he’s not going to sell it anytime soon, despite lots of speculation to the contrary).
I also had a basic, outside the Belt...
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April 9, 2025 • 69 mins
The New York Times faces the same challenges every other news organization faces in 2025.
But it’s also in way better shape to take those challenges on: Thanks to a business model built on 11 million subscribers, it’s not nearly so worried about things like the fluctuations of the ad business, or changes in Google’s algorithm.
That comparative strength also gives NYT publisher AG Sulzberger the ability to do things his peers can...
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April 2, 2025 • 50 mins
The Trump 2.0 era is less than three months old. But it’s already creating havoc for journalists and the companies they work for.
In Washington, Trump and his team are demoting traditional media - or kicking them out of the White House entirely. In corporate boardrooms, he is forcing media owners to settle lawsuits they would normally fight, and to submit to investigations from newly aggressive regulators.
Again: We’re just at the...
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March 26, 2025 • 47 mins
Call it symbiosis. Call it co-dependency. However you want to characterize it, there’s zero debate that Big TV and Big Sports are deeply intertwined. So if the TV business is shrinking, what happens to sports?
That’s the main question I had for John Ourand, the longtime sports business reporter who’s now at Puck. But I had lots of related ones, like: Now that (some) college students are getting paid to play sports, how does that a...
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March 19, 2025 • 65 mins
Anyone who makes things thinks they could do it better if they had more. More money, time, headcount, infrastructure.
Some of us find there can be upsides to doing it with less, too.
That's not exactly PJ Vogt's story but I think it's directionally accurate: Vogt cohosted a huge hit podcast - Reply All - and when he decided to try again - with Search Engine - he had a lot less to work with. That shaped his thinking about the co...
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March 12, 2025 • 61 mins
Back when I first started covering the internet, the idea of broadcasting yourself for hours on end seemed like a pipe dream for weirdos. Now it's how some people make a living.
Twitch more or less created live-streaming in the U.S., which is why Amazon bought it for about $1 billion back in 2014. But now there are plenty of places to watch, and create, live streams. How does Twitch fend off competitors? How does it convince its mo...
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March 5, 2025 • 43 mins
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 busi...
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February 26, 2025 • 53 mins
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 an...
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February 19, 2025 • 38 mins
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?
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February 12, 2025 • 34 mins
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,...
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February 5, 2025 • 61 mins
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 question...
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January 29, 2025 • 51 mins
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 worl...
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January 22, 2025 • 40 mins
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...
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January 15, 2025 • 42 mins
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 me...
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January 8, 2025 • 55 mins
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...
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December 18, 2024 • 44 mins
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.
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December 11, 2024 • 52 mins
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...
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December 4, 2024 • 60 mins
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...
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November 27, 2024 • 54 mins
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.
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