Channels with Peter Kafka

Lachlan Cartwright Started in Tabloids. Now He’s a Must-Read Media Gossip.

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 Enquir...

2025-12-10

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"Hollywood is Truly Freaked Out." Inside the Netflix/WBD Deal with Lucas Shaw

In 2013, Netflix wanted to become HBO. Now Netflix is going to buy HBO along with the Warner Bros. Studio, in a blockbuster $83 billion deal. Wowza. Here to talk me through this is Bloomberg’s Lucas ...

2025-12-06

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PBS Lost a Billion Dollars. Now what? With CEO Paula Kerger

The last time I interviewed PBS CEO Paula Kerger was 2019: Donald Trump was President, and Republicans were trying to defund public media — as they had been trying to do for decades. That didn’t happ...

2025-12-03

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What Happens To Media When The Web Goes Away, with Tony Haile

We built the modern media business for the web — for people who visited websites, read articles, and saw ads. What happens when no one does that anymore? That’s been one of the big themes of conversa...

2025-11-26

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Kevin Reilly got to the top of the TV heap. Now he's in AI.

If you watched something on TV that you liked in the past few decades, there’s a good chance Kevin Reilly was involved: at various times he’s held top jobs at FX, Fox, NBC, Turner and HBO Max. But th...

2025-11-19

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What the Disney–YouTube Battle Tells Us About the End of Cable

It’s not unusual for a big TV network and a big TV distributor to fight about money. But the Disney-YouTube fight is unusual -- at the bare minimum, because it has stretched out for so long. CNBC’s Al...

2025-11-12

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The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell on Why Republicans Won the Attention War

In some ways, the Bulwark feels like other small publishers in 2025: it’s found growth and profit by pushing itself out on any platform it can find. But that wasn’t the plan when the company started ...

2025-11-05

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The Man Who Fixed The New York Times Wants to Fix CNN

Would you pay $7 a month to stream CNN? Because CNN CEO Mark Thompson would like you to do that. I know, I know, I’m skeptical, too. But Thompson has been here before: At his last job, as CEO of the...

2025-10-28

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The End of Mass Media—and What Comes Next

We spend a lot of time on this show talking to people who run media companies. We also spend a lot of time talking to media reporters. So here’s our one-man Venn diagram: Brian Morrissey runs The Reb...

2025-10-22

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The PR Guy Who Says the AI Boom Is a Bust

The AI story is changing fast. A few months ago, it was all promise and inevitability. Now even AI boosters are asking if the numbers make sense. Ed Zitron got there early. He runs a PR firm for a li...

2025-10-15

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Why the Guardian Doesn't Need a Billionaire to Thrive

In lots of ways Guardian Media Group is facing the same problems as every other news publisher: A tricky ad environment, platform problems, looming AI threats. One big difference: The Guardian also h...

2025-10-08

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Almost Everyone is Taking Money from OpenAI. Why is Ziff Davis suing them?

In the future, digital publishers could get run over by AI. In the present, they are deeply concerned about Google, and the prospect that the search giant is going to choke off their last reliable tra...

2025-10-01

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The Future of Late Night TV, Jimmy Kimmel, and The First Amendment

When’s the last time you stayed up to watch a late night TV monologue? Months? Years? Decades? I’m not sure, either. But I stayed up Tuesday night to watch Jimmy Kimmel’s return. James Poniewozik, wh...

2025-09-25

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I tried Zuckerberg's $800 Ray-Bans. Are they the future? With Alex Heath

A year ago I got try a pair of $10,000 computer goggles from Meta. The tech was super-impressive, but you couldn’t buy them them. You still can’t. Now Mark Zuckerberg is trying a similar idea. But th...

2025-09-18

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How TBPN Made a Tech News Splash

John Coogan knows what you’re thinking: the world does not need another tech podcast. And the world does not need another podcast featuring two dudes talking. Yet Coogan and Jordi Hays have started a...

2025-09-15

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Patch’s AI Experiment: Thousands of Newsletters, Zero Humans

Everyone agrees that the decline/disapperance of local news is a big problem. No one agrees about the best way to solve it. So let’s check in on a new AI push from Patch, the people who have been try...

2025-09-10

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Oliver Darcy Thinks the Media Doesn’t Get It. So He Built Status

One thing about the internet is that it lets you build really, really fast. A little more than a year ago, Oliver Darcy was an unemployed former CNN media reporter. Today he’s the proprietor of Status...

2025-09-03

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Why Henry Blodget is Building Another Media Company

Henry Blodget can’t help himself. The Business Insider founder is starting another media business, knowing full well how difficult the industry can be. You can watch him build it in real time: Regener...

2025-08-27

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ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro on streaming, the NFL and sports betting

The media industry has been waiting for ESPN to cut the cord for a decade. Now it’s finally happening: This week the sports TV giant will let you start streaming — without a cable TV subscription — fo...

2025-08-20

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A Busy - and Expensive - Summer for AI, with NYT's Mike Isaac

What makes a particular engineer worth $250 million to Mark Zuckerberg? What does Trump 2.0 mean — and not mean — to people building large language models? I didn’t know the answers to these questio...

2025-08-13

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Channels with Peter Kafka

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