Search a title or topic

Over 20 million podcasts, powered by 

Player FM logo

Jimmy Apple Blogger Podcasts

show episodes
 
Artwork

1
Channels with Peter Kafka

Vox Media Podcast Network

icon
Unsubscribe
icon
icon
Unsubscribe
icon
Weekly
 
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.
  continue reading
 
Loading …
show series
 
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, his must-read media newsletter. In our conversation, we spend a little bit of time talking through the mechanics of his two-man operation, and how h…
  continue reading
 
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: Regenerator on Substack, and Solutions on TikTok, YouTube and everywhere you hear your favorite podcasts. Henry — who hired me to work at Business Insider in…
  continue reading
 
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 — for $30 a month. Why now? ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro is quite frank about it: Along with his boss — Disney CEO Bob Iger — he wanted to make as much money fr…
  continue reading
 
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 questions either. So I got the New York Times’ Mike Isaac, who covers this stuff for a living, to walk me through some of the biggest questions in AI right now…
  continue reading
 
The last time I talked to Jesse David Fox about the comedy boom it was… March 5, 2020. Since then, some things have changed. But in other ways it’s just the same: comedy - or at least, some kinds of comedy - seems almost custom-built for our current technological and cultural moment, and it’s easier than ever to get this stuff on your devices whene…
  continue reading
 
A decade ago, Disney CEO Bob Iger freaked out the media industry by acknowledging something many of us saw coming — his previously unassailable TV business was starting to erode. But even with a 10-year warning, today’s moguls seem unable to cope with 2025’s reality: The pay TV business is permanently eroding, and there’s nothing in its place that’…
  continue reading
 
Reporting on the place you work is not fun. But it is an occupational hazard for media reporters — particularly for NPR’s David Folkenflik. That’s because National Public Radio — along with Public Broadcasting Service, its TV counterpart — is quite frequently the target of attacks from critics on the right, who would like the federal government to …
  continue reading
 
Here's one way New York Times reporter Michael Grynbaum described Condé Nast to me in this week’s chat: “A real exporter of American cultural influence in the late 20th century.” And here’s another one: "A kind of enchanted land” but also a “lost world." And here’s one way I’d describe it: it’s hard to imagine in 2025, but just a few decades ago, m…
  continue reading
 
You’re probably a normal person, so you didn’t spend your holiday weekend talking to people at the New York Times about a local politics story that some people didn’t like. But that’s Max Tani’s job: He’s Semafor’s media reporter, which means he’s supposed to burrow into the paper of record — as well as other important media institutions — and tell…
  continue reading
 
"Black Mirror" creator Charlie Brooker knows that everyone thinks his show is about tech-fueled dystopias. But he says it's really about humans, not their tools. I loved this chat back when we recorded it in 2023, when Brooker was promoting the sixth season of his Netflix show. Now there's a new season - and Brooker's vision of the world is as rele…
  continue reading
 
What's the best way to describe what Emily Sundberg does? Substacker? Influencer? Journalist? Brand-builder? Let's go with "yes". And she does a much better job of describing herself in our conversation, where we talk about how she went from being a laid-off marketer at Meta to a one-woman business with a devoted following and a revenue line that’s…
  continue reading
 
If you want smart, nuanced insight into Apple’s products and would-be products, you turn to John Gruber, who’s been blogging about this stuff for more than two decades at his Daring Fireball site. So in March, when Gruber announced that Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino — focusing on Apple’s botched plans to imbue its ailing Siri servic…
  continue reading
 
Here’s one where we try to do two things at once: Have a convo about green shoots in media with two smart guys who know media really well — Semafor’s Ben Smith and The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey. Try to find new audiences for our respective podcasts, by cutting up that conversation into 3 parts, and distributing those parts to our respective feeds…
  continue reading
 
Scott Frank used to write great movies, like “Out of Sight.” Now he’s a Netflix guy, and a super successful one: he made “Godless,” a horses-and-everything Western for the streamer, then had a pandemic-era phenomenon with “The Queen’s Gambit.” Now he’s back with “Dept. Q”, his take on the British mystery genre. You can find that one on Netflix’s to…
  continue reading
 
I admit it: I most definitely rolled my eyes in 2019, when Twitter announced vague plans to build an "open and decentralized standard for social media". At the time I didn't really understand what then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was trying to do — or why the head of a social media company with plenty of problems was messing around with plans to create…
  continue reading
 
Today we’re talking about how you take a media property that’s been around for a long time, and find a way to bring in new eyeballs — and new revenue. That property is Wired — the place that told you about the internet before the internet even existed — and the person who’s reviving it is Katie Drummond, who has been running the property for a coup…
  continue reading
 
Adam Mosseri's official title is head of Instagram, Meta's massive photo and video app. He also runs Threads, the Twitter clone the company launched two years ago. Unofficially, he's become one of Meta's chief explainers, frequently jumping on social media to defend and proselytize on behalf of his employer. So when I got a chance to interview Moss…
  continue reading
 
The iPhone you’re reading this on was made in China. For a long time, that fact was a huge part of Apple’s success story: Working hand-in-hand, Apple and China built a sophisticated supply chain that let Apple manufacture very complicated technology at an enormous scale. Now that relationship seems like Apple’s achilles heel, says Patrick McGee. Mc…
  continue reading
 
I wanted to talk to Ian Rogers about his fascinating career. He wanted to talk to me about Ledger, the crypto wallet company he’s working at now. So we did both things. Background: Rogers was an important figure in the digital music business, back when the music business was being fundamentally reshaped by digital. He helped the Beastie Boys get on…
  continue reading
 
Today's podcast is an in-depth discussion of Apple's App Store rules and how they... wait! Don't leave! I could try to tell you why Apple's App Store rules are important to both Apple and the digital economy (sadly, I just realized I've been covering them for nearly 15 years, so they better be important). But a better messenger for that task is Tim…
  continue reading
 
There are all kinds of ways to measure the health of an economy. The one I rely on is ad spending. One reason for that is simple: I work in ad-supported businesses, so I want to know about things are going to affect me personally. A less self-interested reason: The health of the ad business is tied directly to the way companies feel about their ove…
  continue reading
 
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 ambit…
  continue reading
 
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,…
  continue reading
 
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 stre…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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, lik…
  continue reading
 
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 Sear…
  continue reading
 
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 cr…
  continue reading
 
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 th…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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 doe…
  continue reading
 
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 th…
  continue reading
 
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 wh…
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
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 actuall…
  continue reading
 
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 MoffettNathans…
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
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 podcastcho…
  continue reading
 
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. A…
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
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, an…
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
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 an…
  continue reading
 
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 ow…
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
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 th…
  continue reading
 
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 h…
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
Loading …
Copyright 2025 | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | | Copyright
Listen to this show while you explore
Play