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 crowd of influential people.

There’s more to it than that, as Semafor’s CEOJustin Smith explains to me in our conversation. But it’s not a coincidence that Semafor is doing well in the same market that’s been quite kind to other news startups in recent years, including Axios and Punchbowl.

So one big question I had going into this conversation — and one I still have — is whether you can adapt the Semafor playbook if your media company isn’t oriented around the C Suite/K Street set. But take a listen and let me know what you think.

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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 that tracks her ascent over the last few years, and I wanted to talk to her about it. It’s a story about networking, talent, and timing, and I think it tells us a lot about where we’re at right now.

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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.

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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 people in other industries, too — are figuring out how to think about money, ownership and scale.

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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 great media/tech collision we’ve been covering for years.

*How Trump, Middle Eastern money and antitrust regulators complicate the deal

*Who actually needs this merger more.

*What happens now that WBD has formally dismissed Paramount’s bid? Again: we recorded this a few days before the news — but as you’ll hear, we had a pretty good sense of how it was going to go.

And because this still is a wrap-up episode, we got some AI vs. Hollywood chat into this one, as well as some listening/watching recs.

PS: I’ve got some bonus programming coming to you over the next couple of weeks. Have a great holiday, and I’ll see you in January.

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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 spends his time staking out Sulzberger family barbecues, knocking on doors at 4:45 a.m., and writing about the people who run the news.

We talk about how tabloid training shaped the way he reports; what he saw and did during his Enquirer years — and how he thinks about that period now; and why he believes there’s still a business (and an appetite) for smart, funny, deeply-inside media gossip. And then I put him to work, dishing on the big under-covered stories we will be talking about in the next year.

Cheers!

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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 Shaw, who has been deep in the deal talks for weeks. Discussed in this one:

*How did Netflix maneuver its way into a deal everyone thought Paramount would win?

*Will this deal actually get past Donald Trump and U.S. regulators?

*What does this deal — a kind of deal Netflix has never, ever made in the past — tell us about Netflix today?

*What happens to my favorite HBO shows?

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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 happen then, but this year it did, and now Kerger is trying to fill a $1 billion funding hole.

So far, she says, PBS and its member stations have held up ok — no one has had to shut down, yet.

But while Kerger holds out hope she can convince Congress to start funding public TV again, it’s worth talking about why federally funded public media was created in 1967 — and whether it still makes sense to continue that setup in 2025. And if federal funding is permanently off the table, what will PBS do — and not do -- in the future?

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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 conversations we’ve been having on Channels with this year — with people who run big and small media properties, and with people who are trying to build media businesses. And that’s why I wanted to talk to Tony Haile.

Tony got into digital media years ago, when he was the CEO of Chartbeat - the analytics site that trained every web publisher to watch what was happening to their properties in real time. Then he went on to build Scroll, a sort of ad-blocking subscription service that was meant to work with lots of news publishers. Twitter bought that one, then killed it.

The point is that Tony has spent a lot of time talking and working with media companies of all sorts, and now… it looks like he’s getting out. So I wanted to talk him about why his new company — Filament — is not a media startup, and what he thinks is going to happen to the rest of the media business as AI washes over the landscape. This is going to sound like a bummer of a conversation — and in some parts it is! But he’s a good guide, and there are some glimmers of hope here and there.

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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 that run ended in 2020, and now Reilly is running Kartel, an AI company that… well, I’m still not entirely sure what it does. (To be fair, as Reilly notes in our chat, it’s a young company that’s still figuring it out itself.)

But I really wanted to talk to Reilly to get his POV on TV, which more or less peaked when he was working in the industry. Now, of course, it is in what appears to be permanent decline, while its remaining participants try to merge their way to safety.

Why did TV flourish in its not-that-long ago Golden Age? And why didn’t its leaders see — or act on — the threat that streaming/digital/internet tech would have on their industry?

You probably have some ideas yourself. Now you get to hear it directly from a guy who was there, at the top.

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