Recode Media with Peter Kafka

By Recode

Tech News TV & Film Business

What's Recode Media with Peter Kafka about?

What happens when media, entertainment, and technology collide? Peter Kafka, one of the media industry's most acclaimed reporters, talks to business titans, journalists, comedians and podcasters to get their take. Produced by Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Why did it take 5 months to...

09.25.2023

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 ...

Recode Media with Peter Kafka episodes:

09.25.2023 Why did it take 5 months to solve the Writers’ Strike? 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 ...
09.21.2023 Why did Rupert Murdoch just leave his media empire? 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 ...
09.21.2023 How Matthew Berry made fake football his real job 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 ...
09.14.2023 Inside Sam Bankman-Fried's Rise and Fall 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 ...
09.12.2023 The Business of Taylor Swift 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, ...
09.07.2023 It’s the US vs China with tech in between 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 ...
08.31.2023 CNN is Mark Thompson’s problem now 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 ...
08.24.2023 How The Try Guys survived going viral 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 ...
08.17.2023 Today, Explained: Sound of Freedom is the surprise movie hit of the summer 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 ...
08.10.2023 Land of the Giants: How Tesla became the Elon Musk Co. 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 ...
08.03.2023 Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker says tech isn’t our problem - it’s us Black Mirror isn’t just a hit TV show: It’s a window into the not-too-distant future. Creator Charlie Brooker (@charltonbrooker) has an astonishing track record of consistently imagining what we’re just about to see - whether it’s Donald Trump, the downside ...
07.27.2023 Why Lina Khan is fighting big tech - and losing Joe Biden wants to stop big companies - especially big tech companies - from buying or merging with other companies. FTC boss Lina Khan is supposed to be his enforcer, but… it’s not going well. In fact, it’s possible Khan’s ...
07.20.2023 Strikes! AI! And a Steven Soderbergh show he’s selling himself. This is a very good week to make a Recode Media episode: Hollywood is reeling from two different strikes. Disney CEO Bob Iger has hung a For Sale sign on parts of his company. And Steven Soderbergh just made a ...
07.13.2023 Can Meta Make a Twitter Killer? We’re one week into the Threads era. How long is that going to last? What does it mean for Twitter, really? And what do Threads and continued chaos at Twitter say about the future of social media? That’s maybe a ...
07.03.2023 Why ESPN’s old boss made movies you can’t see - yet Former head of ESPN John Skipper has produced an ambitious new project. Now he has to figure out how to get it in front of you: Sports Explains the World is a series of films featuring well-known personalities (like Curt ...
06.29.2023 How to make laughs on TikTok and action on Netflix Comedian Nimesh Patel was grinding it out in the stand-up mines for years with middling success. And then the stage changed. Patel tells us how TikTok changed everything and what it’s like to live at the whim of the algorithm. ...
06.22.2023 Is Instagram the place to unbreak news? Mosheh Oinounou worked his way up through the TV news ranks and ended up running CBS Evening News. Now he’s starting over - this time on Instagram - with Mo News, a platform he says is a more responsive way ...
06.15.2023 Meet the AI company that wants to remake Hollywood For some people that’s a dystopian vision. But for Cristóbal Valenzuela, it’s a mission statement: Valenzuela is the co-founder and CEO of Runway, an AI startup that wants to radically change the way movies and TV are made. Right now ...
06.07.2023 CNN’s CEO is out; Apple reveals its goggles After just over a year of questionable leadership and on the heels of an unflattering Atlantic profile, Chris Licht is out as the head of CNN. Vox’s Peter Kafka talks to Puck’s Dylan Byers, who not only covered Licht, but ...
06.01.2023 NYT rising star Astead Herndon on podcasts, power, and the 2024 race It’s not just Ron DeSantis: All kinds of candidates are piling into the 2024 presidential race. New York Times national politics reporter Astead W. Herndon is covering the contest in audio form, via his show, “The Run-Up” — a weekly ...
05.22.2023 Meet the media insider who makes Succession feel real Succession — the HBO drama about a Murdoch-ish family of media moguls — feels authentic thanks, in part, to consultant Merissa Marr. Marr covered the Murdochs and other media titans for years at The Wall Street Journal, and she’s worked ...
05.15.2023 It’s TV’s biggest week - and TV is on strike Live from New York, it’s Upfronts week, where TV networks sell billions of dollars of advertising with glitzy presentations. It’s also the third week of the writers’ strike, which means the people who make the shows that run in between ...
05.11.2023 Ken Jennings on the future of Jeopardy! Ken Jennings won 74 straight episodes of Jeopardy back in 2004. Somehow he’s turned that winning streak into a career, and now co-hosts the surprisingly resilient game show. Peter Kafka talked to Jennings about his job and much more at ...
05.04.2023 How worried—or excited—should we be about AI? AI is amazing… or terrifying, depending on who you ask. This is a technology that elicits strong, almost existential reactions. So in the final episode of our special series about AI, we dig into the giant ambitions and enormous concerns ...
05.02.2023 Jonah Peretti, Nick Denton and Ben Smith on digital news’ past and future It’s our first four-way pod, featuring BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, Gawker founder Nick Denton, and Semafor founder (and former editor-in-chief of the recently shuttered BuzzFeed News) Ben Smith, who wrote a book about them both. Peter Kafka talks to all ...
04.27.2023 Inside the AI Gold Rush Silicon Valley needs a new thing and AI is that new thing: investors are supposed to pour 43 billion dollars into AI this year. But will individual startups cash in on the boom, or will the real winners of AI ...
04.20.2023 AI is the future! AI is a fraud. Let's debate. AI has captured the imagination of Silicon Valley seemingly overnight. And in all this excitement, it's hard to tell what's really going on. What is this technology, how does Silicon Valley plan to change our world with it, and what ...
04.19.2023 Has Fox News learned a $787 million lesson? Fox News, accused of repeatedly and knowingly spreading lies about Dominion Voting Systems, opted Tuesday to fork over $787 million rather than find out what its correspondents had to say under oath in a court of law. Vox’s Peter Kafka ...
04.13.2023 'Chef Reactions' blew up on TikTok. But will TikTok blow up? It’s a TikTok double-header! Vox’s Peter Kafka talks to ‘Chef Reactions,’ the semi-anonymous TikTok star whose hilarious culinary critiques skyrocketed him to viral fame in less than a year. After that, The Washington Post’s Will Oremus catches us up on ...
04.06.2023 Why is a talent agency buying pro wrestling? Plus a green media startup Endeavor started out as a traditional Hollywood talent agency - CEO Ari Emanuel, famously, was the model for Jeremy Piven’s character on “Entourage.” But suddenly, it’s become a giant media company focused on real and fake fighting, by merging its ...
03.30.2023 Is Apple sure about Apple’s new Goggles? Plus Roger Bennett, Media Mogul We’ve had questions about Apple’s new VR headset — supposedly set to debut in June — for some time. Starting with: Who’s going to pay $3,000 for these things, and what will they do with them? Turns out some Apple ...
03.23.2023 Podcast pioneer Jesse Thorn built his own business. Now his employees own it. Jesse Thorn has been podcasting for so long it was called radio. Over time he turned his career into a business - Maximum Fun, a network of eclectic pop culture shows like Bullseye; My Brother, My Brother and Me; and ...
03.16.2023 An SVB (phew!) update + Benedict Evans on the future of (almost) everything First: A Silicon Valley Bank check-in with Dan Primack of Axios. Why, exactly, did so many tech companies (and, um, media companies) bank with SVB, and what happens next? Then, Peter Kafka has a great, wide-ranging conversation with tech analyst ...
03.06.2023 Science fiction pioneer Neal Stephenson on the metaverse, the movies and why he still believes in blockchain Mark Zuckerberg wants to build the metaverse. Neal Stephenson created the meta verse three decades ago. The author’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash popularized the use of the term “avatar” in a digital context, inspired the makers of Google ...
03.03.2023 Meet the woman who got De La Soul streaming De La Soul was legendary for their trail-blazing approach to hip-hop. But in recent years the trio become notable for another reason: You couldn’t hear their music on any streaming platform. This means that generations of fans - including Recode’s ...
02.23.2023 Real-life “Succession”: Jim Stewart on Sumner Redstone’s sordid saga Veteran business journalist James B. Stewart specializes in getting behind the scenes to tell the stories of rich, powerful, and complicated subjects. He has a doozy with “Unscripted”, the new book he co-wrote about the last days of media mogul ...
02.14.2023 We quiz BuzzFeed’s CEO about AI It used to be that a human would have to write a BuzzFeed quiz about “Which Fictional Artificial Intelligence Are You?” But now, BuzzFeed writers are using real artificial intelligence tools — from Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT — ...
02.09.2023 Why is tech in trouble if the economy is ok? Tech and media companies (including the one that brings you this podcast) are laying off workers left and right. Meanwhile, the latest national jobs report is shockingly strong. So… why? Do the excuses make any sense? First, Recode’s Peter Kafka ...
02.02.2023 Land of the Giants: The Hidden Hand Behind Your Swipes This week, we bring you an episode of The Cut and The Verge’s latest season of Land of the Giants: Dating Games. This episode is all about Match Group, the company that went on an acquisition spree and now controls ...
01.26.2023 Don't tell investor Li Jin that Web3 is dead Investor Li Jin helped popularize the idea of the Creator Economy — the theory that many people who make stuff online could and should get paid for that work. Then she merged that pitch with an embrace of crypto/Web3 — ...
01.18.2023 How The Last of Us went from hit game to hit zombie tv The critically-lauded video game The Last of Us is now a critically-lauded HBO series. It's about a global pandemic that turns much of the world’s population into zombie-like monsters. Executive producer (and former roommate of Ted Cruz) Craig Mazin talks ...
01.16.2023 "Resist trying to make things better" - a conversation with internet security expert Alex Stamos A new study in the journal Nature Communications finds "no evidence of a meaningful relationship" between Russian disinformation and voting behavior in the 2016 election. If disinformation maybe isn’t as effective as we assumed, does that change social networks’ responsibility ...
01.12.2023 Was YouTube’s NFL deal a $2 billion mistake? For the first time in 3 decades, NFL’s Sunday Ticket - a subscription service that lets viewers watch many but not all of the NFL’s games each week - has a new home: YouTube TV. The deal will cost YouTube/Google/Alphabet ...
01.05.2023 Apple’s new goggles; Hollywood’s new streaming pitch. Before we face the reality of 2023, we discuss the state of virtual reality — specifically, the still-unannounced VR/AR headset Apple’s been developing for years. The Information’s Wayne Ma joins Recode’s Peter Kafka to share the details of his latest ...
12.29.2022 Reader Mail! Recode’s Peter Kafka answers listener questions about Twitter, niche content streaming, print media microtransactions, regional sports networks and more. Peter’s producers and son also make appearances in descending order according to age. Host: Peter Kafka (@pkafka), Senior Editor at Recode ...
12.20.2022 An Elon-free year in review The Earth has just about completed its latest orbit around the sun, which means it’s time to take a look at what was happening over the past 584 million miles. Joining Recode’s Peter Kafka is Bloomberg’s, Lucas Shaw. Together, they ...
12.13.2022 A n00b’s guide to the Microsoft / Activision deal the FTC wants to stop The FTC wants to (candy) crush Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Inc., the makers of games like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush. Meanwhile, Microsoft, the maker of Xbox, assures Call of Duty players they’ll still be ...
12.08.2022 Why the media landscape is “dire” with WSJ’s Jessica Toonkel Layoffs, Disney CEO take-backsies, and the Netflix of it all — this week, Recode’s Peter Kafka catches up on the not-that-upbeat media industry with Jessica Toonkel, deputy media editor at The Wall Street Journal. They discuss why Big Media companies ...
12.01.2022 How Eventbrite survived the pandemic, and why it’s not fighting Ticketmaster Selling tickets for live events can be… tricky, as Ticketmaster has proven yet again. But Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz runs a much smaller ticketing business and says she’s learned valuable lessons after the pandemic brought her revenue to zero. She ...
11.29.2022 It’s not TV it’s HBO — the book HBO’s 50-year-old history tells you a lot about culture, business, and TV’s past and future. This perhaps explains why we’ve seen two HBO books in the last 12 months. Felix Gillette is the co-author of the newest one: It’s Not ...

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