The Rebooting Show

Sharon Profis, vp of audience innovation at Raptive, joins me to walk through what the company is seeing across its network of 7,000 publishers and creators. Google traffic is still declining, and the smallest sites are getting hit hardest. We get into why SEO still works, how much publishers should bother optimizing for LLMs, and why AI Overviews are showing up three times as often while their hit to clicks has actually eased. We also discuss why email, direct and social traffic are worth far more than their share of page views, what happened to Pinterest, and what a publisher's site is for now.

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Publishers know how to live through distribution shocks. AI is a different kind of disruption. Reuters president Paul Bascobert argues it’s a production shock, one that pushes the cost of commodity content toward zero and squeezes out any business without something unique to sell. We talk about Reuters’ “build it once, sell it four times” wholesale model, why AI companies are now publishers rather than portals, the coming push for content protection, and why he worries the news industry won’t move fast enough. Paul also makes the case that this could be a golden age of journalism, even if it isn’t one for big media companies.

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Adam Reek and Bradley Roe spent 16 years building Peloton magazine, sold it to Outside, and watched it get shut down. Then they started over. Fausto is a high-end print magazine about cycling as a lifestyle. Adam and Brad explain why they've opted out of the digital media rat race. We get into the newsstand economics, the Monocle and Surfer's Journal models, and why patience is the thing they learned the first time around.

Josh Kaplan is co-founder and CEO of Smooth Media, a talent management company for knowledge creators: people like Joanna Stern, Matt Wolf, Cat GPT and the Breaking and Entering guys. Smooth started out selling newsletter and consulting services to creators. It found its footing by doing the opposite: bringing in sponsor revenue and taking a 20% commission. Josh and I talk about why most of their creators are video-first, why they moved away from taking equity, what it means that a top creator now owns a piece of Smooth, and who carries the risk when creators start throwing events.

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The Lever founder David Sirota joins me to discuss why corporate media still sets the terms of the political conversation, even as its business model weakens. We get into the opening for independent investigative outlets, why reader funding brings its own pressures, and the challenge of serving an audience that sometimes wants its beliefs affirmed more than its assumptions challenged. We also discuss what Zohran Mamdani understands about media and why the left needs to do more than copy the right’s playbook.

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The Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson is preparing for a media business where the web plays a far smaller role. That could mean more print issues, stronger relationships between readers and individual writers, and new ways to get paid when AI agents become the audience. Recorded at TRB Audience Summit, this conversation starts with what the industry could look like in 2031 and explores how The Atlantic is positioning itself for that future, why Nick expects a new generation of media startups, and whether AI companies will build an economic system that sustains the journalism they depend on.

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The Guardian CEO Anna Bateson is a realist. She sees the need to prepare for when publishers are connecting information to AI pipes. “Our website may become something that is more of a service to agentic audiences rather than where you have the majority of human traffic,” she said. Recorded live at TRB Audience Summit on Sept 17, 2026.

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Publishers are adding AI tools, but the news product remains largely unchanged. Martin Schiori, former deputy publisher and AI lead at Sweden’s Aftonbladet and now co-founder of newsletter startup Hint Media, joins Brian Morrissey to discuss where that leaves news businesses. We explore the choice between becoming AI-powered information services and building around human relationships, why journalists’ identities as writers complicate adoption, and the risk of trying to do a little of everything without giving audiences a compelling reason to come back.

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Playboy is rebuilding itself as a lifestyle brand for a new era. President David Miller joins me to discuss why content is now the brand’s marketing engine, the return of the magazine, and Playboy’s expansion into licensing, events, membership and hospitality.

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Complex president Moksha Fitzgibbons joins Brian Morrissey to discuss the company’s evolution from an advertising-dependent publisher into a business spanning media, commerce and live events. They examine why content and commerce usually fails, how Complex rebuilt its audience around video, and what it takes for a media brand to turn cultural relevance into product sales and 100,000 event tickets. The conversation explores a larger shift in publishing: Media’s value increasingly lies in what it can make happen beyond the pageview.

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