Channels with Peter Kafka

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,

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

"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'

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 follo

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 t

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