Channels with Peter Kafka

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

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 doe

It’s not unusual for a big TV network and a big TV distributor to fight about money. But the Disney-YouTube fight is unusual -- at the bare minimum, because it has stretched out for so long. CNBC’s Alex Sherman lives and breathes this stuff, so I asked him to walk me through it, and make some prognostications about whe

In some ways, the Bulwark feels like other small publishers in 2025: it’s found growth and profit by pushing itself out on any platform it can find. But that wasn’t the plan when the company started in 2018. Back then, it was a non-profit cofounded by Republicans who couldn’t stand their party’s embrace of Donald Trump

Would you pay $7 a month to stream CNN? Because CNN CEO Mark Thompson would like you to do that. I know, I know, I’m skeptical, too. But Thompson has been here before: At his last job, as CEO of the New York Times, he helped shepherd that company’s subscription business, which had a gazillion naysayers at the start. An

We spend a lot of time on this show talking to people who run media companies. We also spend a lot of time talking to media reporters. So here’s our one-man Venn diagram: Brian Morrissey runs The Rebooting, where he podcasts, writes and hosts events, all geared at making people in the media business smarter about the m