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 media business. If you want to hear from a guy who understands the big picture, but also the practical realities of operating, he’s your guy.
Brian has been preaching the gospel of small media for some time, so we start there: What is the upside of running a scaled-down media company these days — and what happens to all the businesses that spent years chasing scale?
And yes, Brian and I also talk about AI, and what it will and won’t do for (and to) media. But we also spend a lot of time talking about Google, and the enormous power it currently has — particularly when it comes to the company’s Discover feature, which drives an astonishing amount of traffic.
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56:54
The PR Guy Who Says the AI Boom Is a Bust
The AI story is changing fast. A few months ago, it was all promise and inevitability. Now even AI boosters are asking if the numbers make sense.
Ed Zitron got there early. He runs a PR firm for a living, which means he’s supposed to help people sell their stories. But he’s become best known for tearing tech’s biggest stories apart. And he’s been pushing at the economics behind the AI boom, via his newsletter and podcast, for some time.
We talk about how he built a career out of skepticism, why the media keeps falling for big tech’s favorite stories, and what happens if the AI party ends early.
(And yes: I wrote the paragraphs above with an assist from ChatGPT — mostly so I can imagine Zitron fuming when he reads this.)
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54:36
Why the Guardian Doesn't Need a Billionaire to Thrive
In lots of ways Guardian Media Group is facing the same problems as every other news publisher: A tricky ad environment, platform problems, looming AI threats.
One big difference: The Guardian also has a $1.5 billion trust backing the non-profit, which seems way, way better than being owned by a run-of-the-mill billionaire who might want to meddle with the paper.
But CEO Anna Bateson says the Guardian needs to be a self-sustaining publisher. So it has been steadily, and successfully, getting readers to shoulder the load, via donations, which now account for 40% of the company's revenue.
We talk about how and why the Guardian switched its business model; why it still wants ad money; how the British, lefty news shop is trying to break into America yet again, and why asking readers for donations is, and isn't, like asking them to pay for subscriptions.
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39:00
Almost Everyone is Taking Money from OpenAI. Why is Ziff Davis suing them?
In the future, digital publishers could get run over by AI. In the present, they are deeply concerned about Google, and the prospect that the search giant is going to choke off their last reliable traffic stream.That may explain why lots of publishers are making deals with OpenAI now -- and doing a lot of grousing about Google.Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah is going the other way: he's one of only two big publishers to sue OpenAI (the other one is the New York Times) and he says his portfolio of sites would like more traffic from Google, but is confident things will work out.Shah and Ziff Davis never got the attention some of their digital peers did a decade ago. On the flip side, they're still standing in 2025. So this is a POV worth paying attention to.
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34:22
The Future of Late Night TV, Jimmy Kimmel, and The First Amendment
When’s the last time you stayed up to watch a late night TV monologue? Months? Years? Decades?
I’m not sure, either. But I stayed up Tuesday night to watch Jimmy Kimmel’s return. James Poniewozik, who covers TV for the New York Times, just caught up with it the next day on YouTube.
Which underscores one of the odder parts of the Trump v. Kimmel fight - it revolves around a time slot and a format that has been on its way out for a long time.
So how did late night TV become a flashpoint in a crucial First Amendment fight? And how long is it going to stick around?
James is the perfect person for this discussion: Not only does he watch TV (or YouTube) for a living, he’s also become a professional Trump-watcher, because Trump is a TV character. (Trump and TV are the subject of James’ excellent 2019 book). But make no mistake: the threats he’s making — on his own and with the help of his regulators – are very real.
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Media and tech aren’t just intersecting — they’re fully intertwined. And to understand how those worlds work, and what they mean for you, veteran journalist Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers - and gets them to spell it out in plain, BS-free English.
Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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