Channels with Peter Kafka

Jim Bankoff has spent nearly 20 years building Vox Media. Now he’s selling a big chunk of it to James Murdoch, who is acquiring Vox Media's Podcast Network - the same one that produces this podcast - along with New York Magazine and Vox.com.

We do all the disclosures at the top of this interview, but let’s do it all here too: I’ve worked for Jim for a long time, and I work with the podcast network he’s selling, and I just like him as a human.

So this one’s way more conflicted than a standard Channels chat.Still, I have some straight-ahead questions for him. Like: What does it mean when multiple buyers were interested in his podcast business, but much less interested in the rest of the portfolio he’s been assembling for years? What changes for the properties Murdoch acquires? And why is Jim staying on to work for Murdoch, when he can almost certainly do something else?

And, because it’s Channels, we also gaze backwards a bit, and poke at some of the steps and missteps Vox Media took along the way. But if you’re looking for a wake for a digital media startup, this isn’t it. Jim is very optimistic about what comes next, and I have a vested interest in him being right.
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Versant is the new company Comcast created when it spun off CNBC, MS NOW, USA and other cable networks it no longer wanted inside the mothership. That makes Mark Lazarus’ job pretty simple to describe and very hard to do: take a business built around cable TV — an industry in obvious decline — and use the cash it still generates to build new businesses.I talked to Lazarus on the day Versant reported its first real earnings as a standalone company — and the day its stock bounced after getting hammered out of the gate. He says the early selloff was predictable; that Comcast didn’t “ditch” Versant; and that independence gives him the chance to invest in assets instead of kicking the cash up to the bosses in Philadelphia.We talked about what Versant is supposed to become, whether MSNBC -- now MS NOW -- can build a Fox Nation-style subscription business; why CNBC is getting into investor tools; how long NBCUniversal will keep selling Versant’s ads; what kinds of companies Lazarus wants to buy; and why he’s not buying the Vox Media Podcast Network yours truly works with.The bottom line: Lazarus says he needs about three years to prove this works. Let’s see if Wall Street is that patient.
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Roger Lynch has spent the last seven years trying to turn Condé Nast from a magazine company into a profitable portfolio of global brands. Now he has a new set of problems: Google traffic is disappearing, AI companies want to use Condé’s work, and everyone in media is trying to figure out who still has leverage.

I talked to Lynch about the end of Google search traffic, why Condé is doing deals with OpenAI and other AI companies, and how the company thinks about the Met Gala, independent creators, and The Devil Wears Prada 2.

And if you're looking for news about who succeeds legendary editors Anna Wintour and David Remnick: Lynch says he has a plan.
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The internet is in its let-it-rip era: more AI slop, more video, more clips — and very little in the way of guardrails or rules.

Charlie Warzel, who writes and hosts Galaxy Brain for The Atlantic, joins me to talk about what happens when the platforms stop trying very hard to separate the good stuff from the garbage. Do we actually care if a human made the LinkedIn post, the marketing copy, or the video in our feed? Or do we only care when the slop gets in the way?

Then we get into the video-everything moment: Why every podcast is becoming a video podcast, why clips may matter more than the shows they come from, and what Charlie has learned from becoming a video person  — as I mentioned, he has a podcast now — after years of writing about video people.

That leads to a bigger media question: what can old-school media companies learn from creators, Substackers, and YouTubers — and what do they usually misunderstand when they try to hire or absorb them?

Charlie has been one of my trusted guides to internet culture for years. I highly recommend starting your own podcast so you can invite him on to talk to you directly. And in the meantime, enjoy this one.
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Learn to code, they told us. Then the computers went and learned to code. Now anyone can do it, in theory, courtesy of Claude Code and other vibe coding apps.

Tech people I talk to are very, very excited about this. But they often have a hard time explaining to me, a non-coder, why AI-powered coding is such a big deal. And whether it’s a big deal to everyone who already codes or deals with software for a living — or whether it’s a big deal for everyone who uses software. All of us, that is.

Here to the rescue is Paul Ford, a guy who learned to code and who also learned to write and talk, like a human. Paul is the guy who wrote an entire issue of Businessweek dedicated to a single question — What is Code? — and blogs at Ftrain.com; but his day job is making software, which he does at Aboard.

Paul is not the guy who can tell you what’s going to happen to Saas stocks, or if AI is going to wipe out all the jobs, some jobs or will create a gazillion new jobs. Anyone who tells you any of those answers with confidence, he says, is making it up.

But he can tell you and me why the recent change in AI-produced software — something that really kicked in over the last few months — is changing his life, and why it’s going to change software for good. And he’ll help you think about what that means for you, a normal person. You’ll like this one.
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