Channels with Peter Kafka

Joanna Stern spent more than a decade explaining technology to Wall Street Journal readers. Now she’s doing it on her own — with a new media company, New Things, and a new book, I Am Not a Robot, about spending a year outsourcing as much of her life as possible to AI.

Joanna and I talk about what AI turned out to be surprisingly good at, why robots still...

Two years ago, Oliver Darcy left CNN and launched Status, a paid newsletter focused on the media business. The basic bet was that readers would pay for the scoops and insider reporting he had been producing at CNN.

That bet appears to be working. Status now has four full-time employees, more than 130,000 people on its email list, and “many thousands” of paying su...

When I last talked to Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, Netflix was buying Warner Bros. Discovery. Six months later, Paramount has the deal — but, surprisingly, it’s on hold while a group of states tries to block it in court.
Lucas and I talk about whether Larry and David Ellison can still muscle the acquisition through, how long the fight could drag on, and what this fall’s elect...

You are a normal person, so if you think about “people writing their own newsletters” you probably think: “Substack”.

But just as Xerox isn’t the only way to make photocopies, Substack doesn’t own the professional newsletter industry.

So let’s meet a competitor: Beehiiv, run by 32-year-old CEO Tyler Denk. Denk helped build Morning Brew’s newsletter m...

Chris Balfe is the CEO of Red Seat Ventures, the company behind some of the biggest names in podcasting, including Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, and, more recently, Kill Tony. Since we last spoke, Red Seat has been acquired by Fox, making it one of the company’s biggest bets on the creator economy.

So I asked him what that actually means—fo...