Inside the NYT - and Everywhere Else - with Semafor's Max Tani

Channels with Peter Kafka

Vox Media Podcast Network

Technology, Tv & Film, Business News, News

4.4 • 585 Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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 media institutions — and tell you what’s going inside and why it actually matters. So we spent a bunch of time in this chat talking about Tani’s story about a controversial-at-least-online Times story . In part because I find the whole thing fascinating (I’m not normal). And in part because it gives you a pretty good idea of what being a media reporter entails in 2025. Also discussed here: When is something a tweet, and when is it a story? Why is this a “weird moment in media”? And why was 2024 the “fragmentation election?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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1:37.9	From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is channels with Peter Kafka.
1:42.5	That is me.
1:43.2	I'm also the chief correspondent at Business
1:45.5	Insider. And today I'm talking to Max Tani, who has been writing about the business of media for years,
1:50.9	but whose star has really risen in the last few years after he joins Semaphore. He is the guy
1:56.3	churning out scoops on their weekly newsletter. He's dropping other news tidbits at his Twitter account.
2:01.2	He is co-hosting a weekly media podcast. In other words, he is making me look bad.
2:06.6	Max just published an interesting story about an interesting story at the New York Times.
2:10.1	So if you like listening to people talk about the New York Times, we've got you super served here.
2:15.2	But we are also talking about other stuff here, primarily how we are
	...

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