On the hunt for media optimism, with Semafor’s Ben Smith and The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey

Channels with Peter Kafka

Vox Media Podcast Network

Technology, Tv & Film, Business News, News

4.4 • 585 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Here’s one where we try to do two things at once: Have a convo about green shoots in media with two smart guys who know media really well — Semafor’s Ben Smith and The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey. Try to find new audiences for our respective podcasts, by cutting up that conversation into 3 parts, and distributing those parts to our respective feeds. Which is to say: You can hear more of the this conversation by heading to Semafor’s Mixed Signals pod, and you can hear a different slice of the chat by heading to Brian’s Rebooting pod. It’s an experiment, based on the thesis that the people who listen to one of our shows would be very interested in listening to the other shows. Did we get it right? What can we do to make it better? Please let us know. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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1:39.1	podcast network this is channels with peter kofka that is. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider.
1:46.1	And today we've got a bonus episode for you. It's also something a little different. It's a mashup with Ben Smith, the co-founder of Semaphore and the co-host of their Mixed Signals podcast. And with Brian Morrissey, who runs the excellent rebooting newsletter and podcast. All three of us write and talk about media,
2:02.5	which means we're often, quite often,
2:04.5	talking about doom and decline.
2:07.0	So today we thought we'd mix it up a bit and try,
2:09.9	emphasis on try, to talk about optimism,
2:13.1	looking for green shoots and promising developments in media.
2:16.1	Like I said, we tried.
2:18.3	And the other thing we're trying to do here is to introduce you folks to podcasts you might not listen to normally.
2:24.0	All of that means is that this part of the conversation you can hear right now on this podcast
	...

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