On the hunt for media optimism, with Semafor’s Ben Smith and The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey
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After graduating from high school, Anthony needed a plan. He loves playing video games, but that doesn't cover rent. So he took a job at Amazon packing boxes. He heard about their free skills training programs to boost his pay. Now Anthony is a software developer for Amazon. With a bigger paycheck, he upgraded his computer system at home. With his new skills, he's developing a video game in his free time.

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Sign up at Rents.com and save $20 on your first order. From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. 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, which means we're often, quite often, talking about doom and decline. So today we thought we'd mix it up a bit and try, emphasis on try, to talk about optimism, looking for green shoots and promising developments in media. Like I said, we tried.

And the other thing we're trying to do here is to introduce you folks to podcasts you might not listen to normally. All of that means is that this part of the conversation you can hear right now on this podcast is about moves big legacy media companies might have available to them. To hear the other parts where we focus on bundles and the evaporating distinction between pro and amateur media, you can head over to Mixed Signals and The Rebooting.

My hunch is that some of you folks are already doing that on a regular basis, but if you're not, you should be. They're both excellent podcasts. In any case, this is an experiment, so see what you think and let me and Ben and Brian know. All right, that is a lot of talking. Now it's time for more talking. Here's me and Ben Smith and Brian Morris. Hey, I'm here with Ben Smith from Moodle.

from mixed signals and semaphore and Brian Morrissey, who runs the rebooting empire, which is him, excellent podcast and newsletter. And we've been talking broadly about optimism with quite a bit of skepticism and cynicism mixed in about the future of media. We've talked about the professionalization of sort of the up and coming amateur class of producers.

Ben Smith wants to bring back the cable bundle so you can send him your hate mail. And I want to talk about the green shoots for legacy media who still exist, still around, still paying some of our salaries and how they are in some ways successfully adapting to.

to this world. And I guess I wanted to throw out an example here, which is ESPN, which is still a giant, very valuable cable outlet. Primarily you go there to watch live sports, but people do watch other programming there. Their two biggest stars, Stephen A. Smith and Pat McAfee, just have huge deals with them.

But those deals also allow them to work outside of ESPN. Stephen A. Smith can do his own podcast in addition to getting paid a ton of money to appear on ESPN. And Pat McAfee doesn't actually work for ESPN. He produces his own work and licenses to ESPN. Now, you could argue that ESPN's sort of bending to do whatever these stars want, an example of internet age that these guys have more leverage than ever. But I'd also argue that

these people want to be at ESPN, um, either because they can get paid more there or they can still get more eyeballs there than anywhere else. Uh,

And I want to throw that out there as a starting point. What advantages do legacy media still have and how can they use them? Yeah, I think this fits like totally with our two previous segments. This is almost as if we planned this. Almost. But we're being basically amateur media. One was about like rebundling. And I think a part of it is like the fact that ESPN and legacy, like it's a bundle of talent, right, at the end of the day. And

the function of a media company is beyond just the content. It is the advertising, it's the technology, it's the distribution, right? And then the other one is what we were talking about was the merging of alternative and institutional media. I mean, they're gonna blur at the end of the days. And I think what you're talking about to me is

of where those things are going in that it's less oppositional and you're gonna end up seeing different arrangements that take place between independent quote unquote talent and institutional media.

Because both bring particular upsides, right? And I would give another example. Your former boss, Kara Swisher, right? I mean, what she is doing now, before she was a star and so she was going to break off and start her own company, Recook, right? And that's what she's going to do. But now she doesn't even have to run the company. She just gets the upside of it.

of like being Kara Swisher and allow all those other functions to be handled by Vox, right? And so I think the big challenge for media companies when they get out of like an ESPN is how do they start to cut talent deals? Yeah. I guess my question is, what are they going to

offer the talent? What is what is the reason for a Kara Swisher to stay with a Vox? What is the reason for a Stephen A. Smith to stay at ESPN? Right. In a world where they could go anywhere else that they want, those legacy media companies have to be offering something beyond just money because they can always get outbid.

So what what are those people finding attractive? And I guess my point is, I think there is something still of enormous value, whether it's distribution primarily, you know, a little bit branding still helps. I think monetization still helps. I think Vox in particular does a very good job of selling ads. Thank you, Vox. And but it's some combination of those things because it can't just be come work with us. We're Brand X and that matters.

Yeah, and actually, like, I think, I mean, those are the things, right? Brand, advertising, revenue distribution. Maybe support production, community editing. But one version of this is what Chris Balfe, who I've heard on an incredible interview on Peter's podcast and had him on our show, who basically runs the production company for Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, people like that. It's called Red Seat Ventures, but you've never heard of it, and he doesn't want anybody to have heard of it. It's their back end.

And it runs as sort of an agency for Starz and was recently bought. And now owned by Rupert Murdoch. It was bought by Fox for sort of a big number. And so it's like, oh, is the media company of the future like an anonymous agency for Starz that kind of has no leverage to keep its Starz, I think, in some way? Because no one's ever heard of that company. Its brand doesn't have any meaning or guarantee. It doesn't have its own distribution beyond the network of Starz. And I think that is...

obviously incredibly interesting, successful model. But I do think, I mean, I think one of the things you see out there is that you can imbue a brand with meaning and really like hold to that. It really does mean something. And I noticed it the other day because like there's no brand that has been more like beaten up and degraded over the decades than Newsweek. I mean, one of the real learnings of Newsweek is do not put the frequency of publication into your name. But, you know, like it's been sold and resold and in the middle of just like incredible

incredibly boring, complicated, minor criminal activity, alleged, and all sorts of things. And yet, like yesterday, I saw somebody, Elon Musk being like, he didn't like some story in Newsweek and was like, this is what the legacy media does to you. They lie like Newsweek lies, right? And actually, in some weird way, that means that Newsweek still has this incredibly resonant brand. Here's the thing. Newsweek is a good business now. And the reason is because it's a brand.

And so, you know, their fast-growing parts of their business are things like the best hospitals to go to. Like, they're list business. And that's because their brand means something. That's what I'm saying. Is that, like, there is, I think, actually, like...

People understood a little how much these brands mean, probably because they've like seemed to have survived the apocalypse. These brands like cockroaches. They also existed in a pre-digital world, right? Yeah. Where those where there were less brands and it was sort of easier to get people's attention. I do wonder what Newsweek will mean when basically the entire audience cannot remember a time when there was a print magazine.

Right. And we're getting fairly close to that. And I wonder if those brands will continue to be successful. Yeah, we're basically the last people who grew up with it. And I was definitely like around my house.

It was often like the most salacious thing in my home was Newsweek. You know, like there'd be a little bit of like pop culture in my very non-pop culture home. I don't remember Newsweek being that salacious. Did they have a swimsuit issue? I forget that. No, but you could learn about Bo Derek there. Madonna. Bo Derek. Peter and I had very sheltered childhoods.

But yeah, no, I think that's an interesting point when you think about, even like Time, I had a Jess Sibley, I just did a podcast with her the other day. And that's another business where they've sort of ceased to be valuable. I don't mean this in a bad way, just factually, for what they did before, like as news weeklies, that doesn't have a lot of value, but they still have a lot of value in the marketplace.

And, you know, sometimes that can be a big events business or accolades. You have these franchises like the Time 100 Person of the Year. You know, for Newsweek, it can be a licensing business at the end of the day with, you know, best hospitals and all the lists that they do and the college rankings. So there's a lot of value still left in the brands, particularly of legacy companies. I mean, people love to...

you know, hate on Forbes a lot, right? But like what playbook would have worked with Forbes? Like, I don't know if, you know, what, what Forbes has done with that business over the years is really treat it like a brand. And that brand gets expressed in a lot of different ways. And does that mean there's going to be like,

different like 30 under 30 lists. Yes. That's the business. It's a listings business, right? It's a classifieds business. But yes. Brian, you were talking in the previous segment we did on your show about sort of the professionalization of amateur video and how relatively easy it's going to be for someone to make something that looks like, quote, TV, quote. What do you think about other efforts that legacy media are making to sort of

hip themselves up and look a little more amateurish or with it or any other old man saying. I think a lot about the New York Times shoving vertical video onto their homepage, and it's unclear to me whether that's meant to make someone who's heard of TikTok feel like they're getting a TikTok experience or whether that is actually meant to port to TikTok or it's a little bit different. But I think that the journal understands

under Emma Tucker quite clearly trying to become more tabloidy and sensational and clickable, which is not really amateurish, but they're clearly trying to sort of change their branding and point. Are those moves sort of, are there enough companies with the ability to make those moves to make it work and sustain themselves?

Yeah, it's funny because the risk is always that you become that Steve Buscemi meme. Like, how do you do fellow kids with the skateboard and the hat on backwards? And, you know, I think what Emma's done at the Wall Street Journal is a great example of livening up a brand, but within the...

the reality of the Wall Street Journal. Like I think we all went through an era, I think I blame you, Ben, right? Where like everyone had Buzzfeed envy. And so you had these people doing a lot of like embarrassing listicles that they shouldn't have been doing because that was what was working. My favorite was we used to do, we did, I thought quite inspired animal listicles, like 41 animals who were disappointed in you. And I remember National Geographic was clearly trying to copy us and they just did a list called 10 monkeys. Yeah.

And we were just like, oh, that's so basic. So, I mean, there's a long history of this. I wouldn't recommend that. But I mean, I look at like, you know, someone like, I mentioned Odd Lots on one of them. Like, I think that's a great example of legacy brand in Bloomberg that that is a very modern show. And like Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Holloway, they're great characters. They have great chemistry. They're kind of internet people. Oh, they're very much internet people. Yeah, and they're like native to it.

But like it fits within the Bloomberg ethos. It isn't, it isn't like out of left field. So I, I worry a lot about traditional brands that decide that they need a creator strategy and that there's, you know, there's a task force that gets like spun up and they're like, we're going to find creators. We're going to like build creators. And, you know, it ends up coming across as phony and that's, um,

That's not what you want to be. But what about the less cringy one where they just say, we are hiring Joe Wiesenthal or Matt Iglesias or Emily Sundberg, and they're going to either make something, which actually Bloomberg already does. Which is literally what Bloomberg did with Joe. But also Matt Iglesias publishes for Bloomberg on the regular. Yeah.

And Michael Lewis is going to do a big thing for them. I'm very jealous. But the point is, I'm assuming we are going to see more people adopting the ESPN. You can bring your product to us and license it to us and we will sell it for you or whatever it is. It'll be part of our bundle.

but you are gonna be able to do your own thing on your own. And we're gonna figure out how to do that, but it's actually, it's less complicated than it thinks. And you are gonna get our distribution and audience, and we're gonna get your brand and sizzle. It seems like a pretty good and pretty obvious trade. Yeah. Aren't you doing something like this yourself? Is that me? Yeah.

I have two jobs, so I guess that sort of makes sense. Yeah. I mean... I work full-time for Business Insider, and then I own a show that Vox distributes and sells. Okay.

But yeah, I mean, take someone like Emily Sundberg. Like it makes all the sense in the world for her to have some kind of arrangement with like New York magazine, right? I mean, they're doing incredible work. Talk about like a legacy brand that is still just as relevant culturally. Maybe more so. The business is totally different, but that is a very relevant brand. They're constantly in the zeitgeist, at least from what I can tell.

But that raises a question for me, because you talk about these brands like Forbes and Newsweek that somehow are still milking their, like, 1980s and 90s resonance with, like, living in the brains of, like, old people like us. But, I mean, at some point, if you aren't doing, essentially, the great journalism that is what distinguished these things, like, at some point, that runs out of steam, right? And I do think if you look at, right, the contrast between New York and a lot of the Condé Nast publications, like, really...

We're actually doing living up to the expectation of your brand matters a lot too, right? I mean there's it's harvesting I think is what you're talking about. It's so bleak You're doing some brand harvesting and there's a reaping. Yeah, I mean there's the SEO harvesting, you know, which is pretty common I think with a lot of you know, publishing rights, I think one of the sad things of digital media is that

dignified death of brands is not an option, right? Like, I mean, I think Gawker in some ways got off easy. Like,

It did have its corpse paraded around for a little bit during that weird bustle thing. But overall, it went away. And most publishing brands that started on the internet do not go away. They become SEO farms. And perhaps, we've gone through all this without talking about AI, perhaps with SEO losing a lot of its allure that

will not necessarily always be the case. But that is the reality for a lot of brands. So AI will kind of put the zombie brands out of their misery? Well, there's so many zombie brands around. And like the reality is from a from kind of like a private equity perspective, it makes a lot of sense. Like managing decline can be a very lucrative business. I'm regularly reminded by someone at Apollo that like AOL's dial up business is still like $400 million in EBITDA.

like not even like revenue. So there's money to be made and capitalism will find it. That's interesting. I do wonder if AOL, I mean, if AI kind of accelerates some of that decline and puts things out of their misery. Well, yeah, the SEO harvesting giga ohm for an SEO play, you know, was a pretty small business to begin with. And then it's going to be much, much smaller now for all the obvious reasons. We'll be right back. But first, a word from his father.

After graduating from high school, Anthony needed a plan. He loves playing video games, but that doesn't cover rent. So he took a job at Amazon packing boxes. He heard about their free skills training programs to boost his pay. Now Anthony is a software developer for Amazon. With a bigger paycheck, he upgraded his computer system at home. With his new skills, he's developing a video game in his free time.

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with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash voxbusiness. Go to shopify.com slash voxbusiness, shopify.com slash voxbusiness. I had like a strange, slightly optimistic, um,

experience with sort of the intersection of journalism and AI, which is that, and you may have noticed this, but PR people who had mostly like gotten out of the business of pitching mainstream publications because they just wanted to put their people on podcasts and like ghostwrite LinkedIn posts for them, have now realized that ChatGPT and Anthropic tilt very heavily towards stories in journalistic publications. And so if I ask, what is the reputation of Brian Morrissey? It's going to pull something up from

the mainstream media. It's not going to look at Reddit. And so there's been this swing back in the PR industry that the way PR services in the world of AI work is that like you really want a story about your CEO in a trade publication. This doesn't help the trade publications business model at all, but the PR people are like back to pitching

articles that perhaps nobody will read, but the AI will read. And that's what matters. This is why I'm going to revive my, I had a business idea many years ago when I was like a reporter who would get like 150 emails following up on another email from PR people. And then I would get 150 calls following up on the email that were following up on the email. The ad tech business is really particularly focused on this. Right. And I always looked at it like this needs to be taxed.

Like there needs to be a disincentive of it. So the idea was pay per pitch where they would actually have to pay a fee in order to pitch publications. Oh, it's a fantastic model. And that would be the way to fund the journalism. Which, by the way, they used to do just called taking you out for drinks. This is more scalable, Peter. Well, the company pays a fee, which is called hiring that guy to email you.

Well, they're always convincing to me, like companies saying, why should you buy ads? It's much better for you to be in the article. And that was directly oppositional. That's just competition at the end of the day. And so maybe now with this generative AI optimization, it's time. It's time for a pay-per-pitch. All right, Brian, I'm going to put you in charge of Condé Nast. Big house of brands. Brands still mean a lot.

Um, everyone knows about their struggles, big legacy media. What do you, what do you, what are you immediately pointing to as a strength? Well, I mean, kindness is hard because it's a, it's a collection to me of like assets and like some of the assets are perfectly suited for like what I would consider like a DTC lane, something like the New Yorker, right? The New Yorker has proven that it can get a lot of people to pay for its high quality journalism.

You put in opposition to that, say, Vanity Fair, right? Vanity Fair, as it is now, doesn't necessarily have a very clear reason to exist, I don't think. And that is a challenge. But it's still got a tremendous brand, right? So I think the inevitable result for a lot of the assets in a Condé Nast is that they move from being publications to being brands. So you go to the Vanity Fair hotel...

or the Vanity Fair airline food on Delta or whatever it is. Well, they got to, I mean, move it to LA. That's pretty uninspiring, Peter. No, it might be uninspiring, but it's not. It's just a playbook. It is a playbook and it can work. I think like,

nostalgia is not really much of a strategy, right? And I don't necessarily see the days of, you know, Graydon Carter has, is I'm like working my way through his like memoir and it's great. And, um, but those days aren't coming back. Like that's over.

Right. So you do what with it? You manage that into some sort of brand play. You keep a few other titles as DTC plays and then the rest you get rid of. Yeah, because most... Look, the reality for a lot of these legacy assets is they're going to be fronts for other kinds of businesses, right? Like, so...

The direct, unless you can do a DTC model where you're actually getting people to pay for it or you're in a category that advertising can support it when they can just go to Meta and have Meta make the ads and put it exactly in front of people, then you need to find basically a business in the back that you're supporting. Yeah.

And you see this with a lot of magazine brands. You know, they're almost more like party promoters, really, at their core business than they are, you know, publishers. Because that's what's paying the bills, putting on parties. So to me, that's inevitable. Like, you just, is there a difference? Like, what would you do, Ben? Yeah, I mean, I think I'm sort of, in some sense, have less of a business strategy here. But I do think if your brand is going to be, we capture the zeitgeist and tell the sort of big, splashy sort of,

gossipy story of power and money and glamour in America. You should do that. And I do think that they at some point got confused about what they were... If you even just read the job ad for the new Vanity Fair editor, it's like they're looking for somebody who will run a matrix content organization or something like this. I do think there's something about these... I hate that word brand, right? These newsrooms can get distracted from...

Like, what are they trying to do here? And it's not churn content.

and like, you know, publish web articles. It's to like tell incredible stories that people are obsessed with. And if you, and if what they want to be as a party hosting brand, telling incredible stories people are obsessed with is going to get you a lot closer to that than whatever exactly it is that they think they're doing. Ben, I had a different legacy media question teed up for you. As someone who had a high profile impactful job at the New York Times and left to start a new thing, how does the New York Times keep

a generation of talented people who make a lot of, who have their own brand and can do a lot of things. How do they keep them at the New York Times or recruit them at the New York Times? - I mean, it's an incredibly powerful brand, actually. Like when I was there, like I did feel, you did feel like, I guess my own view is if you break like a big story or if you write something really good, it really doesn't matter where you write it. It'll travel, people will read it, it'll hit really hard.

If you write a mediocre story or like kind of miss, like I wrote when I was there at the Times for a couple of years, like half of my columns were in the worst half, a quarter were in the bottom 25%. Those ones still hit, right? Because it's the New York Times. And so, like there is a sort of authority to, again, probably a shrinking number, but almost because the number has shrunk, their authority is magnified of outlets that

you know, isn't really directly connected to the strength of their business. But no, The Times has this incredible prestige and people care in varying degrees about prestige, but they, like The New Yorker, are able to kind of pay in prestige. And that's, I mean, that's real leverage too. And I think, I mean, I don't know, it was interesting because I think after the, as the sort of internet, the digital social media boom receded, people like

people of our generation, people like me and Ezra and Kara all wound up at the New York Times because it was sort of a safe harbor. And the Times, you know, Corey Seiko, I put in that category, the Times, you know, I was like looking for like digital people to figure out that thing, whatever that was. But I think three of those four people I just mentioned are gone. And Ezra, you know, has really managed to

I think the Times has turned him into a huge, huge star. And he was already a star, but it somehow amplified his brand, which is so close to the New York Times brand. So, complementary with the New York Times brand in a certain way. I mean, I do think there's a question of, right, like if, I mean, just of money, right? Like, I think most of the- Ezra is leaving millions and millions of dollars on the table by working at the Times. Right, and the question is just how many, right? Like, I think it's literally like-

If you are Ezra Klein or if you are Andrew Ross Sorkin, there's a lot that's great about Big at the New York Times. It probably doesn't have infinite monetary value, but it has a lot. And there is actually kind of a behind the scenes of this kind of a market question of how much is... It's a way of their pricing prestige.

All right. Do we feel like we're ending on an optimistic moat that the future of legacy brands is either leveraging the remaining bit of now currency they have with the remaining bit of stars and or turning themselves into zombie brands? It's the best we could do. Let's be real. All right. That counts as optimism. Thank you, Brian. You said it. Thank you, guys. This was fun.

Thank you again to Ben and Brian. Special thanks to Ben and his team for dreaming this up and putting it together. Thanks on my end to Charlotte Silver for her production editing. Thanks to advertisers who allow us to make shows you can listen to for free. See y'all soon.

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