The Rebooting Show

AI agents are consuming content at a scale the web was never built for — and they don't watch ads, subscribe, or click. In this episode of TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO ( https://EX.CO ), recorded at Cannes, Brian Morrissey talks with Cosmin Ene,...

At the Bloomberg Studios in Cannes, Bloomberg Media chief commercial officer Christine Cook and HSBC CMO for corporate and institutional banking Nicole German joined me to discuss the current and future shifts as media moves into an agentic era. The co...

People Inc CEO Neil Vogel explains his beef with Google and how publishing now requires running multiple playbooks customized for each brand. Axios chief media correspondent Sara Fischer says an AI marketplace can only emerge if Google participates. Ch...

Esses is betting a high-end print magazine will help establish brand credibility an email list alone cannot. Founder Ojus Jain is building a model that uses that credibility and editorial distribution to power brand activations around the crowded F1 ra...

KCRW is a local institution in Los Angeles, home to Morning Becomes Eclectic, the long-running music-discovery program. The public radio station is using its standing to lean into a community model that includes 100 events per year, such as a pie bakin...

The Reuters Institute's new digital news report lays bare the challenges facing journalism as people increasingly stop seeking out news products. Instead, news is a feature of other products. Jim Egan, one of the report's authors, joins me to discuss t...

A year after its launch, Dynamo’s Nich Carlson joined me to discuss what he’s learned in starting a YouTube-first video programmer. Dynamo is home to “Business Explains the World ( https://www.youtube.com/@BusinessExplainsTheWorld ),” a documentary-sty...

TikTok broke social media's original contract — grow followers, followers see content — and replaced it with algorithmic sorting that rewards entertaining strangers over satisfying your loyal audience. Link in Bio's Rachel Karten joins The Rebooting Sh...

In the wreckage of the scale era, The Wall Street Journal is one of the winners. It has 4.5 million paid subscriptions and the broader Dow Jones portfolio has 6.3 million with a foothold in B2B data assets like OPIS and Risk & Compliance. The Journal h...

Markets in the midst of technological change tend to have two camps. One is the legacy incumbents that have strengths in their brands and the other in upstarts that are nimbler. In digital media, it turned out brand won. At Possible, The Rebooting held...

At nearly two decades old, Politico's Playbook was an innovator in the now-familiar daily agenda-setting newsletter. Playbook is now more than a DC staple. It has editions in five countries with two more on the way. And it is looking to adopt a franchi...

The decentralization of digital media has arrived for TV. The TV advertising system is being remade in the image of the data-focused, automated ad systems that came to dominate the internet. TV was always the holdout, thanks to scarcity. That’s changed...

Much of the U.S. news landscape is doom and gloom, but The Guardian is a quiet success story. Powered by reader contributions, The Guardian now has a 150-person newsroom and draws more web traffic than The Washington Post. Guardian U.S. managing direct...

In this live recording from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, I debated Peter Erdelyi, director of the Center for Sustainable Media, about the role of state subsidies in building sustainable media businesses. Chapters: 00:00 Beeh...

Morning Brew CEO Robert Dippell discusses why there are two types of publishers: those with a passive connection to their audience and those with a strong connection. Sponsored by Beehiiv, the modern email system used by leading publishers like Time, T...

Allison Murphy, COO of Axios, joined me to discuss the evolution of Axios Local five years in. Axios plans to be in 43 cities by the end of the year. It is adapting its franchise model to build around individual reporters. In this model, the journalist...

Christian Muche built Dmexco into Europe's biggest digital marketing event, walked away, and then launched Possible in Miami Beach — after Martin Sorrell told him the world didn't need another marketing event. We talk about what it took to launch a new...

Former Athletic and Puck exec Max Tcheyan is launching Caper, a media brand covering the power dynamics behind the restaurant world. Max explains why he thinks food media is where sports media was in 2016, how dining culture has become a status marker ...

The Philadelphia Inquirer is a typical big city newspaper that's been in retreat for a generation. Now under a unique nonprofit ownership structure, the Inquirer grew revenue last year and turned an operating profit. CEO Lisa Hughes, the former New Yor...

Robin Thurston raised $150 million to turn Outside into more than a magazine. He explains how the company married media brands with mapping apps, SaaS platforms, and a festival to reach profitability at $125 million in revenue.

Dmitry Shishkin, a veteran of the BBC and former CEO of Ringier International, has a back-to-basics suggestion: Journalism needs to adapt more of a product mindset. Too much of what newsrooms produce is basic news updates rather than acting as a utilit...

Taboola CEO Adam Singolda has built his company on open web publishing. He sees the dynamics of the open web changing, as the battle for AI surpremacy acclerates the shift from traditional web search, putting in motion a cascading series of second-orde...

The industrial logic of media, premised on scarcity, has been replaced by a platform logic that is no less centralizing. Meet the new boss. Entertainment industry veteran Darren Cross breaks down what platform logic is, and how it dictates what's made,...

Food Fix's Helena Bottemiller Evich has achieved sustainability. She has a recurring revenue business that exceeds her salary at Politico, with a 10% free-to-paid conversion rate. This gives her the option to continue as is as a solo operation or expan...

Everything comes back in fashion. Why not the portal? Yahoo is a true legacy brand of the internet. An OG portal that failed to stem the rise of Google, missed on buying Facebook and for the last four-plus years has been a ward of private equity under ...

In this episode, I talk with James Capo, CEO of audience data platform Omeda, about why the traffic-driven media model has finally run out of road and what replaces it. We dig into the idea of a “connection economy,” where audience relationships—not pa...

Recurrent CEO Andrew Perlman discusses how the publishing company is focusing its niche brands increasingly on events as it retools its model from the traffic era. Affiliate revenue is now a third of what it was at its peak, while experiential has rise...

For two decades, the economics of the open web rested on a simple bargain: platforms indexed content, publishers got traffic, and monetization happened downstream. AI breaks that loop by delivering answers without the click. This week, I’m joined by Do...

In the second round of our TRB Conversations powered by EX.CO, I spoke to EX.CO CEO Tom Pachys about why the streaming landscape is even more chaotic than online advertising; Manas Mittal from Uber discussed why mobility advertising has become a new ca...

This episode features two conversations I had at CES as part of TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO. First, a discussion with Vox Media CRO Geoff Schiller on the company’s bet on talent-led franchises, and why podcasts have become the proving ground fo...

In this episode, I talk with CJ Gustafson, the former CFO behind Mostly Metrics. CJ didn’t come from journalism or media. He came from operating. He started writing to document the playbooks he’d built as a finance executive. That side project turned i...

Semafor's recent $30 million funding round at a $330 million valuation is a needed jolt of confidence in the media sector -- and an endorsement of its events-led media model. CEO Justin Smith joined me to discuss why putting events first allowed Semafo...

CEO Sarah Personette is blunt that she has no interest in becoming an events company, warning that "over-rotating" to events is how media brands lose their identity. Puck runs a limited slate—two premium ticketed summits, insider breakfasts in DC and H...

Axios media correspondent Sara Fischer and Breaker founder Lachlan Cartwright are two of the best reporters who are attuned to the daily changes to the media business. They joined me for a year-end episode that covers key themes of the year, including ...

This week I spoke with Washington Post CTO Vineet Khosla about the collision between a legacy shaped by perfection and a future shaped by iteration. We get into why the Post is pushing beyond the one-size-fits-all article, how conversational and person...

Jason Wagenheim has lived the full arc of media’s transformation, from the late-stage magazine era to the current scramble to build durable franchises in a post-pageview world. We talk about how the shift to mobile foreshadowed the AI disruption now hi...

The AP is quietly becoming a core supplier to the AI economy. I talk with Kristin Heitman, the Associated Press CRO, about how a 178-year-old cooperative built on serving newspapers is shifting to a business where newspapers now account for under 10 pe...

Defector is one of the clearest test cases of what comes after the scale era. Born out of the Deadspin walkout and structured as a worker cooperative, it has achieved something most digital media operations haven’t: five years of stability with zero st...

Caliber CEO Ramin Beheshti says younger audiences who aren’t typing URLs into browsers and aren’t interested in being talked down to. We get into why the traditional news product is mismatched with how people actually consume information, why platform-...

Isaac Saul started Tangle in 2019 without a platform job, a big name, or the institutional head start many Substack-era independents enjoyed. He describes himself bluntly: “When I started Tangle, I was a nobody.” In this episode, we talk about how he h...

The Schneps Media story is a blueprint for how local publishing can still work when it’s treated like a real business, not a civic charity. Josh Schneps explains how he and his mother built a diversified local empire by combining print, digital, and ev...

The Economist’s president Luke Bradley-Jones looks to Ferrari as an example of a brand that’s been able to use scarcity to drive value. Ferrari has avoided the trap of many luxury brands in chasing scale and in the process diluting their brands. While ...

The New York Times has become the rare publisher proving that subscriptions and advertising can strengthen each other. Chief Advertising Officer Joy Robins explains how a subscriber-first model creates the engagement, trust, and data that fuel a thrivi...

Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark and founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, discusses why neutrality no longer works in political journalism. Longwell argues that legacy media’s “studied impartiality” has become a liability in a polarized,...

Axios CRO Jacquelyn Cameron breaks down how Axios thinks about audience segmentation in an age when every publisher says they’re “audience-focused.” Jacquelyn explains why Axios organizes around five core personas — influencers, C-suite executives, dea...

TechCrunch’s new owner faced a familiar challenge: modernizing an old tech stack built for a different era. Matt Gross, vp of digital initiatives at TechCrunch owner Regent, joins Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk to discuss how they untangled years of tech debt,...

Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo, has spent 25 years steering a small, independent newsroom through every shift in digital media. He discusses how TPM survived the traffic era, why it avoided venture capital, and what he calls the “small-b...

Tyler Brûlé has built Monocle into one of the most distinctive media brands of the past two decades. At a time when others chased clicks and platforms, Monocle went the other way. It invested in print, opening cafés and shops, launching a radio station...

Bots are taking over the internet, previewing a new world where agents interact and humans consume bot-created content. Cloudflare, a leading content delivery network, saw this coming. Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen told me that publ...

In this conversation, Beehiv CEO Tyler Denk joins me to discuss the evolving landscape of media, focusing on the importance of audience ownership and the role of email as a primary distribution channel. We compare Beehive and Substack, highlighting the...