The Rebooting Show

Playboy is rebuilding itself as a lifestyle brand for a new era. President David Miller joins me to discuss why content is now the brand’s marketing engine, the return of the magazine, and Playboy’s expansion into licensing, events, membership and hosp...

Complex president Moksha Fitzgibbons joins Brian Morrissey to discuss the company’s evolution from an advertising-dependent publisher into a business spanning media, commerce and live events. They examine why content and commerce usually fails, how Com...

Paul Jelinek, chief business officer at EX.CO ( https://EX.CO ), joined me in Cannes for TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO ( https://EX.CO ), to lay out why CTV programmatic advertising is still in its early days — and why that's about to change fast...

Never bet against the need of young people to get out of the home and socialize. Movie theaters are seeing a revival, driven by young audiences. Geoff Schiller, CEO of movie theater ad network Screenvision, joined me to discuss why this is a long term ...

Per Sendall, co-head of ads at Spotify, joins Brian Morrissey in Cannes for TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO ( https://EX.CO ), to break down how AI agents are already changing the way Spotify builds and sells advertising.Sendall explains why "the v...

Famous Birthdays is a classic open web publishing success story. Evan Britton bootstrapped the publisher to fill a simple need: People were seeking out information about the new crop of influencer and creator celebrities. Traffic peaked at 25 million t...

Rob Wilk, CRO of Yahoo, joined me in Cannes for TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO ( https://EX.CO ), to make the case that 30-year-old Yahoo is in the middle of a genuine business turnaround, not a nostalgia play. Rob breaks down Yahoo's first-party ...

Events have moved from a side business to a core commercial product at The Wall Street Journal. CRO Josh Stinchcomb says the long lead times and scarcity let publishers lock in sponsor commitments earlier, which matters when advertising budgets are vol...

Ryan McConville, chief product officer at NBCUniversal, joins me in Cannes for TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO ( https://EX.CO ), to make the case that premium video has been underappreciated as the origin point of culture. That ends up leaving it ...

Funding investigative journalism is a unique challenge. On The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Scott Stedman, an independent investigative journalist who is using a coffee subscription service as a business model to fund his open-source investigations at Th...

Agentic advertising was the buzzword of the year at Cannes this year. It stands to reason this hype is ahead of reality. Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc, gives a reality check of where the hurdles to agentic advertising, which holds...

One of the more promising areas of media is expert practitioners who are both good at their jobs and at explaining their fields. Workweek is a B2B media company built with this ethos at its core. Adam Ryan, CEO of Workweek, joined me to discuss the adv...

The shift to performance marketing has increased thei importance of affiliate operations at publishers. AI is upending the old playbook. That’s because of AI agents. Agents will increasingly be on the loose to make buying decisions. The question is how...

Mike Nuzzo, svp of Hearst Data Solutions, explains how Hearst is measuring its visibility and favorability inside answer engines, restructuring editorial content into formats LLMs can more easily use, and exploring how GEO could become part of its adve...

USA Today Co CEO Mike Reed explains why he's willing to walk away from Google search traffic within the next 12 months, how the company is building direct-to-consumer relationships through newsletters and social to offset the loss, and why he thinks th...

Daniel Scharff isn't a media guy. He's a CPG operator who stumbled into community-building almost by accident, looking for people to talk to at trade shows. That accidental start turned into Startup CPG, a Slack-based community that's become a trusted ...

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 ...