The Rebooting Show

Adam Ryan, CEO of Workweek, joined me this week to discuss his recent warning that the newsletter sector is overheated. Some points from the conversation: Newsletters are a commodity. The number of newsletters is growing faster than the number of reade...

Sean Griffey, until recently the CEO of Industry Dive, joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the big things Industry Dive, and by extension a lot of B2B, got right. Sean was rarely mentioned in the collection of digital media CEOs of the recent de...

BuzzFeed has always been a company that plays with the boundaries of media, technology, and internet culture. From its early days mastering viral content to its ill-fated attempt to build a sustainable news division, the company has been in a constant ...

The worlds of TV and internet publishing operated separately. The platforms, the dynamics and even the language used was completely different. Linear TV was brand focused and driven by scarcity dynamics while the internet quickly became a direct market...

This week, I'm joined by Pete Pachal, a publishing veteran who writes The Media Copilot newsletter that focuses on the intersection of the news business and AI. Pete and I discuss the recent breakthrough with Deepseek, and what it means beyond Silicon ...

This is set up to be a banner year for alternative media. Axios senior media reporter Sara Fischer joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss why institutional media has lost power and influence to an assortment of podcasters, YouTubers and independent...

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I was joined by Alex Kantrowitz, who writes the Big Technology newsletter and hosts a podcast of the same name, in order to discuss the year ahead in tech platforms. We covered a lot of ground, including: T...

Mike Mallazzo, writer of the reliably excellent Zero Clicks newsletter from Martech Record and a veteran of digital publishing and marketing, joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the state of affiliate and what to expect in the category in 2025. ...

In this live podcast, I spoke to Imtiaz Patel, chief consumer officer; Kristin Roberts, chief content officer; Jason Taylor, chief sales officer; and Renn Turiano, chief product officer. We discussed rethinking the article page, the imperative to provi...

At Metro, the free London newspaper, the comedown from the traffic era was jarring. At the end of 2022, with Facebook turning off the traffic taps to news and a Google update hitting, overall traffic dropped in half, Metro’s director of audience Sofia ...

Stagwell CEO Mark Penn is a veteran of politics. In this discussion, he examines how shifting audience behaviors and trust patterns are reshaping where Americans get their news. The conversation delves into the thorny challenges of advertising on news ...

AI-powered search engines have clawed a foothold in the critical search market that controls distribution on the open web. Media management consuling firm Activate estimates 15 million people are using these answer engines rather than Google, which is ...

Blockworks CEO Jason Yanowitz discusses how Blockworks has evolved the company from an events business to podcast network to news provider to becoming a data and information play with media, events and franchises feeding the core data and research busi...

Defector Media, the sports and culture publication launched four years ago by former Deadspin writers, is an example of the mixed picture for the future of the media business. On the plus side, it is a profitable, employee-owned publication with 42,500...

I was joined by Reid DeRamus to discuss the strategic and tactical decisions that go into building an independent media business. We discuss everything from choosing a business model, using the leverage of individual reputation, the value of consistenc...

In this Spotlight episode, Josh Brandau, CEO of The Rebooting partner Nota, discusses how AI can be a critical tool for newsrooms in a more-with-less era. osh is a publishing veteran having been CRO and CMO at the Los Angeles Times. That informed his d...

Fitt Insider, a media brand for the fitness and wellness industry, is a good example of the type of media brand that hits on many of the current trends in the industry: Niche. The fitness and broader wellness industry is a growing area that will only e...

This week, I was joined by one of my favorite media entrepreneurs, Adam White. Adam has built Front Office Sports from a college project to the $10 million in revenue mark, with backing from Jeff Zucker's Redbird IMI. Some of the topics we covered: Why...

Adam Mendelsohn operates at the nexus of sports, media, business and culture. Adam is a longtime advisor to LeBron James and his business partner Maverick Carter. He’s a communications advisor to many athletes and companies. And he’s recently rolled ou...

This week marks an important moment in the history of digital advertising as the U.S. Department of Justice presses its case that Google is a monopolist in ad tech. The seeds of this case were planted in 2007, when Google bought DoubleClick, a critical...

Scott Messer is founder of media advisory firm Messer Media and former svp of media at Leaf Group. Scott is in the weeds on the digital ad ecosystem, and he broke down the current state of play for publishers. We discussed why traffic declines are stil...

In a spotlight episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke with Affinity Global CEO Lavin Punjabi for his view of how publishers adapt their affiliate operations. Affinity operates NucleusLinks, an affiliate operations platform that serves as something akin...

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I was joined by Ana Andjelic, a veteran brand executive and writer of the Sociology of Business newsletter. I wanted to try an episode with Ana because we focus on different ends of the media ecosystem. Amo...

This week, we are wrapping up a series on The Rebooting Show that examines the role of product at a time of distribution and monetization shifts. The twin themes that emerged are that publishers are increasingly focused on direct relationships with aud...

At the Media Product Forum earlier this month, I spoke with Gannett head of product Renn Turiano, Hearst Newspapers chief commercial officer Bridget Williams and Millie Tran, chief digital content officer at the Council on Foreign Relations. The conver...

At last week’s Media Product Forum, which The Rebooting held in collaboration with WordPress VIP, I had a discussion with Dotdash Meredith chief product officer Adam McClean and The Daily Beast svp of product Samantha Winkelman about their respective p...

In a session recorded at The Media Product Forum in NYC, Bloomberg Media global head of product Marissa Zanetti-Crume shares how the media organization takes an audience-focused approach to building products. Marissa highlights the importance of unders...

In a discussion held in Cannes, I sat down with Jason White, chief product and technology officer at The Arena Group, and Johanna Bergqvist, general manager of the managers at The Rebooting partner EX.CO. A part of the conversation that resonated was h...

In a session recorded at the Cannes Lions, Hearst Magazines CRO Lisa Ryan and Jen Dorre join the show to discuss how the publisher is responding to the shifts in advertising to performance-focused channels, including retail media and platforms. Skip to...

In this episode recorded at the Dotdash Meredith villa in Cannes, Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel and Axios senior media reporter Sara Fischer discuss the impact AI is set to have on the publishing business. Skip to topic: 00:00 Introduction 03:04 Chal...

This episode from Cannes of The Rebooting Show, presented by Outbrain, features David Kostman (CEO of Outbrain), Kate Scott-Dawkins (Global President for Business Intelligence at GroupM), and Johanna Mayer-Jones (chief advertising officer of the Washin...

Semafor editor in chief Ben Smith sees a fragmenting media landscape and impatient owners running headlong into the peculiarities of newsroom culture, where bosses have never had an easy time. Enter the hard-charing Brits. Also: check out Ben’s new pod...

In the wake of Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post in 2013 and the heady “Democracy Dies in Darkness” days following the 2016 election, The Washington Post was considered a credible rival to The New York Times. That’s no longer the case. New CEO Will...

Publishing is shifting from prioritizing breadth to rewarding depth. That starts with understanding the audience — and its segments — more granularly in order to create a more sustainable and varied business foundation. Cory Munchbach, CEO of BlueConic...

Scott Porch, founder of Big IP, which operates the business side of several popular lifestyle podcasts like The John Campea Show, Happy Sad Confused, Star Wars Explained, discusses that state of podcasting, and how it is morphing. He acts as something ...

Detailed.com's Glen Allsop breaks down the massive Google update roiling the publishing world as Google attempts to gain control of spammy results. Glenn breaks down the winners and losers, why big publishers have come to depend on SEO and often push t...

Emma Tucker was named the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal (and Dow Jones Newswires) in early 2023. She was brought in with a mandate to shake up the Journal in a media market that Emma describes as changed “beyond recognition.” The Journal i...

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU, discusses the diminished state of the industry, promising nonprofit models and new funding models that subsidize public service journalism since the economic foundations supporting it have crumbled, and The ...

I’m joined by Matt Cronin, founding partner at House of Kaizen, which works with publishers and other companies with recurring revenue businesses to align their business goals with audience needs through customer experience frameworks. Some highlights ...

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to writer John McDermott about his recent expose of self-help guru Jay Shetty and what it says about the chaotic Information Space. We delve into the paradox of influencer culture, where authenticit...

Stephanie Kaplan Lewis founded Her Campus in 2009 with Annie Wang, and Windsor Western as college undergraduates. They saw a need for college women to have a publication made for them by other college women. Her Campus has grown since then as a profita...

Matt Cronin is a founding partner at House of Kaizen, a consultancy that works with publishers and other companies on recurring revenue growth. House of Kaizen, which is a sponsoring partner of The Rebooting, uses research-backed experiments to foster ...

Mosheh Oinounou, a broadcast news veteran, started posting summaries of the news of the day during the early days of the pandemic. He found they were resonating, and over the past few years, Mo News has amassed 440,000 followers on Instagram for news d...

The Rebooting is launching paid memberships. All the details are on therebooting.com. In this episode, I speak to my collaborator Reid DeRamus, founder of Caddie Labs, which is working with me on implementing and growing memberships. Rather than discus...

Digital media veteran Scott Messer discusses the structural changes to the publishing business, from the deprecation of the third-party cookie to the critical role search plays in many publishing businesses. Scott is a longtime digital media exec who u...

This week on The Rebooting Show, I spoke to The Juggernaut’s founder and CEO Snigda Sur. We discussed the need she saw for a publication focused on South Asians, going through Ycombinator as a media company, using subscriptions as a base of a business ...

This week, I caught up with Larry Fitzgibbon, the CEO of Tastemade. I think of Tastemade as an original digital video brand, ahead of its time in many ways since it was founded back in 2012, before streaming was even a thing. This was an era when onlin...

The media business in 2024 To kick off the year on The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Axios senior media reporter Sara Fischer about the main themes of the year ahead. Among the topics we covered: The value of identifying patterns from the torrent of news ...

I spoke to Matt Cronin, founding partner of House of Kaizen, a consultancy that works with publishers on their subscription and recurring revenue products. Among the topics we covered: fixing misaligned incentives in publishing whether peak subscriptio...

Matt Reustle, CEO of Colossus, a business-focused podcasting network that’s home to Invest Like the Best, Business Breakdowns and Founders, sees podcasting as an antidote to many of the ills of algorithmic media. “To me, it's the highest trust media. I...