Channels with Peter Kafka

Vox Media's Jim Bankoff Explains Why He's Selling to James Murdoch

May 20, 2026

Jim Bankoff has spent nearly 20 years building Vox Media. Now he’s selling a big chunk of it to James Murdoch, who is acquiring Vox Media's Podcast Network - the same one that produces this podcast - along with New York Magazine and Vox.com. We do all the disclosures at the top of this interview, but let’s do it all here too: I’ve worked for Jim for a long time, and I work with the podcast network he’s selling, and I just like him as a human. So this one’s way more conflicted than a standar...

Versant CEO Mark Lazarus is Running a Post-Cable Cable Company

May 20, 2026

Versant is the new company Comcast created when it spun off CNBC, MS NOW, USA and other cable networks it no longer wanted inside the mothership. That makes Mark Lazarus’ job pretty simple to describe and very hard to do: take a business built around cable TV — an industry in obvious decline — and use the cash it still generates to build new businesses.I talked to Lazarus on the day Versant reported its first real earnings as a standalone company — and the day its stock bounced after getting ...

Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala and His Secret Succession Plan

May 13, 2026

Roger Lynch has spent the last seven years trying to turn Condé Nast from a magazine company into a profitable portfolio of global brands. Now he has a new set of problems: Google traffic is disappearing, AI companies want to use Condé’s work, and everyone in media is trying to figure out who still has leverage. I talked to Lynch about the end of Google search traffic, why Condé is doing deals with OpenAI and other AI companies, and how the company thinks about the Met Gala, independent cre...