The Rebooting Show

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 creators — and steps it will take to adapt. Three key ones: Embrace curiosity. Much of institutional media feels like a set piece. Cable news shoutfests are obviously performative. Fact checks often come off as assembling facts to back up a preordained conclusion. Some of the most popular and influential independent creators present as curious. Speaking truth to power is not enough. Build around trusted voices. Later this month, Axios will roll out a membership program built around Sara’s Media Trends newsletter. Axios CEO Jim VandeHei has spoken of the need to elevate “stars,” particularly as AI does Smart Brevity by default. The market will drive this as unique talent has more options than ever — and the risk:reward ratio is often scrambled in the Information Space as the solo path is less risky and offers greater potential rewards.  Pick a lane. The current news market is geared to ideological publications The Free Press, The Daily Wire, etc – leaving an opening for nonpartisan news, as hard as that is to pull off.  Thanks to EX.CO for sponsoring this series.

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: The slightly unseemly kowtowing to the incoming Trump administration OpenAI’s wonky economics Alex’s bet on AI “companions” Why X has proved doomsayers wrong The bright spot of individual creators amid a lot of media industry gloom Check out the Big Technology newsletter and podcast. Learn more about TRB partner EX.CO's expansion of its award-winning ad server to upgrade programmatic auctions in CTV and digital-out-of-home environments.

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. The hopeful view: The efforts to stamp out affiliate arbitrage  will ultimately reward those who put in the work to create high-quality content that’s actually useful, as opposed to churning out affiliate content to arbitrage their brand’s high ranking in the search results pages. As Mike points out, "Without huge arbitrage opportunities, affiliate is a bad business model... We had a 10-year golden era of arbitrage that made affiliate a great business model.” 

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 provide a better user experience, why Google is so frustrating, using AI to drive subscriptions, and how AI answer engines are like Uber.

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 Delgado told me in a conversation at WordPress VIP Innovation Showcase in London. “We had a newsroom that came of age in the era of Facebook,” she said. “We had a lot of bad habits and we were used to doing things quickly. Suddenly that wasn't working anymore.” The publisher pulled off a feat: By focusing on what was working, it has managed to increase its traffic by 50% by producing 25% fewer pieces of content.

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 content and why brand safety concerns are usually overblown. Penn outlines how news organizations can build sustainable businesses by adopting lessons from political campaigns, while warning that chasing ideological audiences risks further eroding media's broader cultural influence.

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 adding AI summarization to its results. By 2028, Activate expects that to rise to 36 million. The open question is whether publishers can stem this tide. Michael Wolf, the CEO of Activate, sees a fundamental shift in the search market, as generative AI can currently handle about 40% of searches as an open web discovery tool. He expects the rest of searches will follow suit over the next five years as the fundamental nature of the open web changes. This will lead to search becoming the front end to what Wolf calls "gated web discovery" and eventually "discovery-led transactions."

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 business. This kind of shift is hard to pull off. Among the issues we discuss: Using podcasts for broad reach and affinity News as a credibility driver Pulling back on B2C events to focus on B2B Using media to drive “negative CAC” for information services Implementing a “house of brands” strategy

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 paying subscribers supporting a $4.6 million business. At the same time, the company saw revenue growth drop to 2.2% from 18% last year and 16% in 2022. Defector's Jasper Wang joined me to discuss Defector’s plans to expand its ad revenue, the inevitable challenges of fast decisionmaking in an employee-owned business, the “lean stack” approach of outsourcing as many publishing and corporate functions as possible, and the growth of its Normal Gossip podcast and diversification of Defector’s audience.

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 consistency and authenticity, the mistake of over-reliance on optimization techniques, and the challenge of growth as tried-and-true methods wane in efficacy.