Channels with Peter Kafka

Every day some 85 million people - most of them kids - show up to play, chat and spend money on Roblox. Thats a massive audience just about any tech or media company would like to have. But David Baszucki wants more: He thinks his platform can eventually command 10% of the worldwide gaming market.

I spent time talking to Baszucki about those ambitions and what has to happen to make it a reality. But I also wanted to spend time getting him to explain what exactly Roblox is, and why its low-fi, user generated games resonate with his audience. Its an unlikely special sauce that has made the company, which spent years flying under the radar, worth some $40 billion today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some people don’t want to pay for media. But lots of people are paying Jake Sherman and his team at Punchbowl News: The 4-year-old startup is thriving by providing super-insidery news and data about what’s happening in Congress. I chatted with Sherman because I wanted to get an update on his business (he says he’s not going to sell it anytime soon, despite lots of speculation to the contrary).

I also had a basic, outside the Beltway question: In a world where Congress spends a lot of time not passing bills, what exactly does Punchbowl cover? He was happy to spell it all out for me. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The New York Times faces the same challenges every other news organization faces in 2025.

But it’s also in way better shape to take those challenges on: Thanks to a business model built on 11 million subscribers, it’s not nearly so worried about things like the fluctuations of the ad business, or changes in Google’s algorithm.

That comparative strength also gives NYT publisher AG Sulzberger the ability to do things his peers can’t or won’t do: Like suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, instead of taking a cash settlement. Or calling out the likelihood of a press crackdown if Donald Trump was re-elected - a call he made in September that looks very prescient today.

We talk through both of those issues in this conversation, and a bunch more - like the role of the NYT opinion section, how willing the Times is to experiment, and how the paper thinks about the economic turmoil we now find ourselves in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Trump 2.0 era is less than three months old. But it’s already creating havoc for journalists and the companies they work for.

In Washington, Trump and his team are demoting traditional media - or kicking them out of the White House entirely. In corporate boardrooms, he is forcing media owners to settle lawsuits they would normally fight, and to submit to investigations from newly aggressive regulators. Again: We’re just at the beginning of this new era. What’s coming down the pike? I asked Sara Fischer, the excellent and Washington-wired media correspondent, to walk me through it Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Call it symbiosis. Call it co-dependency. However you want to characterize it, there’s zero debate that Big TV and Big Sports are deeply intertwined. So if the TV business is shrinking, what happens to sports?

That’s the main question I had for John Ourand, the longtime sports business reporter who’s now at Puck. But I had lots of related ones, like: Now that (some) college students are getting paid to play sports, how does that affect the TV product itself? What’s happening to the local sports networks that bring you baseball, basketball and hockey? And is the sports betting media boom drying up? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices