The old Recode Media podcast is returning to a familiar home

LINK: www.axios.com ➚ | Posted by: Joshua Benton | September 10, 2024

Recode, the original good tech news site, is folding into Vox.com (but relaunching next year)

November 1, 2018

Recode is officially part of Vox.com now

May 1, 2019

There have been few digital news outlets with a more complicated brand history than what used to be Recode. First came All Things Digital, a technology site born within The Wall Street Journal in 2007. Six years later, its two most prominent faces — Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — left the Journal to start their own iteration of the site (and its profitable events business) named Recode. Two years after that, Recode was acquired by Vox Media. Four years later, Recode became a subsection of Vox.com. And four years after that, Vox retired the brand entirely.

Among the longest-serving Recoders was Peter Kafka, the excellent media reporter who spent 15 years among those various iterations, hosting its Recode Media podcast. And when, last fall, he left Vox for Business Insider, it felt like the door had finally been shut on the Recode saga.

But! At Axios, Sara Fischer reports that Recode Media will have a second life, back at a familiar home:

Peter Kafka, a veteran media and technology journalist, is reviving his old “Recode Media” podcast under a new name, “Channels,” with the Vox Media podcast network, he told Axios in an interview.

Why it matters: Kafka’s podcast was considered a must-listen for media and technology insiders for nearly eight years. When he left Vox Media last fall for Business Insider, no long-form interview show that catered to the same audience replaced it.

State of play: Kafka will continue to write full time for Business Insider as a chief correspondent, but he’ll work with Vox Media as a production, distribution and sales partner for “Channels,” he said.

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Interestingly, Kafka will own the show himself and use Vox Media for distribution and ad sales. Which seems like a nice coda to Recode’s story, given than Swisher and Mossberg were some of the first prominent journalists to build their own owner-operated shops outside the media companies they’d built careers in. A decade ago, it was still noteworthy when a prominent journalist struck out on their own; today, a zillion Substacks later, a reporter writing full-time for one media company while licensing his own independent content to a competing media company barely makes a ripple.

I think @pkafka does a great podcast. So this is cool. https://t.co/BGlaPe0G09

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) September 10, 2024

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