Making Media

Jonathan Becker, founder of Thrive Digital, says his team has deployed more than $3.5 billion in paid acquisition budgets and uses the same logic as value investing when buying media.

Jack Davenport says Goalhanger Podcasts now reaches about 30 million downloads a month across The Rest Is History, The Rest Is Politics, The Rest Is Football, The Rest Is Money, and The Rest Is Entertainment.

Mike Strickhoff maps sports media from the inside.

Spike Eskin, head of programming at New York's WFAN and host of The Rights to Ricky Sanchez, assigns 60% of an ideal sports host to fearless opinions and the ability to withstand being wrong.

Emily Sundberg joins Making Media and is asked how she describes herself.

Ben Springwater, founder of Matter, says he and co-founder Rob were Pocket users at Nextdoor who started from frustration with stitching together reading tools.

Making Media's 2023 recap opens with a macro read on podcasting: December downloads for the top 20 publishers were down 24% year over year, ad rates fell from $25 CPM to about $22, and new RSS feeds hit a five-year low at just over 200,000.

Kyle Porter, a CBS sports writer who has covered golf since 2012, says he has grown tired of professional golf because of the PGA Tour-LIV conflict while feeling more connected than ever to playing the game himself.

Jon Ostrower describes building The Air Current as a subscription publication for aviation and aerospace, with a strict paywall, glossy PDF products, and direct email and push-notification distribution.

Craig Fuller discusses how FreightWaves evolved from a commodity futures market concept into a media and data business.

Matthew Sherry, CEO of Platform Media, discusses how he built a unique podcast business by solving distribution and monetization challenges.

Peter Kafka discusses how media business models continuously reinvent themselves.

Dan Shipper, CEO of Every (pandemic-era business newsletter bundle), discusses the evolution of his company and personal identity as both founder and writer.

Dom Cooke shares seven key lessons from a year of running a media business, emphasizing listener-centricity, the slow-growth nature of media, simplicity in production, the critical role of newsletters, challenges with subscriptions, team communication, and long-term consistency.

Amy Astley describes how she took Architectural Digest from a mostly print magazine into a multimedia brand while still treating the magazine as the center of the business.

Tammy Winter, Stripe Press’s commissioning editor, explains why a payments company built a publishing arm with fewer than 10 full-time staff.

Joanna Robinson discusses her definitive book on Marvel's history, tracing the MCU from pre-Disney days to its recent perceived decline.

Kaki Orr from The North Face discusses how major brands approach authentic storytelling, media production, and the challenges of maintaining creative integrity within commercial constraints.

Webb Barr recommends Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker profile on Larry Gagosian, describing it as a long-form biography that moves from William Morris poster sales in Los Angeles to an art-world empire.

Making Media marks Tim Ferriss's 10th podcast anniversary and billion-download milestone with a conversation about how he approaches interviewing.

Adam Hansmann says The Athletic launched in 2016, when paid content was still a contrarian idea and local sports coverage was shrinking in places like Chicago.