Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are ending Hard Fork at the New York Times and launching Machine Gods Media, a new independent podcast company partnered with NPR. The show debuts early next year, publishing twice weekly, with a stated goal of cracking YouTube as a serious journalism platform. Rachel Cohn, a senior producer from Hard Fork, is joining them.
Hard Fork launched in fall 2022 expecting to cover crypto. FTX collapsed in their first weeks. Then OpenAI shipped ChatGPT, and the show pivoted hard into AI. Roose's February 2023 conversation with an erratic Microsoft Bing chatbot pulled AI safety into mainstream news coverage. From that point, the show interviewed executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google alongside researchers, teachers, and doctors, building one of the most consistent records of AI coverage in podcasting.
The full piece is worth reading for its production history: how the cold-open format was invented by founding producer Davis Land, how executive producer Jen Poyant structured the creative process, and how Vjeran Pavic rebuilt the video operation. Newton is candid about why two journalists with W-2 jobs decided to build their own company. The reasoning is specific, self-aware, and cuts closer to the real economics of media than most exit announcements do.
[READ ORIGINAL →]