The old Recode Media podcast is returning to a familiar home

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:

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