The Digiday Podcast

Eric Yang started Gear Patrol as a side hustle to his job at CBS because the publications he knew we missing the mark when it came to product coverage. "The men's magazines out there -- GQ, Esquire -- they were increasingly unrelatable to me," Yang said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "For me it wasn't about a Brioni suit and living your best lifestyle in New York...

This week's episode of the Digiday Podcast is a look ahead at what 2020 may have in store for the publishing industry. The site's reporters weigh in on the beats they know so well: Tim Peterson breaks down the streaming wars that have only just begun, the UK-based Lara O’Reilly makes predictions on a future that goes "beyond the cookie," and Max Willens explains how publishers' revenue streams may change in the New Year.

Sara Fischer, media reporter at Axios, joined the Digiday Podcast for the first of two year-end wrap-up episodes looking ahead to 2020. On this week's episode, Fischer weighs in on why the flurry of digital media acquisitions in 2019 will continue into 2020 and why next year regulation will be in the spotlight. (Next week, Digiday media reporters Tim Peterson, Lara O'Reilly and Max Willens will add their own outlooks for the year ahead in media.)

Gaming is often thought of as a subculture, but it’s just as dominant a part of youth culture today as music. For gaming companies, that means growth opportunities on par with MTV. “Music might have been at its core, or might have been its origin, but at some point the majority of content that they made had nothing to do with music,” said Lee Trink, CEO of FaZe Clan, a gaming collective that’s part professional eSports teams and part creator network...

If you've been upset by something you read in The New York Times' Style section, that was by design. "[The] Style desk covers change, it covers generational change, it covers change in how we talk about gender, it covers young people," says the section's editor, Choire Sicha. "It covers technology, and it covers love, marriage and how we look. Those are all things that are incredibly fraught at this time, and they're supposed to upset people...

The Washington Post's CRO Joy Robins thinks ad agencies deserve a little more sympathy. "We need to better understand their business, better understand how they make money," Robins said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "You start to see more and more that the agencies represent their own business model, they are facing their own challenges," she said...

Condé Nast is on a journey to remake itself from a magazine company -- home to Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and more titles -- and into what new CEO Roger Lynch calls "a 21st century media company." The exact contours of what that looks like remain a work in progress. One aspect that isn't in doubt: video and the establishment of franchises is absolutely part of that vision...

Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs worked together for five years before cofounding Food52 in 2009. That was enough time for them to recognize a gap in the online landscape. Americans were getting more serious about food and cooking as rewarding pursuits and social opportunities but the internet had yet to reflect that movement...

As many publishers zero in on consumer revenue strategies and hardened paywalls, HuffPost is taking a different tack. "Look, I spent 15 years working at The New York Times, which is a fantastic news organization, and I'm thrilled to see them thriving with a subscription model that restricts access to their product," HuffPost editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast...

Hearst Magazines' properties garner 1 billion video views per month. For its head of video, Zuri Rice, that number (and the more granular "watch time") is almost incidental: "Total watch time is something that we think about, but total watch time, of course, is really tied to volume," she said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast...