Joanna Stern on quitting the Wall Street Journal and building a media business with AI

0:10Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media, where we are talking to all of the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tani. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. And with me, as always, from across the office is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Ben, how much of your life have you turned over to AI? You know, increasing amounts, honestly. I spent a couple hours the other day talking to Claude about a book I'm working on. The more I can turn over to AI, the better. What did Claude have to say about your book? Also, do people know about your book?

0:46Do our listeners know about your book? You're writing a book about Steve Bannon. It's mostly a secret, though, so I don't want to go into it. Oh, okay. It's between me and Claude, really. But you did tell Claude. Someone somewhere has that information now, presumably. That's true. Dario, please don't tell. Well, the reason why I asked that question is because our guest this week, Joanna Stern, actually turned over her life to artificial intelligence, at least in part, for a new book that she is working on called I Am Not a Robot. Joanna was previously a tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where she made very funny videos and wrote very funny stories about tech and about phones and about AI and pretty much every way in which technology has interacted with their lives in a major consumer way over the last 10 or so years.

1:33And she recently left the journal to strike out on her own. She has a new media project called New Things with Joanna Stern, Tech Journalism for Humans Who Like Fun. Ben, have you been following Joanna's work? Have you seen her videos? Personally, I really enjoyed the video that she did at the end of last year where she tried to jailbreak a vending machine run by Claude in the Wall Street Journal office. Joanna's, I think, one of the real stars of a long line of tech journalism where you just kind of like try to break everything and have fun with it. She had one of those humanoid robots around her house, I think, for one of her last journal videos that I very much enjoyed.

2:08But no, she's really kind of one of the iconic tech journalists and probably one of the people who actually understands more and has thought more, has talked to executives more about consumer digital technology, consumer tech than anybody else. So Ben, Joanna, obviously interesting, kind of funny person who's gone viral for a lot of this stuff. But why are we talking to her right now? Why do we want to have her on the show this week? I have kind of a dual agenda. One is I do think she's sort of living this very contemporary media career where she, you know, she real star at the journal and yet decided to go out on her own and then immediately strike some kind of contributor deal with NBC.

2:41But I guess on her own terms, I do want to talk to her a bit about her career. And then, of course, I want to talk to her about the technology. I think she has insight into how people are using and thinking about AI. And also, I want to ask her about one of the things that I'm most obsessed with, which is, you know, for how long is the phone going to be the main distribution device for our work, for media, for what most of us do? What does that mean for Semaphore if we're on borrowed time with the phone? It's going to be all your favorite word, Max. It's going to be all convenings. Oh, yes. Great.

3:11Many, many more convenings. Well, we have to take a short break, but we'll be right back with Joanna Stern after this.

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4:08Joanna, why can't we see your mic? I'm anti-mic showing. I think we don't need to all show our mics. For decades, TV hosts have not needed giant mics in front of their faces. We have the technology to have great audio without a giant mic in our face. And so when I was designing my new home studio, which I'm debuting on this show, exclusive. We appreciate that. Yeah, thank you. Are you going to run this with a giant exclusive? Yeah, for sure. Yes. First look at Joanna Stern, new studio. I said, no mic in frame, mic up here. And so there's a mounted mic above me. I'm a little obsessed with this.

4:49Why does everybody, now including like Jake Tapper, have giant mics in front of them? Why do I have a giant mic in front of me? Like I could be using a lav. What's going on here? This is a podcast. And so I think it's okay that you guys have giant mics. I did not come on your podcast to criticize your podcast mics. They're props.

5:11Joanna, thank you so much for coming on, seriously, at a fascinating moment in your career. I'm so happy to be here debuting my studio. And I guess, honestly, like I'm very eager to talk to you about your book and about the questions of consumer technology that you spent most of your career working on. But kind of wanted to start just asking you about kind of where you are and about your own thinking as, you know, a real star at a great institution, The Wall Street Journal, who at some point chooses to quit and go out on her own. Like what's the what is the calculus there? What makes you do that?

5:41I've been thinking about it for a long time. And it's hard. It's really hard to make this decision. and I did not know for a long time if I would make this decision. There were so many things I loved about working at the Wall Street Journal and there were so many things that I thought I'm never gonna be able to leave this. But then there were so many things that I also saw happening in media, places like you guys included, that I was jealous of. Building something around me, building other parts of my brand, so to speak, that you can do at a legacy media organization, but can either, you know, let's be honest, can take a really long time with a really slow infrastructure.

6:26And you're not, too, not going to necessarily reap all of the financial benefits. And so those were two really big parts of the calculus here. For the people who listen to our show who might not know what the economics look like of this. Talk a little bit about the money piece of it. What are the financial benefits that you're leaving on the table? Is it like, you know, subscription type of stuff that you're doing? Is it like YouTube ad revenue split money that you'll be getting? What's the actual money that's being left on the table? What is the financial component? You mean that I left on the table at the journal?

7:00Yeah, that you left on the table at the journal that you can get now that you're in the independent journalism creator space. Right. I mean, look, first of all, it's a complete bet. Like right now, zero dollars. So, you know, I'm betting on myself. And I wrote in a LinkedIn post, you know, sounding like the saying betting on yourself sounds really good on a podcast or at LinkedIn, but it feels horrible in the middle of the night. It feels so terrible at 4 a.m. where you're like, oh, wow, everyone's really excited about this thing I'm doing, but I've also made zero dollars at it yet. And that's not great.

7:31But so the potential of this, to get back to your question about what it can be, is all those things, right? subscriptions. And many places are warming up to the idea of doing revenue shares with their, if you're at a legacy organization or have a different deal where they will do revenue share, right? That can be one option. So you don't necessarily leave that on the table. But these would be my subscribers and I'd like to take all of that money. That sounds great. And so you kind of do that math and you're like, well, okay, maybe I could have a bigger audience if I stay someplace like the Wall Street Journal, but maybe I can still build a substantial audience and make more of that money if I go do it on my own.

8:11So those are one way to weigh the two things. RevShare around video and sponsorship is another one. Events is a big one that I think you guys know a lot about at your company, where you sort of think, okay, we can do smaller size events where, and I love doing events. I love hosting and coming up with events. I could do that at a big place and it could take a lot of time and a lot of energy and huge marketing budgets and huge teams to make this giant event. Or maybe I can make some smaller events and benefit in a similar way and maybe make more money. Well, the first thing to learn about being in the events business is that we don't call them events.

8:47We call them convenings. Max has a real like, you know, be in his bonnet about this fact. But it's just reality. No, I don't. I have drank the Kool-Aid. I'm all about calling anything that's a gathering of individuals a convening. Three or more people, it's a convening. Yes, for sales purposes. But actually, let's just take a step back. Joanna, what's your new thing going to look like? Because I think that a lot of our audience is probably familiar, you know, with some of your, you know, consumer reviews and some of the stuff that feels like almost like, and I mean this in a like a positive way, kind of the stunt type of stuff that you've done where, you know, for example, I loved the video that you did at the end of last year where you tried to essentially jailbreak the Claude programmed vending machine in your office and got it to order fish, like live fish and to give away an Xbox or a PS5 for free, things like that.

9:34It was amazing. But what's the new thing going to look like? Still stunts. We should probably brainstorm here on this podcast some good stunts that I can line up in the next few months. For me, I want to keep doing what I've always done, which is, and I'll say this is sort of the mission of the new things. This is what I'm calling it. People keep saying, what's the new thing? And I was like, actually, that's just the name. We're going to try to make it the name is the new thing. So the new things, and it made sense too. I cover new things And we'll still talk about some old things. There's some fun stuff I want to do around old things.

10:03But my mission is the same as it's always been, which is to help people and guide people through this complicated world of technology. Feels like right now, that's a really important moment to do this with the AI everywhere. And that's what the book I wrote that comes out in May is all about. It's called I Am Not a Robot. And it's about my 2025, my year trying to use AI in as many parts of my life as possible. But the mission of this company is just to do it in different mediums, right? Help people cover the latest and greatest of consumer tech, but do it through the lens for humans, humans that like to have fun, because I do think that fun in tech journalism is a lot.

10:44It's not a loss for them, but if you are having fun at this and do that in different mediums, we'll do a newsletter, we'll do a lot of video, eventually events, and maybe a podcast where I do need a big mic in front of my face. So you say that you're not a robot. However, in starting a new media company as an independent person in 2026, like, are you not a robot? Like, how much of what this company is going to be is shaped by AI tools that are available that might not have been available a year ago? AI is my co-founder, is my truth. Look, the book was definitely, for me, an inspiration to go and do this.

11:17Like, as you knew, Ben, I had been thinking about doing this for a while. And then I went out, got this book deal because I really wanted to tell the story about, like, where is AI coming in all parts of our lives? And so sold the book and then decided, okay, I'm really going to go full throttle at this book and spent a lot of last year doing it. But realized I was using AI to make a lot of the sort of mundane or boring parts of the book process, like, a lot easier and more efficient. You know about all these mundane tasks that kind of go like planning and not the like actual researching, but like which things am I going to go after?

11:55What companies am I going to talk to? The reaching out. So many little things that I just was able to do in such a shorter amount of time if I hadn't had Claude and my book bots, as I call them in the book, doing some of this work for me. And also I then just was also building sort of a small business around the book. I was hiring fact checkers, and I was hiring an illustrator, and I was hiring a designer, and all of these things. And I was like, I am managing a project here that is on a very small scale, a very small business. And that gave me a lot of faith in myself to be able to do that. And also, yes, AI helped with writing some contracts and doing some things, too, that I was like, okay, maybe I can do this.

12:37And maybe I can do it with this assistance a little bit quicker and more efficiently. So thinking about the book itself, my understanding is you turned over a lot of your life to AI. What did you find to be most illuminating? What did you find to be most alarming? What was that experience like? So you'll see that like I did draw lines because if I had given my life over to AI completely, I would be divorced, homeless. There would be a lot. Things would have been destroyed. And so I needed to continue to live a decent life. And so certain things were not outsourced. But to answer, Max, your question about what was, like, most surprising was actually how big of a theme my kids ended up being in this book.

13:19Because I brought everything home because I wasn't really at the journal. The months that I was not, I was at the journal a year and I was doing a lot of work. But a lot of the book stuff was happening in my house. And I live in a house with my wife and my two sons. They're four and eight. At the time, they were three and seven. And so much of it, like, inundated them. And so I started to see a lot of the future through their eyes. Like, they're obviously obsessed with robots and every single thing they hope now is a robot. And actually, next week, we're having, like, an actual humanoid come to the house.

13:48And they're so excited. And they're getting out of school early. I'm the best parent in the world. We went on a vacation to Phoenix. This was called our Waymo Fun Vacation. It was just we only took Waymos for the week. And if you have young kids, you actually know this is miserable because you have to keep putting in the car seat a million times. So I think that was one of the most surprising things in the themes of the book is that I started to see what life is going to look like for my kids where they're no longer the smartest. We are no longer the smartest beings on earth, that AI is smarter than us.

14:20But also that just so much of tech is infiltrated into parts of their lives from driving to education to health care and seeing it, they just kind of accept it, right? Like, they now, like, rest in peace, Sora, but they got very used to seeing AI-generated video, and they're very, very quick to say, that's AI-generated. That's not real. So just seeing a lot of the impact of all of those things on that generation was really surprising. You said before AI is your co-founder. What does that mean? That's not really true. Also, by the way, I just hired a producer. His name is David Hall, and he's been my producer for a few years now, a video producer.

14:59Person? Person, real person, real man, real background. We do a human test on him every so often because he does work really hard and does really good work. But I cannot imagine making this company without him. So let's just put that aside. He is a creative partner and every morning and every day we're talking to each other all the time right now. So I cannot imagine doing it without him. But on the other hand, there is all of this work, as you guys know from building a company, that is just tedious. And people don't tell you too, right? Like you need to get insurance, but you need to get three quotes of insurance or two quotes of insurance.

15:36And you need all this different types of insurance. And so, yeah, I just usually all day, every day have a Claude agent, whether it be in Claude code or just Claude, working on stuff like that for me, finding me people to contact, helping me sort out certain things and doing that kind of work. I don't want to say it's all being done by AI because there's a lot that I have to spend at the end of my days doing. But it is certainly doing 80 % of what I think I would have been doing before. Yeah, that's pretty good. Our CFO is on vacation this week. And I can just tell him, like, don't come back. I hope one day I'll have a CFO.

16:13But, yeah, like asking Claude questions about how I should spend money right now is probably not the best idea. Yeah, I mean, it is just such an amazing moment. I was in San Francisco last week. And you always get the sense of, like, okay, like they're living in the future there. And I had dinner with a guy who's spending between, he told me, between$10 ,000 and$25 ,000 a week on tokens because he's running so many different processes, having it power so many different parts of his life. It's in his bank account. It's in his email. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. I mean, to bring it kind of full circle to the book and AI and leaving my job, the end of the book, which I didn't know was going to be this, is me asking ChatGPT if I should quit the journal.

16:48And, Ben, I can say this because I sat with you as a human, and you definitely did not give me that advice. I mean, I think my goal was certainly that you should come to Semaphore. I just pick on that because I remember coming away with that meeting with some really good ideas, but you also did not tell me what to do. Right? I met with so many people over the last years to tell them what I was thinking about doing. Should I do this? Should I? And people give you ideas, but they do not tell you what to do. Humans do not tell you what to do. Because if you did tell me what to do and it really went wrong, you'd feel really bad.

17:20Right? But ChatGPT just fully told me what to do. Told you to quit? Told me to quit. I uploaded all this information, all my notes, maybe some notes from our meeting. It's hard to say. I'm not looking at the notes right now. And it was like, this is a slam dunk, easy decision. You got to get out of there. Exactly. Yeah, you know, it's funny because I think I probably would have said that, but felt like it was socially inappropriate. So there you go. Right. And I say, I didn't know the book was going to, that's what was going to happen to me at the end of the year. That was going to make that decision.

17:48But it felt like the one big decision where I actually did trust AI. because I kind of like knew it in my gut. Well, I didn't, I actually say in the book, like people kept saying, every human kept being like, trust your gut, trust your gut. You know what to do. And it's like, no, I think I say in the book, like my gut just wants a burrito. Like, you know, like I, my gut doesn't know what to do right now. I'm too overridden with anxiety. But like, yeah, it doesn't have anxiety. And I guess just to sort of come back to the choice you made to leave, you know, I think of the journals as an institution that, you know, has, like all these big institutions, historically treats its journalists as kind of cogs in a big machine, but certainly is thinking really hard about these challenges, is moving things around it, is trying to sort of develop a talent center or something and trying to engage with this new very, like, individual personality creator brand centric moment in the business.

18:40And when I saw that you were leaving, I thought, like, oh, you know, like, maybe this isn't fixable. Like, maybe it's going to be a really hard time for these big institutions. That's like a pretty forward looking one that's trying to do well. And ChatGPT is still telling you it's a total slam dunk to leave. Yeah, but I – and this was something I said on the way out to many people there is that I really think the next Joanna Stearns need to be coming up through the journal or these other institutions, right? Like I had 12 years there and won many awards and did lots of great work and worked with amazing people and learned so much.

19:16And if we don't have that pipeline, right, I think a lot about this now. Like, where's that pipeline of journalists going to start? I think, like, for me, it was really just time and place. Like, I've been there for 12 years. It's a great moment to try this in media. There's the AI tools. There's the economy. The path has been paved by others. Like, I'm certainly not the first to do this. Kara Swisher has been yelling at me to do this now for, like, five years. You know, Kara does not actually have the reticence that many of us have about telling other people what to do. That's so true. That's so true.

19:51She's the one person I didn't call because I knew exactly what she would say. And, in fact, she was on – I listened to her on this podcast. Probably I listened to that podcast two or three times because I thought what she said on this podcast was so good. I think that was last summer. All of our listeners should listen to Joanna and listen to every one of our episodes two or three times. Or just go back to that one with Kara if you're considering doing something on your own. Because she was honest. She said, too, like, I remember, like, not everyone has what it takes to do it. Yeah. It was a very good episode.

20:21We have a lot more that we want to get to with Joanna, but we have to take a short break. So we'll be right back after this.

20:33In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I talked to Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about YouTube's growing share of the big screen. Josh Nielsen recently reported that YouTube has been leading in streaming time for three years now. Why are people spending so much time watching YouTube? So Ben, at heart, we're all human, right? We all want friends. We want family. We want strong Wi-Fi. And we want entertainment. YouTube delivers that entertainment. You know, we've had decades and decades of TV programming telling you what to watch, when to watch it. And that's all gone by the wayside, which is why there's over a billion hours of watch time on YouTube every single day on the largest TV screen in the household.

21:15That's remarkable. There was a recent survey done by Kantar that found that 62 % of their respondents actually choose to watch YouTube between 6 and 10 p.m. YouTube delivers the you in your programming. Instead of being told what to watch, you get to decide what you want to watch. And I can tell you from my experience, I would rather have one hour of my content on YouTube chosen by me than three hours of top-down someone else telling me what I need to watch. The unbelievable ability to personalize on YouTube in the content you watch and then for the advertisers to take advantage of that is incredibly powerful.

21:49More relevant ads, more relevant messaging, more relevant content. It makes for just a much more enjoyable advertiser experience, a much more enjoyable consumer experience, and a much more powerful platform that people spend more and more time on. It's a win for everyone. Where can people learn more about this? Head on over to thinkwithgoogle.com. We just published an article looking back on three years of streaming leadership and three marketing opportunities for brands in 2026.

22:42like 3x7 screen or whatever. And there are now people like making a serious run at the phone. There are glasses, there's whatever OpenAI is doing, there's voice. And I guess I'm curious what you see as kind of the trajectory of the smartphone. Or, you know, are we going to, 20 years from now, are we all going to be staring at these things all day? Like, how is that going to change? Well, I think it's appropriate, too, that we're taping this on April 1st, which is the 50th anniversary of Apple, because this is the big question everyone has for Apple right now. Is this what's going to happen post iPhone?