The media industry is facing an unprecedented economic and political moment. The appetite for trusted journalism is sky high, yet media companies are grappling with a sudden sharp decline in ad revenue. Journalists are building production sets in living rooms and podcasting in closets as executives get creative with rethinking products, creatively reengaging sponsors, and reassessing investment strategies.
Recode senior correspondent Peter Kafka is here to help you understand how this time of upheaval may bring about lasting changes and how media companies can leverage this opportunity to become even stronger when the pandemic recedes.
Recode Media@Home is a curated series of live, candid conversations with top leaders in media and tech on how they’re building products for the current moment, making decisions about their business, and navigating the rapidly shifting landscape. These unscripted conversations will be conducted live in real time, and you’ll have the opportunity to ask questions and hear from your peers confronting similar challenges.
To kick us off, Kafka will be talking with SoundCloud CEO Kerry Trainor about the challenges of running a streaming audio business with hundreds of millions of users and a workforce distributed around the world. Trainor, who has been running the company for close to three years, was well into a turnaround effort when the pandemic struck. How has that changed his plans? What’s working, what isn’t, and what can we learn from his experience?
Peter Kafka is senior correspondent at Recode and host of Recode Media, the weekly podcast dedicated to the future of media and technology. He has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. He made the digital leap to Forbes.com in 2005. He may have been the first national business reporter to interview Steve “Stone Cold Steve Austin” Williams. In 2007, Kafka became the first hire at Silicon Alley Insider, the predecessor to Business Insider, where he worked as the site’s managing editor. He began writing for AllThingsD.com in 2008. In 2011, he began producing and hosting the D: Dive into Media conferences; he will continue to work on other live events for Recode. Kafka is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lives in Brooklyn.
Kerry Trainor is the CEO of SoundCloud, where he is responsible for leading the strategic direction of the company. Prior to joining SoundCloud, Trainor was the CEO of Vimeo, where he oversaw the development of the video-sharing site into a leading global platform. Trainor has held roles at AOL, Huffington Post Media Group, and Launch.com/Yahoo! Music, and was a founder of FlipGloss Media. In addition to his professional role, he currently serves as a board director for Fender Musical Instruments and a board adviser to The Artists Den.
