Ezra Klein: preference

Transcript context

…Speculation. One of the things about podcasts that I really enjoy about it, is that it has a very rambling — at least at this point in the format’s evolution — there’s much more of a rambling, looping, bullshitting quality to it. You are able in a podcast to talk about something where you may not be right in a way that people are, I find, much harder on you in print for doing. Something that I find is true in the discussions I hear on podcasts, is they are much more personal — including newsmakers, by the way. The conversation that I had with Malcolm Gladwell, or even the conversation I had with Cory Booker, ended up focusing quite heavily on the senator’s spirituality. Which I think if I had been creating that conversation for print, I would have felt embarrassed or strange ending up that personal, but podcasting, because of the way people listen to it as a secondary activity, almost as a conversation they are part of, without having to participate in while they’re doing something else. I often think of podcasting as if you’re walking around with your friends, but you just don’t have any actual friends there. That is moving towards much more personal topics, a much more intimate set of ideas, and away from harder, crisper, more concrete presentations of what we already know. Let me ask you some questions about CEOs and leadership. When you look at the data on the corporate world, there’s a lot of evidence that CEOs today, they’re much more likely to be generalists, and to be able to switch from one sector to another. They’re less likely to be people who came up through the ranks, like producing ball bearings, or running a coal mine, or an oil refinery. That’s pretty well established. Do you think that’s true in media, and also, what would you say is exactly your skill that makes you the CEO of the part of Vox you run?…

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