Episode Details

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During San Francisco’s Tech Week 2026 a few weeks ago, we co-hosted our first NEW MEDIA Summit with Yahoo, bringing together media’s biggest names for candid conversations on where the industry goes next.This panel, moderated by Jim Louderback brought together Joanna Stern, founder of New Things, Sona Iliffe-Moon, Chief Communications Officer at Yahoo, and Lillian Xu, VP of Podcast Business at Vox Media. They discussed why Joanna left The Wall Street Journal after 12 years, how her NBC News partnership works, what the NPR and How I Built This deals mean for creators, how to keep audience trust while running ads, and what the internet will look like in five years.

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In our in-depth episode, we discuss:

* Why Joanna Stern left The Wall Street Journal after 12 years, when 80% to 90% of her time was already going into YouTube, and how she de-risked going independent by negotiating her NBC partnership while still at the Journal

* Why owning your IP matters most, and what the Kevin Roose and Casey Newton NPR deal and Guy Raz buying back How I Built This say about how institutions now partner with talent

* How Vox Media is turning How I Built This into a franchise with video for the first time and the return of its two-day summit, and why Lillian Xu says every creator deal needs skin in the game and upside

* How Joanna keeps trust while reading ads: a physical “money mic,” a published ethics policy, and turning down a possible million-dollar deal rather than take money from the frontier labs she covers

* Why Sona Iliffe-Moon says brands can pay for a placement but never for an opinion, and why the panel thinks expert human voices, video and live events will win as AI summaries become part of our daily lives.

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Timestamps

(0:00) Welcome to the New Media Summit(3:05) Meet Joanna Stern: Why she left The Wall Street Journal(7:28) How media companies are partnering with creators(11:09) What changes when a journalist goes independent(12:33) Do the NPR deals make sense?(17:58) How to keep your audience's trust(19:21) How creators partner with brand