Tech's media safe space

Let me know if you’ll be in Miami Beach for Possible next week. We are doing a pair of dinners, and I’ll be hanging out from time to time in the Fontainebleau lobby among the lanyarded masses.

In today’s member essay, I wrote about how the tech industry is creating a parallel media ecosystem that’s aligned with its worldview in a way that journalistic outlets are not. Treating any group as a monolith is impossible, of course. Silicon Valley is vast and diverse. What I’m seeing is the most powerful people there, particularly venture capitalists, recognize that media provides tremendous leverage. Nobody understands that more than Andreessen Horowitz, which in the words of Marc Andreessen is “a media company that monetizes via investing.” The go-direct playbook is evolving – and will challenge B2B institutional media as it spreads to other sectors.

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First up, some highlights from yesterday’s Online Forum about how Metro UK is using personalization to drive both acquisition of direct connections and deeper engagement with the audience.

The Rebooting held an Online Forum yesterday that took a deep dive into how Metro UK is using personalization to power its newsletter strategy. Sophie Laughton, newsletter editor at Metro, Emily Shackleton, product lead at Metro, and Nikki Perry, director of customer success at Marigold, detailed how Metro uses personalization in newsletter onboarding and created personalized vertical newsletters in horoscopes and sports that drove engagement levels of over 25% CTR. Some key takeaways:

You can watch a replay of the hourlong session here.

Thanks to Marigold for its support. Check out the ways Marigold’s messaging and relationships platform helps publishers nurture audience connections.

It looks like CNBC. A running ticker scrolls across the screen. The backdrop is slick, the lighting tight. On screen, affable, TV-ready co-hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays trade commentary on the day’s biggest business and tech stories. Over three hours, guests—from startup founders to industry analysts—rotate through interviews interspersed with commentary. On X, clipped highlights flood the timeline, recognizable by their distinct three-panel format: the guest framed between Coogan and Hays, in the show’s visual signature. Welcome to the Technology Brothers Programming Network, or TBPN. From the outside, it looks like a scrappy but polished journalistic upstart.

TBPN isn’t a newsroom or pretending to be. It’s the product of two tech entrepreneurs—Founders Fund entrepreneur-in-residence John Coogan and Jordi Hays—who’ve built the kind of tech-focused business media they want to see. It also happens to be the kind of tech-focused business media the tech industry’s powerbrokers want to see. It’s friendly, non-confrontational, aligned—and safe. This week, Coogan, who founded meal-replacement company Soylent, announced he was leaving Founders Fund to focus full-time on TBPN. Considering the show produces 15 hours of live programming a week, it’s a testament to how efficient you can be when you cut out the friction of chewing meals.

The tech industry feels burned by journalistic coverage. It believes the institutional press is focused on accountability—and has spent two decades trying to influence coverage. After many missteps in executing its go-direct playbook, an emerging constellation of tech-friendly media has risen, some directly controlled by venture capital firms, others subsidized and supported, and all broadly sympathetic to the Silicon Valley powerbroker consensus view of tech’s essential role in innovation. 

This ecosystem was built after the tech powerbrokers tried the usual channels. Tech titans have worked the refs, calling in complaints and critiques, as Nick Denton described on People vs Algorithms, recounting the pressure he received running Valleywag.

Tech also tried the investment route. A generation ago, Marc Andreessen and other Valley heavyweights backed PandoDaily, pitched as a more sympathetic alternative to TechCrunch. That backfired when Pando turned heel and started skewering the industry. Pando disappeared in 2015 after it failed to make an audience-supported model work. Its tech backers weren’t interested in continuing to fund it. The lesson tech took from that moment wasn’t that the media model needed tweaking—it was that media independence was too risky to trust.

Then came the subsidization phase. Facebook and Google funded journalism-support programs. Meta launched initiatives before walking away. Google’s News Initiative still limps along, but the returns are hazy, especially now that the company is ruled a monopoly and embroiled in antitrust cases. The ROI on goodwill is hard to measure—especially under scrutiny.

Why not build your own media? And this time, do it differently: no journalists, no editorial separation, no accountability. Just platforms, podcasts, and personalities who share your worldview—or won’t challenge it.

That’s the logic behind the rise of operator media and the alternative tech information ecosystem. It’s not a rebellion against the media. It’s an alternative that is more likely to confirm the worldview of its audience than challenge it.

This is the new media model’s jiu-jitsu: borrow journalism’s look, ditch the burden. TBPN clips look like CNBC, but there are no confrontations. It filters the news through the consensus view of the Silicon Valley elite. John Coogan’s X bio says: “I read the Wall Street Journal so you don’t have to.”

It’s working. TBPN, a two-person operation, is “tech’s hot new show.” This isn’t a scale game. It’s a trust, proximity, and influence game.