Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Hard Fork's two hosts and a senior producer reassemble at NPR as Machine Gods
The New York Times greenlit, designed and staffed Hard Fork over about a year before it launched. What moves to NPR is three of the people who made it, plus a standing disclosure that one host's fiance works at Anthropic.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Casey Newton announced Machine Gods with Kevin Roose on Wednesday, a new podcast made in partnership with NPR, and wrote about it on the eve of Hard Fork's final episode at the New York Times.
- Rachel Cohn, one of the producers Newton credits with keeping Hard Fork listenable, has joined the new show as a senior producer.
- The pair pitched Hard Fork in 2021 expecting to cover the effort to rebuild the existing internet on the blockchain, during what Newton calls Silicon Valley's crypto mania.
- OpenAI launched ChatGPT a few weeks into the show's run, and four months in Roose's conversation with an unhinged version of Microsoft Bing pushed AI safety into mainstream discussion.
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Why it matters
- decision Build a franchise around two named hosts and you own an asset those hosts can re-form elsewhere with three people, while the design, scoring and editing team you paid for starts the replacement from nothing.
- exposure When a reporter's household income is partly paid by a company on the guest list, the visible obligation sits with the publisher on every relevant piece.
- constraint An approval tied to one beat has to leave room for the beat to be rewritten in the opening months, because a commission cleared a year before launch can lose its subject before the first episode airs.
- precedent With a public radio partnership absorbing two hosts from a newspaper's audio department, the same arrangement gets easier to propose for the next named team that wants out.
Casey Newton's farewell post is mostly a credit list, and it is precise about who built which part. The electric yellow-green palette and the pixelated, pictogram-heavy visual treatments came from Kelly Doe and her design team [10]; Dan Powell wrote the theme song [11]. The founding producer, Davis Land, came up with the cold-open format and the rule that you always hear someone laughing before the theme [12]. For the first several months, Paula Szuchman, then running the entire Times audio department, woke before dawn to edit each week's episode [13]. Sam Dolnick greenlit the show [14], and Vjeran Pavic later overhauled its approach to video [17].
Of everyone Newton thanks, one is named as joining the new show. Rachel Cohn, whom he credits as "an indefatigable voice for the audience" [16], is a senior producer at Machine Gods [9]. That makes the count crossing to NPR three: two hosts and one producer [21].
For anyone who commissions work like this, the distinction that list draws is between what a department supplied and what a byline supplied. Design, scoring and weekly editing sat inside the Times [10][11][13]; the questions and the two voices did not.
The run also shows how fast an approved plan stopped describing the show. About a year passed between the 2021 pitch and the launch [19], and the blockchain premise was already stale on arrival [3][4]. ChatGPT landed a few weeks in [5]; the Bing conversation four months in [6] puts the show's real subject in place by roughly early 2023 [20].
The disclosure question outlives the show. Newton's column opens with a standing note saying the column mentions AI, that his fiance works at Anthropic, and that his full ethics disclosure is available at a link [8]. Hard Fork regularly booked executives of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and other AI companies, and quizzed them on how they planned to build their systems safely [7]. The practice on the record is a line that ships with every piece that touches the subject, plus a link to the longer version.
Newton's post does not disclose why Hard Fork ended, the terms of the NPR partnership, or any audience figures [18]. Without those figures this cannot be read as an audience relocating. The partnership with NPR and the three people named on the new show are on the record [1][21].
What to watch
- Whether the New York Times keeps a tech show in Hard Fork's slot, and who hosts it.
- Whether Machine Gods carries the Anthropic disclosure on air as well as in Newton's column.
- Whether other Hard Fork staff follow Rachel Cohn to the NPR show.