Why Did Kevin Roose Leave the New York Times?

Kevin Roose left The New York Times, and left Hard Fork with Casey Newton, to build on YouTube. Nilay Patel had been telling him not to for as long as Roose had been trying to talk himself into it. Media companies, Roose says, have been wary of going all in on YouTube or any other video platform, and the ones that did often came out unhappy. A pivot to video can waste money on work that does not pay for itself, and few institutions are built for that kind of long-term bet.

He has spent years trying to push people in media toward YouTube. He calls it the most important media platform in the world, and a place where high-quality journalism is a vanishingly small slice of the whole. Part of leaving was to figure out video that holds up economically and creatively, to experiment, to put other people on camera, and to find formats. He points at what The Verge has done, and at Joanna Stern, as the version that looks exciting, in a field with less competition than text or podcasts.

Machine Gods is the show that came out of the leap. Patel describes it as the next generation of Hard Fork.