Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, two prominent tech journalists and hosts of the New York Times podcast “Hard Fork,” have signed with UTA for representation in all areas, signaling the duo’s independent ambitions as they form their own company.
The signing comes less than a week after Roose said he would leave his role as a Times columnist in August after nine years to start a new media venture with Newton, including a new show focused on AI. “Hard Fork” began in 2022 as a podcast examining the world of tech before adopting an AI focus concurrent with the boom of the AI industry. Roose and Newton have interviewed OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and, in a live event in April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
“I can’t give too many details yet (there are still some domain names we need to grab, and self-indulgent manifestos we need to write) but suffice it to say that our goal is to take the thing that makes Hard Fork work and extend it into new formats and directions,” Roose wrote on X last week.
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After “Hard Fork” ends in August, both Roose and Newton will still pursue their independent projects, including Roose’s upcoming book, “The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence,” and Newton’s independent newsletter, Platformer.
After a stint on the Times’ DealBook section, Roose worked in various news roles before returning to the Times as a tech columnist in 2017. He and three Times reporters won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2018 for reporting on Uber, and his podcasts “Rabbit Hole” and “Hard Fork” have both been critically acclaimed. He has written three books, including “Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation.”
Newton is a veteran tech reporter and editor who previously worked at CNET and The Verge before starting Platformer in 2020. The tech-focused, scoop-driven newsletter, which began on Substack before moving to the publishing platform Ghost in 2024, boasts 215,000 subscribers.