Newton and Roose Launch Machine Gods With NPR as Hard Fork Ends

Casey Newton and Kevin Roose are ending Hard Fork, their New York Times podcast, and replacing it with Machine Gods, a new AI-focused show produced through their own media company in partnership with NPR. The transition gives the hosts more room to publish and experiment with video, but also puts a small new operation in charge of executing both ambitions.

The announcement is a change in both employer and operating model. Hard Fork was made at The New York Times; Machine Gods Media is the company Newton and Roose formed to produce the successor show. NPR is their partner, giving the venture a route into public-radio distribution while the hosts build a standalone media business around it.

Newton described AI as the organizing principle for most of Hard Fork’s run, after the show began in 2022. Machine Gods is intended to go deeper on the week’s stories rather than move away from that focus. The larger change is the production model: the hosts want to expand capacity and run the show more frequently.

The sharper contrast is between the established audience and the platform the new company wants to master. Newton and Roose say they want to get much better at YouTube, which Newton called one of the world’s most important media platforms and a difficult one for journalists to crack. They plan to use a small team to test video and audience strategies, with the hope of sharing what they learn with others.

The rollout

1. Machine Gods is scheduled to begin the week of October 19, 2026.
2. The show is expected to publish twice each week, rather than Hard Fork’s weekly schedule.
3. It is expected to begin airing on NPR in early 2027.

NPR offers a distribution partner with a longstanding audio audience. YouTube asks for a different kind of operation: a format, production process and audience strategy that can work on a major video platform. Machine Gods will be judged not only on whether its AI coverage carries over from Hard Fork, but on whether a small team can build that video operation without weakening the show itself.